
Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M - coloneltcb
https://www.axios.com/scoop-facebook-to-buy-giphy-for-400-million-4a75a359-833b-484d-b15b-87e94d3de017.html
======
volkk
Congrats to giphy I guess? But I'll be honest, any time I've ever used them as
an extension in slack or anywhere, and tried to get relevant gifs, I got back
some really bad results. I'll never fully understand why they're so successful
short of just dominating the market through sheer popularity. I remember
switching our team over to rightgif and the difference was astounding given
the fact that giphy has millions upon millions and loads of developers.

~~~
txcwpalpha
I've always thought part of the "charm" of Giphy in Slack is that does give
you those somewhat silly or "not exactly what I was looking for but actually
this is funnier" type of GIFs.

The couple of times I have tried to use it to search for a very specific GIF
(like searching for a specific clip from a movie) it hasn't really worked, but
whenever I use it for more general stuff like "/giphy cardio sucks" or "/giphy
hooray" I get some pretty pleasing results.

~~~
yreg
I'd just like this trend of sending reaction gifs to end.

<rant> People keep posting them in Slack all the time, but I find it about as
appropriate as that brief time when all my uni teachers decided that it's hip
to include rage comic faces into every other slide of every presentation.

</rant>, yes I know, I'm fun at parties…

~~~
Freak_NL
I can't grok this trend at all. All these replies in the form of memes make me
feel like I'm in the Darmok episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I'm grateful communication on MatterMost at my company has not seen the need
for reaction gifs emerge; the wildest thing we have is a custom emoji of a
dancing banana.

~~~
teddyh
“Grok” is actually a cultural reference; it is a made-up word from a very
famous science fiction book.

When people use it, it looks the same to me like if they were using “Live long
and prosper” in casual conversation.

~~~
ghaff
I think one difference with "grok" is that, the way it's normally used, there
really isn't IMO a perfect English replacement. To me at least, it implies a
deeper and broader internalizing of something than saying "I understand it" or
"I get it" necessarily implies.

~~~
whichquestion
Grokking being beyond understanding something is central to Valentine Michael
Smiths understanding of the world, and therefore the plot, in “Stranger in a
Strange Land”.

Grok is not simply understanding or knowing a thing, it’s knowing that thing
so well and all the things related to that thing, and understanding all of
your feelings associated with that thing, that it becomes a part of you. At
least, that was my interpretation of it.

Heinlein’s explanation and exposition is more detailed in the actual book. If
you have not read it, highly recommended.

~~~
ghaff
Oh, I've read it and it's on my bookshelf. Just something like 3 or 4 decades
ago :-) It was never actually a particularly favorite Heinlein for me though
so I haven't re-read in a very long time if ever.

~~~
qorrect
Hey same here, and Heinlein was my favorite author for a very long time. That
particular book just never really did it for me.

~~~
ghaff
Stranger in a Stranger Land was probably more of particular time and place
that a lot of Heinlein's works. Although it came out at in 1961--mostly
predating the counterculture era in the US, its mainstream cross-over appeal
was definitely tied in with the Summer of Love etc. later in the decade.

~~~
dingaling
1968 would indeed be about the right time period as "I grok Spock" bumper
stickers appeared around then too.

------
dumbfounder
Congrats to Giphy, but honestly it baffles me they are worth this much money.
Do they actually bring in decent revenue, or was this all about eyeballs? Is
this content even decently monetizable?

Disclaimer: I am the jaded creator of Twicsy, a Twitter picture engine with
many millions of visitors over its lifetime, and I apparently missed the boat
on this trends and had to shut it down.

~~~
cosmie
Read the privacy policy[1].

Think of Giphy images as a giant, organically shared version of web tracking
software. Which complements the coverage of the FB Pixel[2] well, as it worms
its way into privacy-conscious areas they might not have FB Pixel coverage
such as private communications and security/privacy-minded apps. And without
implementing something like a proxy server to pre-cache/sanitize images and
strip tracking identifiers in both directions, it's a tracking vector that's
hard to keep out of your app without introducing user friction.

Given that cynical viewpoint, the valuation makes a ton of sense.

[1] [https://support.giphy.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360032872931-GIP...](https://support.giphy.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360032872931-GIPHY-Privacy-Policy)

[2]
[https://www.facebook.com/business/help/742478679120153?id=12...](https://www.facebook.com/business/help/742478679120153?id=1205376682832142)

~~~
cced
Does the fact that it is integrated into iOS keyboard have any implications?
WlWhat kind of data does this have access to when I send gifs from iOS
keyboard?

~~~
degenerate
Google messenger (the default texting app) has a gif search that includes
giphy, and Discord and slack also use giphy. What I don't see is what data FB
is getting when the gif loads. OK, so they can see I am using giphy in
Discord. Now what?

 _edit: apparently wrong /outdated information._

~~~
ehsankia
I'm fairly sure this is False. GBoard uses Tenor (the next largest Giphy
competitor), which Google also happens to have bought 2 years ago (undisclosed
amount of money). I also just tested Messages and can confirm that the results
look like Tenor too.

