With 200M daily users, Giphy will soon test sponsored GIFs
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I think the whatsapp deal probably works out -- but how many of those will such companies bank against.
One hope could be that disk and network prices become low enough to sustain some small profit, but when that happens a dozen other hosts will pop up. A gif website isn't hard to host.
I mean now that they've created a social network and are redirecting all image links to their shitty webpage with the cat paw, ok, I believe it, but since day 1 when they were just hosting images? There's no way they were making money off that
First donations, then using plain old ad networks.
It was bootstrapped for years.
https://www.neowin.net/news/from-rags-to-riches-the-story-of...
Quote: "Imgur has always been profitable right from the very beginning and the only time I ever had to spend money on it was for the initial domain name because as soon as I released it, people liked it so much that they were donating and so Imgur survived for the first six months just purely on donations."
Personally I think a hybrid between a video codec (h.264, VP10, etc.) and a lossless transparent still codec (PNG) would be a good way to go
Yeah, the noise was more the point I was getting at. IIRC PNG also has the benefit of prefilters which allow it to (and maybe there are other things) compress rectangles as contiguous symbols rather than splitting them across lines, which makes obvious sense for 2D images.
Gifs store every frame as a separate image and use very crude compression. Also the very limited color palette as others mentioned.
Uh, they are using WebP and MP4, how is it terribly un-optimized?
Is BMW going to buy sponsored GIFs? Is McDonald's? Are major CPG companies going to buy sponsored GIFs? I think TV shows and major studios have a good use case for this, but even if the sales are constrained to suitable markets, and healthy, will those sales support a $600mm valuation, or even keep the lights on?
Ad sales work well when you control a platform with a lot of eyeball-share, and when you have strong profiling. I don't think Giphy will have much of either, and if they do, I think the they won't have all of those attributes available (i.e., giphy.com is hard to build facebook-level profiling on, but is easy to control ad units on, GIF keyboards/facebook/various integrations are high-eyeball, but someone else controls the profiling and you can't control the ad units etc).
I could see them being a clear buyer here. Some of the GIFs in that article are clear, in-your-face ads, but some of the others are a bit more subtle... yet still probably achieve Starbucks' ad goals.
As for Giphy reach... I use Giphy on Facebook Messenger, Discord, and probably a few other places that I'm unaware of. They hook into a LOT of places.
VIDEO is the future, and with AR, VR, and mixed reality on the rise (where the Almighty Facebook's Oculus is actually 5th place in sales [1]), images and gifs are looking about as exciting as innovations in the design of mobile flip phones. Snap, with Snapchat, went public earlier this year, but I don't think they ever could have done if they remained merely a photo-messaging app, rather than a photo-and-video messaging app, as well as a news-publishing app and now a TV app with its own proprietary programming.
[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=imgur,re...
I see McDonalds integrating Giphy into a larger ad campaign. Let's say they launch a campaign around happy moments with family. That gives them scope to includes moments from the TV or cinema spots as featured results when someone searches for a happy or family gif, which the user is more likely to do because they're aware of the campaign. That user then shares the campaign to friends on social media who may not be television watchers.
Or consider the next Minions movie. They just animate and render a bunch of Minions acting out the top Giphy search terms (subtly tagged 'Despicable Me 4'), and suddenly the movie is being organically promoted by thousands of users.
And for a really bad one. It's more of a gif aggregator that can give you gifs of approximate themes. But I very rarely find a specific gif I want and I know it exists.
Edit: It may have improved a bit lately, but it would be much, much better if they did OCR of text in gifs, and use the context of where the gifs are found (esp. page title) for additional search terms.
They'll of course make the "user generated content" argument, but clipping a video is not user generated content.
Giphy's Slack integration is a pain point, just pasting in the first result (or just a slot machine type system) is not the best UI. They do better on other platforms, but RightGif tends to get it right the first time.
That said, the valuation is nuts.
Holy moly, good luck with that ...
I think there is a place for a company like theirs, at a much smaller valuation, running and making profits. But now that they took VC money on such a high value, they're bound to do all the classic tricks to burn through money keeping the illusion going ...
The moment `/giphy cat` in slack returns sponsored content is the exact moment people will disable it.
But I think there are variations on this that work/make money.
`/giphy football` could return some relevant superbowl sponsored gif as one of the first N gifs. Kinda like how google gives you 3 "relevant" ads before showing you the actual search content. Start subtle, get more and more brash as time goes and people won't notice. I guess making it work without people leaving is the $600M question.
Isn't that the classic mistake of projecting your own opinion on that of the many, many other users that are using it?
I could distribute that thing across a global cluster of VPSes with cheap bandwidth (Vultr, Digital Ocean, OVH) and host it for peanuts. Given that it's drowning in VC money my guess is that it's all at AWS, not using S3, and over-engineered to Juicero levels. They're probably using Kubernetes, a dozen different database and message bus protocols, and a whole sprawling Rube Goldberg machine of a microservices architecture to... host gifs.
