Facebook is acquiring Giphy which is the most popular short animated video platform. Many platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Telegram, Instagram, etc use Giphy API to integrate GIFs.
Instagram product vice president Vishal Shah twitter handle already confirmed that..
Facebook Welcomes GIPHY as Part of Instagram Team https://t.co/beKufkcDfB
— Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) May 15, 2020
The cost, which Facebook and Giphy declined to disclose, was placed at around $400 million by news website Axios. Facebook said that they will integrate this with the rapidly-growing photo-sharing platform Instagram which is also owned by Facebook.
In 2015 Giphy rebuffed a Facebook offer, choosing instead to continue integrating its products with multiple social media platforms, according to news site TechCrunch. Both companies declined to comment on any earlier talks.
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The tech giant said that 50 percent of Giphy’s traffic already comes from Facebook’s apps. 50%of the traffic is coming from Instagram itself and rests half from other Facebook apps which include its popular social-networking service as well as WhatsApp.
Giphy is an app in its own right, but most people use it in the context of other services — as an add-on to Apple’s iMessage tool for texting, for example, or as a way to send viral images to co-workers using Slack. In acquiring the company, Facebook signaled Friday it did not plan to change Giphy’s core functionality, pledging it would invest further in content while assuring developers “will continue to have the same access” to the underlying code.
“We will continue to make Giphy openly available to the wider ecosystem,” Giphy said in a post on blogging website Medium.
Several popular apps like Twitter, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit, and others use Giphy’s API to integrate GIFs. Even if Facebook claims there will be no change for existing users, it will be interesting to see if these companies continue to use Giphy or look for an alternative.
