Facebook buys Giphy for $400M
50% of Giphy's traffic already comes from Facebook
Facebook on Friday purchased online image database and search engine Giphy for $400 million.
Giphy's website allows anyone to search for GIF image files, or moving images that play on a loop. GIFs are popular on social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and are often used to respond to express emotion through an image rather than words.
"A lot of people in our community already know and love GIPHY," Facebook Vice President of Product Vishal Shah said in a Friday blog post. "In fact, 50 percent of GIPHY’s traffic comes from the Facebook family of apps, half of that from Instagram alone. By bringing Instagram and GIPHY together, we can make it easier for people to find the perfect GIFs and stickers in Stories and Direct."
Giphy was created in 2013, and now the platform has "several trillion" GIFs that anyone can create, according to a Medium blog post the company published Friday.
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"Instagram has revolutionized self-expression," Giphy wrote. "More than 1 billion people use Instagram to communicate how they’re feeling and what they’re passionate about — we can’t wait to help those people become even more animated! We’ve had a lot of fun teaming up with Instagram over the years; GIPHY’s Stickers were the perfect fit for layering on Instagram Stories, while our GIF search allowed everyone to capture that perfect emotion in Instagram’s DMs."
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The partnership will allow Facebook to integrate Giphy's image library onto its apps, including Instagram.
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Giphy's current content creators will still be able to upload new images to the platform like they were able to before the acquisition.
