Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
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And then they manage to make it hard to actually post the gif you found via the search engine, so you end up using the giphy platform to do it.
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.
<rant> People keep posting them in Slack all the time, but I find it about as appropriate as that brief time when all my uni teachers decided that it's hip to include rage comic faces into every other slide of every presentation.
</rant>, yes I know, I'm fun at parties…
/collapse is your friend here.
I got tired of collapsing them
I'm grateful communication on MatterMost at my company has not seen the need for reaction gifs emerge; the wildest thing we have is a custom emoji of a dancing banana.
and before that, plaintext emoticons... ಠ_ಠ
When people use it, it looks the same to me like if they were using “Live long and prosper” in casual conversation.
Grok is not simply understanding or knowing a thing, it’s knowing that thing so well and all the things related to that thing, and understanding all of your feelings associated with that thing, that it becomes a part of you. At least, that was my interpretation of it.
Heinlein’s explanation and exposition is more detailed in the actual book. If you have not read it, highly recommended.
Grok works in English, I've been reading it for, what, 20 years in English texts. It mightn't be in dictionaries but they're not the sole arbiters of language.
It comes from US English, AFAIK, a neonym from Heinlein (the sci-fi writer).
English speakers seem to have this weird idea that all people need to use language that everyone can understand.
Other languages tailor their speaking patterns given the class, context, and people around them.
This is how new forms of communication develop. Sometimes they're random images (images that'll probably be used for even more extensive tracking now), sometimes they're playful changes to language, sometimes they're intentionally invented or modified words because the language lacked a word for a given purpose, and if they catch on enough with enough people they'll become part of communication. Because brains and pattern matching.
Sounds beautifully dystopian.
If this is an ironic joke, it's a good one. If not, it's painfully un-self-aware.
Because "feels like I'm in Darmok" is just an meaningless in isolation as "Temba, his arms wide."
-- https://twitter.com/venatrixlunaris/status/11852863701068595...
Giphy takes way too much space.
Also, why does Teams not have a :shrug: icon. Seriously?
The term to Google here is “digital blackface”.
If you bring this to more people’s attention my guess is that reaction GIFs will become less prevalent in your office.
I don't think there's any solid evidence of disproportional use of of one ethnic group by another. You can certainly find individuals who thoughtlessly or deliberately do that but generalizing that to some random population (eg of office workers) is likely wrong.
And that persistent dancing parrot animated emoji.
Luckily the bot ended up doing more valuable things too, but the original design of the bot was purely for abusing the colleagues on my team.
And it had the intended effect, people still joke but slack is not pegging my CPU, rendering animated images anymore.
1. Type a couple words relevant to the topic or your feelings on the topic into a gif search engine.
2. Pick whichever gif suits the context best.
3. Watch as everyone thinks you're super clever.
------
I mean, I get it. Most people just want funny pictures, and I love sharing memes with friends. But something about reaction gifs just boils my blood. I'm very, very bothered by them. If someone posts a relevant comment, or video: great. If there's something really clever about the reaction gif: good job. But most of the time it's just kind of related, and not really a discussion at all. Or worst of all, a "wow" "lol" or "wtf" expressing funny face.
So... confirmed?
Which, I have to say, just made me feel a little sad and now I'm actually starting to consider how giphy's are made... David Finlayson is a world-class trombone player and to have his video reduced to those tags (and associated with that context) was startling. The original video is here, in case anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soDn2puEuL8
Did somebody edit the video to create that gif, or could that have been machine generated? Are human-made gifs actually a source for image tagging with context???
Last time I tried: dragging in gifs (or mp4s or webps) resulted in an attachment, not an inline gif, giphy wanted money to upload your own gifs, and gfycat had some kind of slow and inconsistent review process so that your gifs don't show up in search (or in the slack plugin) for weeks to months after you upload them.
I'm begging to suspect that there's a setting, hidden size threshold, or something involved.
Do gifs really only happen on slack for y'all? That's the place I encounter them the least, and I think that's a good thing. On the other hand, a ton of other places are more suitable for gifs, and (even) less suitable for using a facebook service, so this really hurts right now.
Overall I'm quite sad to see how centralized freaking gif-sharing is, and that it's happenind mostly in walled gardens?!
What do you mean? https://giphy.com/search/it-works works for me.
For users it can be useless because they do not seam to understand multiple words and they do not have localized memes, so they for example don't understand dutch words and they don't have dutch memes.
1/2 joking
Sounds like a perfect match for Facebook :)
This sort of solution "Make it easy for the rest of us" is a tried and true winner of traction for products.
The other day I wanted to send a pic of Naomi Scott from “Aladdin” to my colleagues, but I couldn’t get even a single decent one. There was just one in which she was turning around, but that was not even a second long, so no one would had figured out who she was anyways.
Contrast this to Tenor on WhatsApp and the results are much more satisfying.
Disclaimer: I am the jaded creator of Twicsy, a Twitter picture engine with many millions of visitors over its lifetime, and I apparently missed the boat on this trends and had to shut it down.
