Facebook has just purchased the popular GIF search engine company, GIPHY. This move was disclosed by Axios and now confirmed by Giphy itself. While this move is said to be costing around $400 million for the social media giant, it’s aimed at integrating Giphy well into Instagram. It’s already available across many of the Facebook products like FB app, WhatsApp, Messenger, and even Instagram. It’s still mysterious what Facebook will make out from this deal.
GIPHY is one of the well-known names in the GIF space. It’s a search engine for GIFs and provides tools for creating, mixing, and sharing of creative GIFS. Its extensive library is used in many popular platforms like Facebook and its apps, Twitter, Slack, Pinterest, Reddit, etc. Most of these are directly, or indirectly rivals of Facebook in some ways. And this buyout shall raise concerns about what Facebook can gain an advantage over them.
Present and the Future
Well, the company has already clarified that it’s not making Giphy any exclusive to itself but rather stay independent as before. Even after this purchase, it will still just stay as a part of the Instagram team, and offer services to other platforms like Twitter, Pinterest, etc through APIs usual. The community can still be creating and uploading GIFs and add their works to the library.
To say, Facebook is already a significant part of Giphy since its inception. Half of the Giphy’s traffic is driven through Facebook apps like FB app, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. In this, half (means around 25% of total Giphy’s traffic) is coming from Instagram itself! So this buyout will help Facebook to integrate Giphy more info Instagram by making it simple to use its GIFs and stickers like in stories, quick shortcuts, etc.
Via: GIPHY