For Discord, while they initially used Giphy and has a /giphy command, it now
uses Tenor too in the GIF picker.

~~~
judge2020
The only difference with this acquisition and Discord is that Discord might
now start proxying Giphy (they previously didn't to save bandwidth).

~~~
ehsankia
Again, Discord uses Tenor, not Giphy (unless you manually use /giphy instead
of the GIF picker, which most people don't).

------
raiyu
Last private raise \- [https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/31/giphy-the-platform-
for-all...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/31/giphy-the-platform-for-all-
things-gif-raises-72-million-in-new-funding/)

\- $600MM

\- $150MM raised

\- $400MM sale price

\- $400MM - $150MM 1x preferred = $250MM (assuming not ratchet up for selling
below last preferred price)

\- $250MM net to shareholders.

\- 50% for preferred investor share holders

\- 25% to founders

\- 25% to individual contributors

\- 25% of $250MM = $62.5MM

These are all just estimates

~~~
nimish
I wonder what happened to employees who joined later on, with underwater
options.

~~~
thebradbain
Why would any of their options be underwater? Going off of those estimates
above, the pot split between shareholders after liquidation preference is
250million. Anyone who has shares is able to cash them out I imagine (how much
profit dependent on how many shares someone is granted, which varies obviously
but is still a positive net) — unless you’re implying the strike price is less
than the share value?

~~~
nimish
Their last round valued the company at $600MM, so anyone with options at that
strike isn't going to make any money.

~~~
creddit
Only if 409A valuation was at referred price which it almost certainly wasn’t

------
cecilpl
Every time Facebook is buying something I feel sad and imagine Facebook like
the black plague that will swallow that normal organism.

~~~
jondubois
It's a great match. They're both hype-mongering companies which add no value
whatsoever to society.

~~~
kgin
Am I out of touch? No, it's the 1.6B daily active users who are wrong.

~~~
nine_k
Look at it as at a bad but addictive habit.

Hundreds of millions of smokers do harm their health, and through it their own
and their neighbors' wealth. But quitting is indeed hard.

~~~
hk__2
You can’t seriously compare smoking and keeping up with friends and family,
which is the reason that drives most of the usage of Facebook.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_You can’t seriously compare smoking and keeping up with friends and family_

You must come from a nice family.

Some people don't. Some people are actively in hiding from their families and
things like that.

Some schizophrenics go to in-patient treatment, get better, go home to their
nutty relatives and get worse again. This is a known thing.

------
xoxoy
It’s a Trojan horse play. Giphy is used by all of FB’s competitors, including
Tik Tok.

Scummy imo.

~~~
nanna
Let's not forget Signal, a competitor to WhatsApp.

~~~
partiallypro
Does Signal have enough of a userbase for Facebook to even care about? I doubt
it.

~~~
est31
Signal MAU is probably in the low two digit million range (probably because
there are no public data), while Whatsapp MAU is 2 billion as of March [1]. So
Signal has maybe 1% of Whatsapp's market share.

[1]: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-
monthly...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-monthly-
active-whatsapp-users/)

------
lucideer
The Giphy integration that Facebook put into WhatsApp lets Giphy track who
sends what GIFs to whom, so while the message is transmitted encrypted, a lot
of context can be gleaned.

This acquisition makes a lot of sense.

~~~
loceng
Certainly they can't claim that communication is private and/or encrypted
then?

~~~
lucideer
They can, as it is end-to-end encrypted; the ends are always the most likely
points of leakage. In this case, it's the sender's end.

This is part of the beauty of e2e encryption because you have reasonable
access to the "ends". For unencrypted traffic you have no access to the "in
transit" part so no knowledge about potential compromise. Since you're
relatively confident with e2e that the message can't be read in transit, you
only need to check the parts of the transaction you have access to.

In this case, we can check the sender's end by looking at what external
entities are accessed (network & API requests from the client). For WhatsApp,
there's a total of three I'm aware of:

1\. The OS keyboard API. This theoretically means Apple or Google can read
everything you type (but not necessarily messages you receive).

2\. The Giphy search API for retrieving a list of GIFs to choose from (notable
as this means Giphy also gets metadata about your thought process in choosing
a GIF, even if you never send one).

3\. The HTTP request to Giphy to retrieve the chosen GIF (I'm not 100% sure if
this is distinct from the above search request results, due to resolution
differences, or if they're all one-in-the-same).

------
minimaxir
Per Crunchbase, they raised $150M total, with the last raise being $72M in
2016:
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/giphy](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/giphy)

This might not have been a 10x acquisition.

EDIT: The Information is saying the price was $300M + bonus, and a 50% drop
from the valuation in 2016.
[https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/4fbc4a](https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/4fbc4a)