... and yeah that nose candy valuation is ludicrous. There is no way.
If your numbers really are accurate then it underscores the insanity of the valuation. If the costs are intrinsically high then you'd need a high value advertising niche to make this profitable.
Assuming giphy does an average of 2 searches / user / day, that's ~150B searches per year. Put another way, 1/8 of Google search volume.
I think it's reasonable to believe the average Giphy search can eventually monetize at > 1% of the average Google search query.
Especially if Gif searches sometimes have intent.
Not too sure about that. I don't search for gifs of anything I want to buy but I certainly google some of them.
I think there are huge gaps to fill in before we can understand what the value of monetized search on Giphy is vis a vis Google.
...they do? I'm not sure I've ever seen a Gif posted that was not a pithy reaction to a conversation. Seems kind of hard to come up with meaningful context from "spongebob nope".
I get it, it's the game we play now with content that is ostensibly or otherwise "free", pandora's box is open but the internet has become such a frustrating place for me personally every time I see "Sponsored tweet" or "sponsored post" or "sponsored ________" that tries to blend itself into the rank and file of non-sponsored content I would otherwise enjoy.
After the VC money runs out, content hosting service need to pay the bills somehow. I can only think of a few ways this can work: you pay for the content you like via a subscription or per unit of content, you look at ads, or you look at sponsored tweets/gifs/whatever. I suspect that most people would be unwilling to pay subscription fees, so ads and/or sponsored content are probably the way to go for most companies.
I suppose to unpack my position a bit better than I have so far, if the sponsored content is truly relevant and engaging, I'd have far less things to complain about on this topic.
As it is, the majority of "sponsored content" I've seen hasn't really amounted to much that seems to fit within the ecosystem it exists in; it oft seems out of place and irrelevant.
But again, your point is well taken and I'm sure smarter people than I will continue working on this question and find ways to continue delivering content freeloaders like me love to consume :P
Not only is it a timewaster application (why would a business pay for employees to use it), but it also does a poor job of search - its main selling point. Baffling that anyone believes it's worth $600M.
because surely that's a problem money can easily fix
That would make their search usable, but still not sure what the market for gifs is. I don't see any good way to compel their end users to pay for the service, and ads will fundamentally degrade the utility of the service even further.
They've essentially built a poorly-functioning toy and are getting investors as if they are a B2B SaaS service. What is their value-add? Is there any economic utility in being able to quickly find a gif?
Giphy gets used all the time in my company's Slack channels..
It's a morale thing I think (at least a bit).. People enjoy putting a bit of fun into the work chat, in a way that's acceptable (in our office culture - don't want to speak for everyone) and low-effort..
If Giphy was suddenly 5-10$/month (like RightGif is for example), I think my company would gladly pay that to continue to let our employees use it during their work conversations.
We used it a bunch when we first moved to slack, but now we probably use it less than once per day across the whole team. We'd turn it off without hesitation if we had to pay for it.
> If Netflix doesn’t buy ads against "chill"
This is not saying they're bad, I totally can relate with their need to cut costs because just hosting these gifs for free and letting anyone <img src> them is not a profitable decision, but then again, it's not really Gif anymore.
So even in this case the "sponsored gif" would probably be some sort of a video instead of an actual gif.
Nowadays whenever I want to search for a gif I want to use for a blog post or website, I have given up looking for gifs on giphy and just go to google search instead. The "gifs" on giphy are unusable for my purpose.
You know exactly how much each GIF served costs you.
Charge that to a balance I keep on file on my account, and add autopay with a monthly spend limit. Let me indicate whether my GIF links should become sponsored or should simply return 1x1 transparent when my balance for the month runs out.
I don't want a "premium monthly fee" account, I want you to charge me S3 delivery fees + 15% markup for the privilege of dealing with S3 for me.
I use the giphy website a couple times a week, but the search is terrible. It's my go-to choice purely because it's convenient, but there's no way I would ever pay for the service. If other users feel the way I do, sponsored gifs may be their only hope.
Seems like giphy is counting some things they shouldn't. If a giphy gets embedded on the page, maybe they count every single impression of that gif as a daily user?
I'd be shocked if anywhere near 200M people actually had accounts on the giphy website.
This wouldn't surprise me in the least. But, if they can turn a reasonable number of those impressions into sponsored impressions, it's kind of beside the point.
Although doing the numbers, 5% paid impressions on 200M daily impressions at $5 CPM is only $50K daily or $18.25M yearly...
1) I'm glad HN doesn't allow gif images in the comments. If you are reading this you are probably not in the target group that might be willing to spend money on gif images.
I think ad-sponsored GIFs will be more popular and more legal then any other type of gif. I envision a future where we are all sending ad-company created gifs to each other without even noticing that they're created by ad companies.
GIFs are so easy to make and so cheap, and they're used everywhere.
I thought something like that was already happening in the form of PR firms producing contrived "reaction" GIFs with celebrities.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gboard-a-new-keyboard-from-g...