In a surprise move, Facebook has announced today that it is purchasing the popular GIF service Giphy. The deal is worth about $400M and Facebook’s initial plan will be to tie the GIF platform tightly with Instagram.
Axios broke the news this morning before being confirmed by Facebook. The company was apparently in talks with Facebook before the coronavirus pandemic, according to anonymous sources. Those started around forming more of a partnership before evolving into a full-on acquisition.
Facebook shared more on the purchase in a blog post including a statistic for how much traffic it was already driving to Giphy:
Facebook said it plans to keep the Giphy API access the same.
Imagine how much data they can collect from the gifs embedded all over the internet. https://t.co/7VqM68qJ6Q
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) May 15, 2020
Giphy was good while it lasted
— Mayank Parmar (@mayank_jee) May 15, 2020
Notably, Giphy has an iMessage app that’s popular with iPhone and iPad users. Time will tell how Facebook’s acquisition could change users’ feelings about using Giphy going forward.
As an alternative, Apple features its own GIF search app called “#images” as a built-in iMessage app. Read more in our tutorial here.
