Facebook announced that it has acquired Giphy, a search engine and database for short, animated images known as GIFs for a $400 million.
Announcing the merger, Facebook said, “A lot of people in our community already know and love Giphy. In fact, 50 per cent 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 is integrated into a whole bunch of social media platforms using its unique SDK and API. That means Facebook is about to get a lot of information. Twitter reports having 152 million active users, Snapchat reported its daily active users are reaching to 218 million already, Telegram has 400 million and TikTok has 500 million users. And all these social platforms are integrated with Giphy, which means a colossal database Facebook has had no access to it.
“We see the positive in how people use Giphy in our products today, and we know that uniting the creativity and talent of the Giphy team with ours will only accelerate the way people use visual communication to connect with each other,” Facebook concluded.
On Instagram, and on Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp, Giphy’s creations have been available for years and, after this agreement, its library, including its global content collection, will continue to operate, only it is expected to invest more in its technology.