Facebook Inc has announced the acquisition of GIPHY and merged the visual expression and creation team as part of popular photo and video-sharing networking service, Instagram. Both Facebook and GIPHY made separate official announcements, however, both teams did not discuss the financial terms of acquisition. The folks at American news website, Axios value the deal to be around the US$ 400 million mark.
The platform currently serves over 10 billion plus GIPHY contents everyday to over 700 million people around the world on internet’s popular apps such as Twitter, TIktok, Apple’s iMessage, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Tinder, Telegram and more. Facebook in a blog post, revealed that the GIPHY contents will be further integrated in Instagram’s content library and other apps owned by the company (Facebook app, Messenger, and WhatsApp).
Facebook’s family of apps is mentioned to account for 50% of GIPHY’s traffic and Instagram accounts for half of that traffic. Commenting on the launch, Vishal Shah, VP of Product for Instagram said:
“GIFs and stickers give people meaningful and creative ways to express themselves. We see the positivity in how people use GIPHY in our products today, and we know that bringing the GIPHY team’s creativity and talent together with ours will only accelerate how people use visual communication to connect with each other.”
The company also allayed fears that developers and API partners will still be able to integrate Giphy’s API and archives on other internet platforms to let users share and post Emojis, GIFs, Stickers and more. Going by the views of The Verge, most services will become wary of having a Facebook-owned service integrated into their products/services, not only because they prefer not to rely directly on major competitors but also the constant scrutiny the company faces due to privacy issues.
Source: Facebook News | GIPHY
Via: The Verge
