
Giphy plans to build a real business - okfine
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-giphy-plans-to-build-a-real-business-by-animating-the-internet-with-gifs-2017-5
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geetfun
The service is cute. No doubt about it.

All the best to the team to find a way to monetize, however. Seems like the
advertising route may be the most promising.

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dredmorbius
Giphy's among numerous sites I've blocked at the domain level because the
principle use is to create an annoyance: animations which cannot otherwise be
blocked or stopped, frequently used to directly annoy those who've stated that
they don't care for such things.

Aside: two of the biggest blow-ups I've seen in social media have been between
those who don't, and do, like animations. Go figure.

Unless and until user tools (e.g., browsers) put this control directly in
users' hands, I don't see the situation improving.

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indescions_2017
Despite Giphy's broad distribution network, it doesn't seem that Gif Artists
can be compensated for their labor in the way Youtube Creators can.

Nor would a watermarked Gif Ad, like the one I just saw for Netflix's "War
Machine" provide much more than what amounts to CDN hosting fees for Giphy's
platform. Minus any content licensing.

Hiring and developing Gif talent, building a Creators' Studio and marketing
any resulting new IPs falls into the same conundrum: endusers copy, share and
consume Gif images freely.

As for mobile ads, its the engagement, such as redeeming a Memorial Day
promotion code for Lyft, that is monetized. Not the content.

We could hypothesize and analyze the remaining possible revenue models but
unless Gifs can somehow be transmuted into some sort of cryptocurrency or
other store of value, I am just having a hard time wrapping my head around
this one.

How do you build Paywalls for Gifs? And aren't Snap and Insta Stories the new
"micro reality entertainment" channels?

Wishing Alex and co. best of luck!

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sjg007
You want to use apps/mobile as much as possible to control the experience.

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eon1
Giphy is mostly used to host content to be posted on third party sites. An
upload app would be useful but by no means crucial, and nowhere near as
trafficked as the content itself.

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puranjay
IMO Giphy has raised far too much money to ever be a viable business.

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planetjones
Giphy employs 70 people. This I find an astonishing high number.

It also seems that they are partnered with netflix to automatically create
gifs from their content; this is interesting. But what about content providers
who aren't so happy about unauthorized clips being created of their content -
I would have thought giphy is a copyright disaster, should owners assert their
rights.

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ambulancechaser
> But what about content providers who aren't so happy about unauthorized
> clips

There is no way that netflix will jeopardize their distribution licenses for a
few gifs. Anything that comes from it is no doubt cleared and above board.

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jnty
I think they mean all the other content providers, besides Netflix, whose
content is on Giphy.

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yeukhon
I think advertisement and licensing/subscription are the way go along with
providing a motion recognition engine. They have gifs which are basically
frames of motions. Wouldn't be good to have a search engine tells you which
movie this gif was based on, an anotation like genius for explaining memes and
slangs?

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geekme
They have a search API with a public key
[https://github.com/Giphy/GiphyAPI](https://github.com/Giphy/GiphyAPI) with
limits. I used it in one of my apps. Pretty cool stuff.

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maxaf
There are VC-funded startups that fulfill a semi-real need, but lack any
potential to become a real business. "Advertising" isn't a business model;
it's a crutch one reaches for when an existing business isn't financially
sustainable on its own.

Giphy should be an open source library or app, or perhaps a community-
supported site, that people would use on occasion. Expecting it to drive
traffic that justifies a VC-scale investment will only dilute a generally
useful service and cause it to fall by the wayside when the VCs pull out.

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sjg007
I mean imgur is the pioneer in this space... advertising seems like a fine
business.

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plorkyeran
Imgur is not even remotely the pioneer. They're the most recent in a long line
of image hosts that built up a userbase with a simple functional website,
followed by sacrificing that to be able to serve ads.

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ishi
Go to [https://giphy.com/](https://giphy.com/) and take a look. Does this
random collection of animated images give the impression of a service worth
600 million dollars? It's just fluff, it doesn't solve any real-world problem,
how on earth would any VC be brave enough to invest $150m in this juvenile
idea?

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bluejekyll
Isn't entertainment reason enough? And the problem they are solving is to
allow others to send memes that are unique and funny or otherwise entertaining
given a simple search string.

It's not sending someone to the moon, but it's also not worthless. The system
itself would benefit from hard technical solutions as well. Facial recognition
in gifs; understanding context in a picture... you may see it as a waste, but
it may also lead to discovery some new CS techniques for these things.

I'm not necessarily saying they can show a value of 600m, but I would just
dismiss the whole idea either.

~~~
DiThi
Since it's integrated in Telegram as "@gif", I tried to use it many times to
search for famous gifs or famous clips of some movie/series that are relevant
to the conversation... 19 out of 20 I can't find it, results are irrelevant,
and I have to search something like "site:imgur.com <thing>" in google images
and select type: animated.

If at least this worked half of the time, I may say it is valuable.

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anilgulecha
I figure they have good revenue from whatsapp integration, but can't let their
business be held ransom by a large customer.

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agumonkey
I find non video gif pretty much shocking. So much bandwidth wasted. I hope
they don't do that anymore.

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jasonlfunk
How is a business that isn't profitable and has no business model for revenue
worth 600 million dollars? How are these valuations actually done?

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coralreef
Investor demand for shares.

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breakingcups
Giphy is the slowest, buggiest site I sometimes have the displeasure of using.
Unusable on mobile if you ever get linked to it, the search is mostly useless
and results are irrelevant. Loading an actual gif takes ages.

Just giving stuff away for free and expecting to be able to slap on a business
model later just seems like a recipe for failure in general, only very few
companies manage to survive, let alone thrive, with that start.

