> “GIPHY delivers real-time GIFs as they happen, helping to power Twitter’s live commentary and conversation,” says Alex Chung, founder and CEO of GIPHY.
Someone built a 30+ person company around animated GIFs. And they say there isn't a bubble...
I actually visited Giphy.com the very first time. Wow, such a crazy site. Very similar to many companies in the "F'd companies" book from 2000/01 era. "Giphy Closes $55M Series C at a $300M Post-Money Valuation" (on HN yesterday) Hmm.
It's analogous to building a 30+ person company around MS Office clip art circa 1995 or Print Shop banner designs circa 1985, only now the company is valued at $300m with $50m funding. For gif search. Because I need those memes and I need them fast?
I guess your critique is that Giphy doesn't have a clear, announced monetization strategy?
That sounds fair. I haven't done any research on the company, but that seemed vague in their recent funding announcement/valuation.
However, I think it's fair to say that Giphy has created something people want to use. Anecdotally, their Slack integration is very popular in the channels I frequent. Maybe the lack of public monetization plan means bubble to you, but it seems the business at least has some value. I don't know if they'll be able to turn that value into revenue, but it seems plausible to me.
I'm not really arguing against your opinion. I'm just trying to get clarity on exactly why you think Giphy is indicative of a bubble. Searching for funny gifs may seem frivolous, but it's something people value. If Giphy can capitalize on that value without losing users / destroying the brand, it seems like a reasonable foundation for a business.
What makes this indicative of a bubble is the combination of:
a. Business centered around an utterly frivolous endeavor
b. Seemingly far more employees than necessary to support (a)
c. Many millions of dollars raised in the pursuit of (a) and (b)
You're absolutely correct that people want to use it. But they sure as hell aren't gonna pay directly for it or put up with ads. This is not a business made to last. I know it, you know it, we all know it. Yet there are people out there willing to toss $55M into this folly.
Yeah, I guess I put less weight on your point a. Frivolity doesn't necessarily mean an inability to generate revenue. Things that seem frivolous at first or frivolous to certain people can turn into a Real Business™.
However, I agree that people wouldn't pay for it or put up with ads. As a casual Giphy user, I certainly wouldn't pay for it, and to your point, I wouldn't invest my own money in Giphy.
Anyway, thanks for spelling out your reasoning. Cheers.
Actually Giphy has a pretty sound business model. They are already integrated into most of the large communication services used in the US (facebook messenger, twitter, slack, kik). When a movie studio wants to promote their next film they are going to pay Giphy a lot of money to make sure their gifs are featured. It's not inconceivable that that Giphy and it's like (Riffsy, PopKey) become a massive advertising channel for movies and tv. $300m seems like a lot, but I don't think it's ridiculous.
Your (b) is a big one in my mind. The core of giphy could be run by one person. There's probably enough monetization potential here for a good healthy lifestyle business for 1-3 people.
I think it's more relevant that Giphy isn't providing any original content, whereas the clipart vendors were selling their own media. Giphy is merely providing hosting for users' content, much of which is copyrighted.
It's all about the tags. You have to work in the other direction. Find something well-tagged, then giphy the fully qualified tag that produces the same gif every time.
Granted, this is not a "search engine" type of use case, but the actual existence of some gifs, and the tags applied, force a degree of compromise.
I am not the one that got $50M in funding though, I just want to use their one line integration on slack. That's up to them to make it not work, not me.
One key difference I see is that GIPHY is clearly either uploading or categorizing/tagging/grouping pretty obviously copyrighted stuff and is doing so under their own name "team giphy." That's a huge risk because it probably breaches the copyright safe-harbor under DMCA.
If you get your business very large very quick, you can pay off settlements and regulations. This is sort of what Uber has been doing, from what I've come to understand.
I don't think that technological approach is enough here. You don't seem to take cultural significance of GIFs into account.
It's like saying that Pinterest is a photo album. Or that Twitter is just a blog engine with 140 characters. Completely correct. Completely missing the point.
>Someone built a 30+ person company around animated GIFs.
Its one my main sources of entertainment( imgur). There is an explosion of information/media on the internet and we need new formats, presentation to reign that in and make it palatable. I don't think its as stupid as you are making it out to be. There is huge potential in this space.
When will they add support for long GIFs with sound? /s
There's a weird trend of taking full HD YouTube videos, converting them to soundless, bad quality GIFs and then upload them to twitter or imgur, where they're then encoded back to video. Quite often this goes without source to the original. I assume that people doing this just want to show the important content on the respective platform rather than sending a link (although twitter and reddit embed YouTube videos). Or is there another reason?
YouTube regularly transcodes all uploaded content into several different varieties of MP4 container. If you're on iOS, then all videos you watch on YouTube are MP4s.
I don't mean lightweight in a technical sense, I mean lightweight in terms of user experience. To view a gif (or gif converted to mp4, webm, whatever) I know it's silent (don't have to worry about muting my phone), I don't have to load the youtube app or the bloated youtube site. All I do at the most is tap to play.
