Facebook Acquired Giphy for $400 Million and Welcomed It as Part of Instagram

The social media giant bought Giphy, an online database of myriads of short looping videos knows as GIFs, for reported $400 million. Both companies in their blog posts confirmed the news.

In a statement, Facebook said that the company is planning to integrate Giphy into Instagram, as well as other Facebook apps. However, nothing will change for users as GIFs will work as they used to. Thus, the GIF-sharing platform will become a part of the Instagram team.

The company also stated that half of the Giphy’s traffic comes from apps owned by Facebook, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and Facebook itself. At the same, half of that number comes specifically from Instagram.

“By bringing Instagram and GIPHY together, we can make it easier for people to find the perfect GIFs and stickers in Stories and Direct. Both our services are big supporters of the creator and artist community, and that will continue. Together, we can make it easier for anyone to create and share their work with the world,” Facebook's vice president of product Vishal Shah wrote in a blog post.

Giphy is a company based in New York that was founded back in 2013 with a goal to “make communication more fun.” During its first week of operation, the website attracted nearly a million users. Nowadays, Giphy is widely used by many other social media networks, platforms, and messengers that rely on Giphy’s API to supply GIFs. Among them, there are iMessage, Slack, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, Telegram, TikTok, Twitter, Tinder, Signal, and many others. By now, it is unknown whether these services and apps will change their way of working with Giphy since it was bought by Facebook.

Facebook’s latest acquisition really concerned a lot of people since the company’s privacy and security policies are not that reliable. Over the years, the social network experienced quite a few scandals and data breaches.

After the acquisition, Giphy will maintain its branding. In an announcement, the company said:

And for our API/SDK partners and developers: GIPHY’s GIFs, Stickers, Emojis, etc. aren’t going anywhere. We will continue to make GIPHY openly available to the wider ecosystem.

“GIPHY will continue to operate its library (including its global content collection), and we’re looking forward to investing further in its technology and relationships with content and API partner. People will still be able to upload GIFs; developers and API partners will continue to have the same access to GIPHY’s APIs; and GIPHY’s creative community will still be able to create great content,” Facebook’s blog post also states.

Giphy is not the social network’s only purchase. This year, Facebook bought Sanzaru Games, a video game development startup, and Scape Technologies.