Facebook is buying the GIF-making and sharing platform Giphy, bringing a massive change to the way Americans currently use GIFs online.
- The deal is reportedly worth $400 million, according to Axios.
What’s Giphy?
For the uninitiated, Giphy is a website where you can research, download and find links to GIFs. There are even tools on how to remix and edit those GIFs to fit whatever reaction you want.
“GIFs and stickers give people meaningful and creative ways to express themselves. We see the positivity in how people use Giphy in our products today, and we know that bringing the Giphy team’s creativity and talent together with ours will only accelerate how people use visual communication to connect with each other,” said Vishal Shah, Instagram’s vice president of product, in a blog post about Facebook’s purchase.
What’s going to change?
Over the years, websites like Facebook, Facebook Messenger and What’s App have worked with Giphy. But now it’s going to reach new levels.
As The Verge reported, Giphy will be brought on as a part of the Instagram team, since Facebook also owns Instagram.
- “Under its new ownership, Giphy will live on as part of the Instagram team, with the goal of making it even easier to send GIFs and stickers in Instagram stories and direct messages,” according to The Verge.
For now, though, much will remain unchanged.
- “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,” Shah said.
But it may change how apps like Twitter, Pinterest, Slack and Reddit use GIFs since they rely on the Giphy service, too.
- “While Facebook’s announcement would seem to indicate that those services will still be able to rely on Giphy as they currently do — at least for now — there may be some added tension with those services going forward given that several of them compete directly with Facebook,” according to The Verge.