~~~
nojito
Most likely because their operational costs are borderline obscene due to
reliance on Google Cloud for their ML pipeline and moving all their metadata
to dynamodb.

~~~
anbotero
ML? For what? It’s not like it finds the GIF you’re looking for. Serious
question.

~~~
nojito
[https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/building-a-
better...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/building-a-better-giphy-
with-google-clouds-machine-learning-tools)

They are literally setting money on fire.

------
bertman
I wonder if Signal will now remove their Giphy integration...

edit: Guess they won't ...

    
    
      We have always used a proxy for our requests to GIPHY, and will continue to do so. 
      There should be no harm in continuing to use it.
      https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/
    

Quote from a Signal dev [https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-
Android/issues/9628#issu...](https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-
Android/issues/9628#issuecomment-629360756)

~~~
draven
I saw this on my twitter feed this morning. They don't include the Giphy SDK.
They act as a proxy and (ab)use range requests so they don't even see the size
of the returned GIF. It's a really interesting read.

And that blog post is from _2017_ so those measures have been in place for 2.5
years already.

------
adjkant
So Facebook basically just bought inside usage info on a ton of direct
competition, even if they stop their integration in the future.

Messaging: Signal, GroupMe, Telegram, Viber

Social Media: Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, Tiktok

Dating: Bumble, Tinder

Video: Skype

Does anyone else kind of feel weirded out that this isn't illegal? Not
surprising legally or for a move for Facebook, but this just feels incredibly
wrong.

~~~
throwaway4715
Are you saying that Facebook shouldn't be allowed to own any product that can
be shared on a competitors platform? Seems kinda ridiculous.

~~~
adjkant
No, I am saying that them retroactively buying it without warning and getting
access to the historical data, which users and developers did not intend to
give to Facebook, is the off part.

If Facebook bought this or developed it themselves and then these companies
integrated Giphy, it's obviously very different. Basically this implies that
any data you give to any third party can then basically be bought by your
competition. I think legal language that prevents this would likely be a net
good thing. I of course realize it's fair game, but that seems like a great
way to discourage the use of any third parties generally.

The acquisition itself is very valid from a product standpoint, but I suspect
a big reason for the buy was that data on competitors as Facebook claws back
against pressure from rising platforms. I would bet a good deal of money this
will be used to inform future acquisitions and fuel the black hole of Facebook
acquisitions and squashing of any competitors.

~~~
hedora
> _I think legal language that prevents this would likely be a net good
> thing._

Language that protects end user data across changes in company ownership basic
doesn’t exist.

For one thing, if the company goes bankrupt, the data is an asset of values,
and the court will allow them to void prior contracts so that they can sell
off assets and pay their debts.

This is legal for the same reason pensions get zeroed out during bankruptcies
and acquisitions.

If the new owners can steal retirement money from current and former
employees, you can bet they can sell whatever treasure troves of data the
company has amassed.

------
kentosi
I feel so bitter right now.

A recruiter asked me to join them back in 2016 and they were paying $200k+ for
a senior backend role. I turned them down because I was on a visa and wanted a
company with financial stability. A gif-search engine startup sounded
ludicrous.

Well, here we are...

~~~
seemuch
Were you offered any stock/options? How much would that worth now? (If you
don't mind sharing..)

~~~
likpok
Giphy was valued at 600M in 2016 according to The Information, so the equity
might not be worth much.

------
ArmandGrillet
Giphy shows good results but the search is quite slow IMO, I hope this
improves in the future.

If you haven't read Facebook by Steven Levy I recommend it, the book explains
quite well what happened after the acquisitions of Instagram, Whatsapp, and
Oculus.

~~~
CamelCaseName
> If you haven't read Facebook by...

Thanks! This is exactly the sort of thing I love to read. Got anything else
you can recommend?