I would love to see a service that caption sounds in gifs. Not just talk, everything, you gif a video of a car starting and the caption goes 'wrrrrrrooooo'
And you need to click a blue play button to play it - not in gif spirit at all! Also it can only be saved as a video, which is likely terribly compressed from the original gif.
By the way, Tumblr had this feature for ages: even the icon is completely identical. [1]
I dont need to press a button. 'GIFs' play automatically for me in Twitter when they are scrolled into view, and paused when scrolled outside of the main view area - which I think is a good experience.
What the hell is Twitter turning into? A broadcast Messenger chat? It seems like to me that Twitter is increasingly promoting the mindlessness often found on sites like Reddit; In my opinion the attempt to increase the number of GIFs in an attempt to resume growth to millenials is misguided, and will lower the quality of Tweets overall (not that it was high to begin with), and will likely further alienate parts of its existing userbase, as we saw yesterday.[1]
How is what GIPHY is doing not just plain copyright infringement? I get the "search Engine" spiel, though questionable, on their site. But there is no attribution on Twitter/Slack etc.
Fair use is hard to determine before you get sued. There is no black or white rule. There are 4 (or more) factors to consider. Some are in favor of it being fair use--a)Amount and substantiality* and b) effect upon work's value. Some go against fair use, like commercial nature of the work. The fact that Giphy is just ripping off other people to get funding is bad for their fair use argument.
How a court would rule isn't clear.
*assuming they are copying a clip from a movie or show. Ripping off someone's original gif would turn this factor against them since they copy the whole thing.
If it's something they already had for free and are now rebranding/repurposing, fine. But, there are many other features I'd rather have, like better lists, or a more open API for 3rd party apps to build off of.
Its also a beautiful thought terminating cliche that, whether designed to or not, shuts down introspection into a current society/time.
I get it, Socrates complained about the youth of today, that doesn't mean that there aren't societies that really need someone to point out the failings of the current zeitgeist, or that we aren't creating a culture based around consumerist banalities.
Societies before us didn't have mass-market advertising, industrialisation, instant communication devices, etc. Pointing out the inanity of our tech scene and commercial activities, is i think, not only accurate in its assessment, but I think a much needed cultural critique...
Twitter is becoming worse in every way in order to chase the users of a larger social network that's worse in every way. The timeline isn't just about to become disjointed, it's going to become more inane as well.
Twitter is all about who you follow. Follow people with similar interests and it's great. Follow random people and non-suprisingly, the experience is going to suck.
Didn't understand the reason behind...If Twitter stays the same, they are surely dead too. A big reason that Twitter get crushed is because they basically didn't change over the past 3 years.
Right, as do most "GIF" websites I know of. But they don't allow users to directly upload MP4/WebM videos, do they? So they still encourage and require the use of GIF.
I hope I'm not the only one who looked on their task bar to see the date wasn't close to 1 April!
But aside from the seriousness of this feature, I think there's something crucial here - and it's where emojiis were pointing at - its easier to tell a story with a picture, and pictures can cross the language barrier. I expect there to be more and more reaction images / gifs across Twitter, Facebook, even on hacker news on day. I bet that in 2 years either HN will have animated gifs, or it will be less busy and people will be somewhere else where there are some.
Interestingly, Kik did this last year as alternative solution to custom stickers and emojis other messaging apps have. Looks like this trend is catching on with other services.
Everyone in here acting like Facebook didn't get the exact same backlash for all the changes they made in the last 5-6 years. You'll recall there was never such thing as a newsfeed back in the day... Twitter will be just fine. This is absolutely the right move and you will all forget about this and go back to tweeting as soon as you're done complaining I'm sure.
Facebook has had this for awhile (for chats, at least on web). I rather enjoy it and not really a Millennial, I was born in 77.
I really prefer gifs to all these goofy icons and odd emoji (still use thumbs up etc, just not the poop and other odd ones).
I use Line App for chat with a group for a game I play, and they all love those stickers and emojis. Most of the time I don't even register what it is, and move on - gifs are a bit more eye catching and usually more poignant.
I really wonder how they do financial projections for features like this. How do you even model that? Is it based on retention rates for adding the feature? Certainly users aren't saying "Well twitter has a GIF search now so I can finally join". It just all seems made up. A massive house of cards.
I think Twitter is making the correct move here. It's always been the holy grail of Vine and others to try to create quick consumable content without making others create it.
Ironically the 4chan crowd who create most of the world's shareable GIF content are either banned from Twitter because a feminist got outraged or have left of their own volition.
GIPHY is dealing with gif files, which are much larger and less efficient bandwidth-wise than silent webm videos, such as those peddled by Gfycat. Why on earth would GIPHY be the way to go instead of a company looking to improve the paradigm?
From a technology perspective, dealing in GIF at this obnoxious volume will be needlessly expensive and difficult to scale.
Perhaps GIPHY has convinced VCs that they are a new medium within the 'storytelling' trend that many brands are latching on to. But I don't see GIPHY being able to scale this product successfully to the point where they can start monetizing, without having to abandon their antiquated file format.
Someone built a 30+ person company around animated GIFs. And they say there isn't a bubble...