Gettin' GIPHY Wit It
The "G" is hard... Mark Zuckerberg must have been blasting Will Smith's 1997 banger as he signed the papers to acquire GIPHY for $400M. The GIF-sharing platform will join Facebook as part of Instagram — its library of LOL-inducing moving images will be more deeply integrated into Insta as well as FB's other apps. FYI - GIPHY won't get banned from non-FB apps, like Twitter and Slack.
What's in a GIF?... While FB says it acquired GIPHY to help people better "express themselves," 50% of GIPHY’s traffic already comes from Facebook's "family of apps" (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger) – 25% of that traffic comes from Insta alone. So it's gotta be something else...
GIPHY is the secret sauce to Facebook's ad-reliant burger... Facebook and GIPHY are free, but make money by promoting sponsored content — Facebook does ad sales on a ginormous scale. By making GIFs a more prominent part of its apps, Facebook can make more $$$ from GIPHY's brand partners by exposing them to its 2.5B+ users.