Giphy
Giphy was founded in February 2013 by Alex Chung and Jace Cooke. The couple came up with the idea for the business while having breakfast, which is purely in keeping with the rising trend of visual communication.
When Chung and Cooke first introduced Giphy, the site functioned only as a search engine for GIFs. According to Chung, Giphy attracted one million users in its first week, rising to 300,000.
Giphy is what its founders call “conversational search”, in which content is brought to users’ conversations through a search box found in their messaging applications.
Growth
In August 2013, Giphy users expanded beyond the search engine to post, embed and share GIFs on Facebook. According to PC Magazine, Giphy was recognized as one of the top 100 websites of 2013. Three months later Giphy merged with Twitter, allowing users to share GIFs by sharing the GIF’s URL.
In May 2014, Giphy raised $ 2.4 million in a Series A financing round from investors including CAA Ventures, RRE Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and betaworks. [13]
In March 2015, Giphy’s acquisition of Nutmeg coincided with the launch of Facebook Messenger’s development platform, in which Giffy incorporated several exclusive applications.
In August 2015, Giphy introduced its second mobile processor, GIPHY Game, which allows users to create and share GIFs on social networks.
In February 2016, Giphy raised $ 55 million to an estimated $ 300 million.
In October 2016, Giphy announced several statistics, including 100 million daily active users, providing more than 1 billion GIFs per day, and viewers viewing more than 2 million hours of GIF content each day.
In July 2017, Giphy announced that it had between 200 million active users daily between both the API and the website and that the website had approximately 250 million monthly active users.
At a February 2019 New York event, Chung announced that Giphy was exploring an advertising program that was different from the Google model of showing ads based on user search history. The idea of embedding advertising in personal messages. Giphy seeks to exploit this landscape as the GIG database is integrated into most messaging services.
Acquisition by Facebook
In May 2020, Giphy was acquired by Facebook Inc. (Now known as Meta Platforms) was announced, with a purchase price of $ 400 million. Facebook services accounted for half of Giphy ‘s total traffic. Giphy should be integrated with the staff of Facebook subsidiary Instagram, although Facebook has stated that there will be no immediate changes to the service. Giphy stopped displaying advertising after Facebook’s acquisition.
Acquisitions are under scrutiny due to recent privacy scandals surrounding Facebook. The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) argued that the deal was anti-competitive and began an investigation. In June 2020, the CMA issued an enforcement order preventing Giphy from being fully integrated into Facebook, pending a future judgment.
In August 2021, the CMA released preliminary findings that Facebook argued that Giphy’s services could be at risk of being ripped off by competitors or that they should provide more user data as a condition of the service. It also raised concerns about the market share of Facebook’s advertising services. On November 30, 2021, the CMA ruled that Facebook, which had changed its name to meta at this point, should exclude Giphy.