Good luck living up to that $600 million valuation with sponsored gifs before running out of money. Seems they raised 55 on 300 in February 2016 and then 72 on 600 in October 2016. Seems like a lot of money to be burning for a gif search engine.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.