~~~
avipars
Hatching Twitter, Elon Musk - Biography, The everything store (amazon)

~~~
ArmandGrillet
Hatching Twitter is very interesting and has a lot of drama, I loved it. I
found that Elon Musk had a boring writing style (very slow to start). I also
recommend Bad Blood, it's hard to stop reading it once started.

One great aspect of Facebook is that Zuckerberg interviewed with the author
for years and the cut into parts makes a lot of sense (Harvard and before,
"Move fast and break things", Trump, aftermath).

------
rodiger
Gif trends are likely infinitely mineable for consumer trends. This makes
sense for Facebook- the goliath grows another inch.

~~~
gabagoo
It's important to have hard data on how many people like The Office

------
tombert
Damnit, I turned down a follow-up interview with Giphy years ago since I
didn't think they were sustainable and I had been burned by startups in the
past. Shows how much business sense I have!

~~~
rwmj
It happens. I turned down a job at Shazam very early on because I couldn't
understand what on earth their business model was. They were recently acquired
by Apple for (coincidentally) $400m.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(application)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_\(application\))
The actual start up I founded instead fizzled into administration.

~~~
askafriend
Right but Shazam was founded in 1999 and took almost 20 years to exit.

You can't look at these numbers in a vacuum.

~~~
rwmj
But also Shazam took about $100m in funding with no down rounds.

~~~
rosywoozlechan
It wouldn't have been life-changing money for you, it would have been a minor
bonus. Usually, only the founders make life-changing money from big deals
except in very rare instances, like Microsoft and Google. I doubt any but a
few very early employees did well at Shazam. Meanwhile, I'm sure what you
learned at the startup you joined was far more valuable than whatever the
bonus was. You made the choice with the information at hand.

Equity for employees is trash value. You would do well to just pretend it
doesn't even exist when factoring decisions about where to work or if to
change jobs. I never ask for equity, I never care about equity. I care about
the salary.

------
floatingatoll
Imagine how many billions of Referrer headers Giphy gets every day. Imagine
all the AI training material that comes in when people try to turn a search
term into an image. $400mil for a human-curated dataset that pays dividends in
ongoing harvestable data over time is chump change for Facebook.

~~~
alpb
Majority of the giphy usage probably happens on mobile apps —which don’t send
referer headers.

Similarly, if you use something like giphy on your Twitter posts, twitter
mirrors the gifv image on their servers to avoid leaking user info to Giphy

------
l1ghthouse
Users: time to delete your accounts :P

Developers: Time to remove the Giphy integrations from your apps/services.

~~~
winrid
Haven't they already been selling the data?

~~~
adjkant
My guess/suspicion is that in isolation the data's depth is pretty tame. The
issue is when all the nitty gritty data is then tied with Facebook's.

IMO the bigger issue is that anyone integrating with them basically is telling
Facebook about their app's usage stats now, which makes it easy for Facebook
to see current and future competition as well as any emerging markets they can
sink their fangs into. Adding Giphy is a great way to get your lunch eaten now
as a startup in any remotely competitive space to Facebook.

To me it's kind of wild this type of acquisition doesn't violate some law
(though not surprising) as this gives immediate historical data insight into
dozens of direct competitors even if they stop integrating in the future.

------
jawns
I would not be surprised if the blatant copyright infringement that is rampant
on Giphy has scared off potential buyers in the past.

I know, I know, there's an argument that it's fair use, but that doesn't mean
that legal costs won't be incurred to make that argument, nor that the
argument will be ultimately successful.

I suppose if there's any company that's able to take on that legal risk, it's
Facebook.

~~~
im3w1l
Ianal but isn't this what the DMCA safe harbor is about? Comply with takedown
requests and you are fine.

~~~
henryfjordan
Not when your whole business relies on exploiting copyrighted content, which
someone from Disney might argue about Giphy.

~~~
3131s
Well, Facebook gets away with absolute murder in regard to copyrighted
infringement (especially in the non-English parts of the site) so it's a good
fit.

------
Sevaris
And the inexorable march towards tech companies owning everything continues. I
wish anti-trust law wasn't such a joke across the globe.

~~~
Nextgrid
In this case I'm not sure anti-trust would help? Giphy doesn't have a monopoly
and the product is straightforward to replicate by doing the same thing they
did - ie scraping and stealing content at scale.

~~~
atonse
It would because giphy is a great proxy to find out what people are CURRENTLY
talking about, or how they are feeling, based on the gifs they're searching
for.

This can fuel better ads. So consolidating this stuff further could have that
effect.

