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Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

> $600 million valuation

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 ...

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But if they only make $1/year profit on each of their 200M DAU, the valuation is easily justified. I'm sure FB, Google make much more than that and I haven't clicked on their ads for years.

FB did over a $5/year on a monthly active user in 2016. But they (and Google) are much better positioned at selling ads than a funny gifs engine ever could be.

These are still 200 million pairs of eyes every day on their product. VC funding has looked like a joke recently, but 200million daily users at $600M doesn't seem ridiculous, regardless of how silly/bad the product is.

But that's just users viewing content there, not interacting with the site at all. I'm sure imageshack had those numbers, easily. Until something better (read not monetized) came along to replace it for a while.

You might be right. I've never thought of giphy as just an image hosting platform though. It's more about the integrations with apps that is their edge. Something imageshack/imgur never really nailed.

but how is that integration monetizable?

The moment `/giphy cat` in slack returns sponsored content is the exact moment people will disable it.

Same.

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.

>> regardless of how silly/bad the product is

Isn't that the classic mistake of projecting your own opinion on that of the many, many other users that are using it?

This is my point. Regardless of how silly I think the product is, 200million other people think differently.

I wouldn't be surprised if they count someone who even views their gifs as a user. I guess at a $3 CPM they could make a buck off me in a year.

Yeah totally agree, raised too much money and won't be able to live up to the hype. Probably could have been bootstrapped into a modest company instead.

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