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Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

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Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#11

Post by 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.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#12

Post by 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.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#13

Post by 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.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#17

Post by txcwpalpha »

volkk wrote: post #6

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 up…

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.

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#18

Post by [deleted] »

volkk wrote: post #6

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 up…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

#20

Post by loceng »

jcutrell wrote: post #3

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

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.

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