Facebook acquires GIF-making application Giphy

With many people having more time at home than ever thanks to Covid-19, you would expect them to spend this time developing new skills or starting new hobbies. But no, thanks to the internet, people are spending their time making memes instead. And expect our social media platforms to be crowded by more memes and GIFs than ever before as Facebook has announced that they have acquired the popular gif making company Giphy.

Giphy is one of the largest GIF sites on the internet, offering tools for creating, sharing, and remixing GIFs for a verity of purposes, mostly the aforementioned memes. Facebook has already relied on Giphy’s API for sourcing GIFs in its apps for years with Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp all working with the service and according to Facebook, 50 percent of all of Giphy’s traffic comes from its apps, with half of that coming from Instagram alone.

According to the company, Giphy will continue as a part of the Instagram team, with the goal of making it even easier to send GIFs and stickers in Instagram stories and direct messages. For now, though, Facebook says that things will remain the same for Giphy users.

People will still be able to upload GIFs; developers and API partners will continue to have the same access to Giphy’s APIs; and Giphy’s creative community will still be able to create great content

Although Facebook is a large consumer of Giphy, the website is widely used by other companies, including Twitter, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit, and more. While Facebook isn’t intending on changing any of this, the acquisition has already raised some Antitrust concerns according to The Verge, given the impact the transaction may have on other social media sites and Facebook’s already massive impact to large amounts of data shared around the world.

It will be interesting to see if other companies will keep working with Giphy in the long-term or perhaps look to develop their own applications that offer something similar to allow users to create Gifs on their own platform without needing to have Facebook own part of that data.  

Last Updated: May 18, 2020