Theres been this fake (steal) it till you make it, wild west approach to growth. Youtube, Buzzfeed, Imgur. You just host anybodys content regardless of if the poster is the owner, and once you get to scale, then you handle copyright and creating your own content so you arent as dependent on external creators.
But in Giphys case, they never have to take the extra step. Because they are so short, they are much more likely to pass fair use, and they can just host anybodys anything, barring some illegal fringes, without having to pay for the rights.
I don't think this is quite fair to YouTube. They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing ContentID. It's not perfect, but it's without a doubt the most sophisticated system to date. It's a difficult problem, but I don't see how you can say they've "thrown up their hands".
You can say what you like, but that's genius level politics-business IMO.
Am I responsible when stolen goods are sold from my stalls?
I own and operate an RV park. Someone is selling illegal drugs from one of the RVs.
Am I responsible for the illegal drug sales?
You might not be liable for the sale itself but, depending on the details, you could definitely still have serious legal risk.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/criminal-acts-activi...
Incredible. What a strange time we live in.
This makes me wonder, does Disney have any say if someone uploads a home-made Mickey gif that is controversial or otherwise damaging to their brand?
fair use is an affirmative defense, where you say "yes i stole it, but the government should not protect the content owner from me," similar to "yes i injured them, but it was self defense and they do not deserve compensation."
[1]intellectual property violations are not theft in the strictest sense of the word, they don't remove the original. stealing in this context is colloquial.
Without intellectual property law, you would be free to copy anything. The barrier to copying is the government. The free pass to flaunt their rule, when qualified, is also the government.
Think of Giphy images as a giant, organically shared version of web tracking software. Which complements the coverage of the FB Pixel[2] well, as it worms its way into privacy-conscious areas they might not have FB Pixel coverage such as private communications and security/privacy-minded apps. And without implementing something like a proxy server to pre-cache/sanitize images and strip tracking identifiers in both directions, it's a tracking vector that's hard to keep out of your app without introducing user friction.
Given that cynical viewpoint, the valuation makes a ton of sense.
[1] https://support.giphy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032872931-GIP...
[2] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/742478679120153?id=12...
Developing such a tool might be valuable for privacy-conscious application developers.
[1] Can't find a page specifically detailing it, but [2] gives a basic synopsis on it in the context of allowing GSuite admins to whitelist internal domains from routing through the proxy.
Not if the app developer proxies the encrypted traffic.
That way the app dev does not know the content and the third party does not know which original IP requested it.
This is akin to the Signal-Giphy implementation.
I wouldn't even call that cynical. It's just the state of things.
It's waaaaay more efficient nowadays and way more creepy, but it's not a new invention.
edit: apparently wrong/outdated information.
For Discord, while they initially used Giphy and has a /giphy command, it now uses Tenor too in the GIF picker.
There's also all kinds of shenanigans that they can play in the process of serving that request to harvest other meta data and help fingerprint you. Which Giphy's privacy policy mentions is already done to an extent, in the form of dropping cookies while servicing your request. Cookie abuse itself is a bit of a losing battle, as browser vendors increasingly layer on limitations and restrictions for cookies. But they're far from the only method of fingerprinting possible during the servicing of a web request.
It's behavior is no different from Windows 10 telemetry. The keyboard does not even work if you disable one of the underlying telemetry services in the app (if you have a rooted device).
Acquisitions often happen after some value is lost from the company being acquired, like when Microsoft bought Nokia or when Yahoo bought Tumblr.
[1] https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/analytics/technotes/v...
But you still see nondescript references to the capability in places like that that up-to-date Adobe Analytics doc, and the carriers aren't trying to use legal means (a la lobbying) to slow down the uptick in HTTPS traffic and preserve their revenue stream. Which leads me to presume they've developed technical solutions that are compatible with HTTPS traffic. They can't really use the spray-and-pay method[2] they were using. But all bets are off when they destination site and the carriers are coordinating with each other, as that coordination can involve technical modifications to facilitate it in addition to just the whitelisting itself.
[1] https://www.ghacks.net/2015/08/31/are-mobile-carrier-injecte...
[2] Some carriers would inject a header into all traffic, and any interested party could slurp them up. But you'd have to pay the carrier to access any of the other information the carrier had for that particular identifier.
However, that doesn't stop carriers from inserting something at the start of the stream that the client doesn't see. It would need to be coordinated with the origin server, but that's already true for HTTP header insertion. Sending a pre-handshake blob to a TLS server that isn't expecting such a blob would fail hard though, rather than going on its merry way like an extra header usually would.
Paraphrasing: emojis serving as web bugs.
It really is getting to the point that if you want privacy, don't touch anything owned by the top 5 tech companies. Better yet, only use Open Source. I never used to be a OSS only person, but the past few months I've started to go that way.
Signal's integration is specifically engineered to _not_ do this: https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/
Also the Signal service could do a transparent TLS MitM between the app and Giphy instead of a passthrough TLS tunnel and the user apps would be unaware. In fact from that page I'm not sure they're even doing a tunnel anyway.