To me it is so creepy how much of even our casual thoughts outside of facebook
now are going into facebook servers. There's just no escaping these data
addicts. That's the concern.

------
scared2
These kinds of acquisitions intrigue me. what is valuation crieteria? from
technical and innovation perspective, what part of it is worth millions?

~~~
yreg
Another commenter pointed out that Giphy is integrated into many products and
buying Giphy is a way to get metrics about those products.

~~~
scared2
Makes more sense. But it is easy to replace it with another giphy. Especially
when there is privacy reason.

~~~
johannes1234321
Question os: How many will switch it out? Giphy has a big collection of images
and works ... swapping is effort and brings different (unexpected?) results.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Create a proxy that exfiltrates their active database while providing
anonymity.

~~~
johannes1234321
Again, a small number of people might do that, if one gets too large by chance
Giphy/Facebook will attempt to block them. Most users and integrations will be
kept. As people stay on WhatsApp etc.

------
antibland
FB can utilize Giphy for pixel tracking (similar to FB Like button) since
these low-brow, comedic incantations appear all across the webosphere.

------
mikeryan
I've been watching this a bit in other sectors, but I'm fascinated to see if
there's a real uptick in "Vulture Buying" as the effects of the financial
markets really settle in. This may have been something in the works for a
while but you have to wonder as some companies that have likely weathered the
storm well start on a spree of discount shopping.

~~~
dannyw
Public markets are low down 15% now. It’s hardly a discount.

~~~
mikeryan
I've not been looking really there, most of my thoughts have been around the
commercial real estate market and media entertainment private equity
companies.

Giphy, could (total spitballing here) could be a company that was a bit
overvalued in VC terms, and might not have consistent cash flows and solid
fundamentals where an acquisition makes sense to take their money off the
table now. There might be others.

Or this marriage has been in the works since December and just got pushed
through now. Strange times.

------
codegladiator
Ah shit, another site for my /etc/hosts

I wonder reddit would be even more useless for me since half the content is
from giphy.

~~~
pwython
You're probably thinking of imgur, which lost some steam when Reddit added
their own image hosting. Only a few dozen giphy links get posed each day:
[https://www.reddit.com/domain/giphy.com/new/](https://www.reddit.com/domain/giphy.com/new/)

~~~
FalconSensei
Adding to that, I think gfycat should be more used than giphy, at least based
on how much gfycat content I see there

------
annadane
[https://overcast.fm/+QLdurp-A8](https://overcast.fm/+QLdurp-A8) for a good
overview of how Facebook treats its acquisitions. Absolutely disgusting. Throw
Zuck in prison.

~~~
annadane
I notice someone went around downvoting _all_ critical FB comments I've posted
recently. They legitimately have shills patrolling HN.

------
zuhayeer
Wow, this is crazy to hear about! Back in college I worked on a fun way to
share snippets of music with friends directly in iMessage called RapBits
(essentially audio gifs). I reached out to Adam Leibsohn who was the COO of
Giphy at the time. He immediately replied to my cold email excited about the
idea and offered to help. He also asked about how we were handling legal. We
didn't have an answer, in fact UMG had basically threatened to shut our app
down in a meeting we had with them in LA originally thinking it'd be a great
partnership meeting (the music industry kinda sucks). Really appreciated his
response in that moment, he basically told us to keep going and see what we
could do with it and just have fun!

Kind of wild to see such a fun / not-so-serious seeming product have such a
huge exit and profound impact on the way we communicate now

Anyways, here's a quick demo of RapBits:
[https://rapbits.com/video/ad.mp4](https://rapbits.com/video/ad.mp4)

Even had a brief stint of fame on /r/hiphopheads:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/64ea1v/my_room...](https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/64ea1v/my_roommates_and_i_are_building_this_rap_imessage/)

------
alberth
There is a considerable amount of porn on Giphy.

I wonder if FB will ban porn on Giphy like how Verizon banned porn on Tumblr
after that acquisition.

~~~
Mindwipe
That was my first thought too.

More censorship.

Then again, I am very curious if Facebook's content board will do something
about wearing a bikini being a account closure level offense for sex
workers/cam models and completely okay for celeb influencers.

------
petercooper
Instagram seemed expensive at $1bn in 2012 and ultimately turned out to be a
very savvy buy, so I feel like I should trust Facebook on this one.

I'm kinda surprised Imgur hasn't sold in a similar way yet, it seems to have
slightly more sense of community than Giphy which is more broadly known as a
search engine for GIFs.

~~~
bottled_poe
Yikes. Feels like my privacy is leaking again. Time to find some alternative.

