Facebook, on Friday, said it is acquiring GIF sharing service, Giphy. Giphy is a search engine and database for short animated images, called GIFs. The social network briefed about the deal in a blog post on Friday. It said Giphy would become a part of its subsidiary, Instagram. It also said that more than 50% of Giphy’s traffic already comes from Facebook and it’s apps. However, the company didn’t reveal how much it paid for the deal. Axios reports that Facebook buys Giphy for $400 million.
Facebook plans to integrate Giphy’s library more deeply into Instagram and other Facebook services. Vishal Shah, Facebook’s vice president of the product (Instagram) wrote, “By bringing Instagram and Giphy together, we can make it easier for people to find the perfect GIFs and stickers in Stories and Direct.” Facebook also said that it did not plan to change the core functionality of Giphy. It promised and assured the developers that they would continue to have the same access to the underlying code.
The Giphy team also wrote through their Medium blog, “We will continue to make Giphy openly available to the wider ecosystem.” The team assured their API/SDK partners and developers that “GIPHY’s GIFs, Stickers, Emojis, etc. aren’t going anywhere.”
People’s Reaction
On social media, some people called out to delete Giphy citing their privacy concerns. People don’t seem to be wanting Facebook to collect personal information about them.
Facebook collects the data from people’s activity on the internet through various means to serve them personalized ads on its platforms.
Vishal Shah also wrote that the integration of Giphy with Facebook’s products would help people better express themselves. He wrote, “Both our services are big supporters of the creator and artist community, and that will continue.” He added saying, “Together, we can make it easier for anyone to create and share their work with the world.”
This acquisition of Giphy by Facebook may be a question of privacy for many, but it will make it much easier for Facebook (including Instagram) users to share GIFs and interact much effectively.
