Facebook is acquiring the popular GIF-making and sharing platform GIPHY with plans to integrate it into Instagram and other Facebook apps.
Not even a pandemic can stop Facebook. The company is buying GIPHY for $400 million, as reported by Axios.
GIPHY is the largest GIF-making and sharing website on the Internet. The platform is already integrated in many social media apps, and most notably, powers the GIF library on Instagram, Messenger, and other Facebook apps. In fact, the integration with Facebook was so strong, it has been reported than over 50% of all of GIPHY’s traffic is coming from Facebook apps, half of this coming from Instagram alone.
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GIPHY will now join the Instagram team. with the global goal of making it even easier to send GIFs and stickers in Instagram Stories and Direct Messages.
Facebook explained that, at least for now, nothing will change 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,” Vishal Shah, Instagram’s VP of product, said in a blog post announcing the news.
The irony, of course, comes from the other many services that rely on GIPHY’s API for supplying GIFs to their users. I am thinking about Twitter, Pinterest, Slack, Apple, Reddit, and more. What do you think will happen to these under the new ownership?
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