~~~
nindalf
How many times are you going to make the same comment on this thread? This is
a pretty good angle for farming karma on HN but you have to be more subtle
about it.

Other comment -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23192779](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23192779)

~~~
bottled_poe
I mistakenly posted it on the wrong reply. Should have deleted the other.

------
9wzYQbTYsAIc
Any good alternatives to GIPHY?

~~~
hckr_news
Gyfcat?

------
ivanstame
Facebook and others should be put on hold for buying companies for a while...

~~~
paxys
Why on earth would they do that? There's practically a fire sale of startups
unable to raise more cash.

~~~
ivanstame
Startup business models should not be to be sold...but to make money and be
useful. And I am saying this because those companies are becoming too big and
too powerful.

------
schoolornot
Struggling to understand the value-add for Facebook here. For a while they
were buying businesses for the coveted "screen time" \- VR, messaging, etc.
Everyone expected that they would monetize or integrate those platforms, and
they did for most apps.

So I guess if I post a giphy in a work chat they will now get an extra few
seconds of ~100 people's screen time/day. What's the point? I doubt they will
overlay ads. So what else? Some form of content control? Only show pics that
ascribe to Facebook's agenda?

~~~
ComodoHacker
What kind of gifs you like/share/post would be a useful addition to your
[shadow] profile, won't it? More training material for their AI projects.

------
iphone_elegance
Makes sense, it seems like a great way to inject ads coupled with facebooks
profile information it's likely a goldmine

You start a campaign and suddenly you have people inserting meme-like-ads
feature your content into their chat threads

It'll have a personal and convincing touch ( esp. with facebooks ad targeting)
it's going to be amazing for our industry reaching customers, Pepe/Trump memes
did win an election afterall

Also a great way to get ads into whatsapp messages without seeming intrusive

------
yalogin
Do slack and others pay Giphy when they integrate? Is that their main source
of revenue or is it ads?

I am wondering what makes them more attractive than someone like imgur for
example.

~~~
FalconSensei
Yes, they pay. Because it helps keeping users active, in case of Instagram,
for example. And in slack's case, I think when you install the app you can
have it for free (with limitations), or pay to remove said limitations. In
that case, slack may not (IMO) pay then.

------
reubensutton
It's a significant discount from previous funding rounds according to
Techcrunch: "Giphy last raised $72 million at a reported $600 million
valuation at the end of 2016"

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/09/giphy-held-talks-to-
raise-...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/09/giphy-held-talks-to-raise-a-
massive-new-funding-round/)

------
xd_dino
Duh. I am sure of one thing what is going to happen for pretty little Giphy
service. Instagram was cool. now, I see sponsored Ads for every two posts. It
is annoying to be in Insta nowadays. I suppose this is going to happen for
Giphy as well. How frustrating if you are searching for quick witty gif and
you see a sponsored ads in it.. you never know FB monster can do this.

------
Causality1
For me Giphy is the poster child of Google's infuriating decision to put
videos in the image search results. It's almost impossible to find a gif you
can properly embed an HTML these days. Sure, you can use search terms to
filter out giphy.com but then a hundred other copycat websites only fill the
void with more videos masquerading as image files.

------
scared2
These kinds of acquisitions intrigue me. what is valuation crieteria?

from technical and innovation perspective, what part of it is worth millions?

~~~
johannes1234321
The fact that it is embedded in tons of software and delivers information
about usage and trends.

~~~
Nextgrid
They don't have a "moat" though - no cutting-edge technology or even content
licenses (it's all stolen). Anyone can build their own alternative to it very
easily and I'm confident it'll quickly happen to any company that competes
with and/or feels threatened by Facebook.

~~~
colinmorelli
Err, no. This is a serious underestimation of the difficulty involved in
acquiring users. Networks effects are a moat. Market share can be a moat.

You don't need to just "build your own alternative to it." You need to get all
the content (this is actually not as easy as you make it seem - stolen or
not), then integrate that into Instagram, WhatsApp, Slack, and hundreds of
other platforms across the world as _the_ supported way of sharing gifs. Then
you'll have to build a brand around the product that people remember, and
whose website they actually visit when they want images and aren't using one
of the hundreds of platforms that already natively integrates giphy.

And in order to do all that, you'll have to somehow manage to convince
everyone out there that your gif search system is better than their gif search
system that they already know, are comfortable with, and generally happy with.
Your pitch will probably be that theirs is owned by Facebook, and is therefore
a violation of their privacy. But you know who else is owned by Facebook?
Facebook. And yet Facebook is pushing close to 2 billion daily active users.

Convenience trumps privacy in modern society most of the time. I'm sure there
will be a changing of the winds - there always is - but there likely will not
be significant competition for Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Giphy/Google/(put
any other company in here) until that comes. The network effects are too
strong, and the convenience is too great.

There are so many posts about "(Twitter/Facebook/Giphy) clone in a
(day/weekend/week/month)" and yet there's a distinct lack of commercial
successes in these spaces.

Edit: a word.

------
ronnieoverby
[https://gph.is/g/a99MK06](https://gph.is/g/a99MK06)

~~~
loceng
I tried to find a The Social Network movie overlay with the words "Dumb fucks"
on Giphy - though it doesn't seem to have it;
[https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/oct/20/mark-
zuckerberg...](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/oct/20/mark-zuckerberg-
the-social-network)

------
iambateman
Giphy...by Facebook.
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/2zmo6nl7mmtnhzf/giphy.png?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/2zmo6nl7mmtnhzf/giphy.png?dl=0)

Maybe they keep the ephemeral absurdity that was giphy...but it feels like the
beginning of the end.

------
crankylinuxuser
Giphy was the reason why at my last job, a manager inadvertently posted porn
to our slack channel.

Nevertheless, giphy was just a gif image host. They do have access to current
meme culture, which I imagine is useful to FB. But for me, thats just a less
of a reason to use them. Im data-mined enough already.

------
wdb
The only GIF you need in Slack is this one:
[https://media.giphy.com/media/n59dQcO9yaaaY/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/n59dQcO9yaaaY/giphy.gif)
for when a new user signs up :)

------
anupamchugh
Facebook has now got a foot into its competitor's data. Retrieving unique
device ID from Android phones(below Android 11 of course) is a cakewalk and
Giphy requires that for its client SDK

------
savrajsingh
Congrats Alex Chung! Met him a couple times in NYC and he was gracious and
kind. I remember him mentioning that Giphy is the largest search engine behind
google or so, which makes sense as everyone's searching for cool gifs in chat
whenever they can. :)

~~~
maest
Bigger than Bing?

------
dblock
Time to finally remove support for it, [https://github.com/slack-ruby/slack-
ruby-bot/issues/261](https://github.com/slack-ruby/slack-ruby-bot/issues/261)

------
BeautifulOrb
Giphy does not make an effort to pay or credit the artists whose gifs are on
their site.

------
jcutrell
The amount of nuanced information available in this dataset is incredible.

~~~
loceng
I don't understand why someone downvoted you. Giphy is used by many services
and Facebook owning, having access to that data and the insights it could
provide into the whole landscape would lead me to looking for another
solution, although them purchasing it will give them all of the historical
data they'd need to find new niches, successful and growing competitors or
market segments that they can just copy into FB. The laws certainly haven't
caught up with this new age of anti-competitiveness that's possible with how a
single entity is tied into so many competing companies, and so just a big
competitor buying up that resource certainly gives an arguably unfair
competitive advantage.

Edit to add - TLDR: this essentially gives a backdoor to Facebook for usage at
other companies who integrated the service.

------
autokad
i hate giphy, its a SV solution to a problem that never existed.

gifs were fine, now some silicon tech forced them out and we get all the fun
of copy rights and lack of saving the gifs for our personal use /s

------
davidwitt415
Gifs may be fun to watch the first time, but I have to say it drives me crazy
to have a bunch of looping animations running all over the screen when i'm
trying to focus on something.

------
exabrial
great, yet another way to get tracked

------
tiborsaas
It's a data grab. Just imagine how many places Giphy has "integration" with.
And the contents of a gif might be really telling, they are already very well
tagged.

------
ceothrowaway
Any idea what level/compensation FB is offering to Giphy engineers?

------
rofws
The only time I use giphy is through google keyboard (yes, I send a lot of
memes). I guess google will have to pay them now? Or will keyboard stop
supporting giphy?

~~~
FalconSensei
IMHO they will migrate to something else

~~~
hetspookjee
I read in this thread that Tenor is the Gif service owned by Google. I do
wonder why they dont use it in the first place?

------
Priem19
And yet another domain I'll block with uMatrix.

------
agigao
A few weeks ago I decided to completely stop using gifs and emojis in
conversations, and goes what conversations got more meaningful and thoughtful.

~~~
holler
Im working on a new conversation app and I'm explicitly never going to allow
gifs or emojis as they degrade the conversation , distract, and prevent
meaningful dialog.

------
lyime
Facebook might have been trying to / already have a data deal in play and
probably decided to just buy it out right.

------
cityzen
[http://i.imgur.com/e8a5w9s.gif](http://i.imgur.com/e8a5w9s.gif)

------
didip
For a silly product, this is a great success despite its "down round".
Congrats to everyone who has equities.

------
fritex
So, what's next they'll buy? :D

------
jdkee
I hope this transaction undergoes a deep antitrust review. As Instagram should
have.

------
arsome
Wonder what will come of the Signal integration... not exactly a good look...

------
scoot_718
This is the first (and I'm guessing last) I've ever heard of giphy.

~~~
zemo
weird flex but ok

------
hyko
Oh ffs. Where’s the justice department when you need them?

------
scared2
How many gifs does it host and does it have rights to It??

~~~
zemo
at least six

------
infused
One more app removed from my phone now. Thanks Facebook.

------
annadane
Could you stop? Don't you have enough? Let me guess. Giphy will now be used to
spy on people, it won't be chronological any more, Zuck bought this because it
threatens his internet empire, etc etc...

------
lx0741
use cases: \- monetize gifs \- suggest gifs to their users based on their
feeds \- nothing relevant just #deletefb and save your brain and the planet

------
pot8n
And I thought Coronavirus would end that kind of deals.

~~~
whoisjuan
Quite the contrary. Expect to see a lot of M&A activity this year. These are
times where companies with positive cash flow can do strategic acquisitions at
a discount.

------
stiray
Nice to know, their domains are going directly to my banned sites list. They
have acquired gliphy to extend reach of their pixels and well... I can live
without gifs.

(edit: they are already banned. Nothing to do.)

------
stephencoyner
\- “New York-based Giphy had raised around $150 million in VC funding.”

\- “Its most recent private valuation was around $600 million.”

Seems like Giphy took quite a haircut to pull this off. Their outlook must
have looked pretty bleak.

------
eecc
So now the intention is to map corporate org charts?

------
chadlavi
Well, frig. Time to find a new very good gif source.

------
mrkramer
Zuckerberg is really desperate paying $400m for this, this is worth $100m max.
Like somebody said earlier Imgur would make more sense. And btw VCs who
invested late stage in Giphy lost money.

~~~
zumachase
No they didn’t: liquidation preference.

------
bilekas
Yay, now our memes will be monetized! +1 FB

------
lowdose
Its a multisided platform inside every app.

------
lowkeyokay
Congrats. That’s it for me then. Deleted

------
block_dagger
Gifs in Slack (or anywhere) are a distraction imo. I disable them where
possible and never post them. I encourage others to do the same :)

------
PopeDotNinja
I wonder what happens to Giphy porn.

~~~
FalconSensei
probably it'll be gone. gfycat already banned it, creating another service
(redgifs I think) and moving that content there

------
badrabbit
Signal uses giphy. Hope they stop.

~~~
schwag09
I had the same thought. Although it looks like Signal uses a proxy for GIPHY
requests [1] and has at least thought about the privacy implications of GIPHY
support [2].

[1] [https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-
Android/issues/9628](https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9628)

[2] [https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-
update/](https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/)

------
geocrasher
Welp. There goes the neighborhood.

------
arnklint
Is it for tracking purpose?

------
OctopusSandwich
Now that Giphy has a rich owner, will hollywood try to sue them for using
their intellectual property?

------
techguruseo
Giphy is so lucky. All the best to them.

------
fritex
So, what's next they will buy? :D

------
lx0741
why on earth does fb exist?

------
whatsmyusername
RIP giphy

~~~
solarkraft
Was it ever good?

~~~
loceng
Define good? The data's worth at least $400M to Facebook.

~~~
maest
They probably mean from a user perspective. Most users don't care about the
value of the data.

~~~
mrkramer
"Most users don't care about the value of the data." In a world of micro
transactions every user could for example be paid fraction of a cent every
time he or she sees an ad thus sharing revenue with Facebook.

------
jondubois
The title is misleading. It should be "Facebook executives give free money and
Facebook shares to Giphy executives and save Giphy from bankruptcy."

------
andy_ppp
The web of surveillance capitalism Giphy has in every integration is worth _at
least_ $400m to Facebook... Crazy!

------
jondubois
I can't help but think of all the millions of economically useful people who
lost their jobs over the past couple of months because of COVID19... And
contrast that with all the economically useless Giphy employees and executives
who not only get to keep their jobs but get massive bonuses.

~~~
dang
Could you please not post flamewar style comments to HN? We're looking for
curious conversation, not denunciatory rants, and you've done this 4 times in
this thread alone.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