- $600MM
- $150MM raised
- $400MM sale price
- $400MM - $150MM 1x preferred = $250MM (assuming not ratchet up for selling below last preferred price)
- $250MM net to shareholders.
- 50% for preferred investor share holders
- 25% to founders
- 25% to individual contributors
- 25% of $250MM = $62.5MM
These are all just estimates
Investors get either the 1x or convert to common. So the most recent investors will take their 1x ($72mm if public sources are correct, which might include some shares bought by previous investors), but previous investors are likely to convert to common if their price per share of purchase is below the acquisition price. But even in your simple example, the $250mm is only split between founders and team, the shareholders who take their 1x are done prior to that point.
I can imagine an alternate 2020 where an independent Instagram is growing like a weed and the founders are much more wealthy.
Hard to feel bad about it.
That's an incredible leap to say IG couldn't develop their own ad network as a stand alone company. Hire a few people away from Google with options in a growing company the same way FB did.
If IG didn't sell they would have fully killed Facebook's relevancy by now.
Hundreds of millions of smokers do harm their health, and through it their own and their neighbors' wealth. But quitting is indeed hard.
You must come from a nice family.
Some people don't. Some people are actively in hiding from their families and things like that.
Some schizophrenics go to in-patient treatment, get better, go home to their nutty relatives and get worse again. This is a known thing.
You're right: It's easy to smoke outside without harming anyone but yourself -- and even if you smoke indoors, you only harm one room full of people at a time.
Don't get me wrong, I use Facebook once in a while to keep in touch with my friends, and in rare occurrence I even feel "Damn, I'm thankful that Facebook exist" I can see the good in them, but the problem they cause to society cannot be denied. The witch hunt, the cyberbully, the echo chambers, the life's hilight showreel effect, the "do whatever in order to get the Like", etc. (Ugh, I need two A4 to list them all!) These problems may existed since the dawn of internet, but it is amplified by social media, and many of them pioneered by Facebook.
I log into FB about once a day and see some pictures of friends who live far away and their children. Sometimes people post funny things. A couple of friends occasionally post interesting or thought provoking articles. My experience as a user is almost entirely positive.
Meanwhile at some level I know it can and is being used in abusive and bad ways. Cyber-bullying, sure. The ever-present outrage machine, pitting the God-loving Americans against the God-hating ones, certainly thrives there. And I once read something or other about enabling horrible hate crimes in Myanmar. And the company itself seems to be a scandal factory, bent on a kind of dystopian mission of collecting data on everyone.
I do struggle a bit with how much to blame the company versus, well, the people who are misusing it. I think a constant lesson of this whole internet thing has been: you can develop the most utterly amazing tools ever, but at least some of your users will take them and use them to be absolute shits.
The facebook hate really just gets out of hand sometimes.
Scummy imo.
Interesting/not interesting all just services for integration and tracking in various platforms. Will FB stop Twitter from using Giphy?
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-monthly...
> Since communication is done via TLS all the way to GIPHY, the Signal service never sees the plaintext contents of what is transmitted or received. Since the TCP connection is proxied through the Signal service, GIPHY doesn’t know who issued the request.
> While this does hide your IP address from GIPHY and your search terms from Signal, there are some caveats. The GIPHY service could use subtleties like TLS session resume or cache hits to try to correlate multiple requests as having come from the same client, even if they don’t know the origin.
edit: more here https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12853248
This acquisition makes a lot of sense.
This is part of the beauty of e2e encryption because you have reasonable access to the "ends". For unencrypted traffic you have no access to the "in transit" part so no knowledge about potential compromise. Since you're relatively confident with e2e that the message can't be read in transit, you only need to check the parts of the transaction you have access to.
In this case, we can check the sender's end by looking at what external entities are accessed (network & API requests from the client). For WhatsApp, there's a total of three I'm aware of:
1. The OS keyboard API. This theoretically means Apple or Google can read everything you type (but not necessarily messages you receive).
2. The Giphy search API for retrieving a list of GIFs to choose from (notable as this means Giphy also gets metadata about your thought process in choosing a GIF, even if you never send one).
3. The HTTP request to Giphy to retrieve the chosen GIF (I'm not 100% sure if this is distinct from the above search request results, due to resolution differences, or if they're all one-in-the-same).
This might not have been a 10x acquisition.
EDIT: The Information is saying the price was $300M + bonus, and a 50% drop from the valuation in 2016. https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/4fbc4a
They are literally setting money on fire.
I suspect that actually it was closer to 75-150 range.
edit: Guess they won't ...
We have always used a proxy for our requests to GIPHY, and will continue to do so.
There should be no harm in continuing to use it.
https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/
And that blog post is from 2017 so those measures have been in place for 2.5 years already.
Messaging: Signal, GroupMe, Telegram, Viber
Social Media: Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, Tiktok
Dating: Bumble, Tinder
Video: Skype
Does anyone else kind of feel weirded out that this isn't illegal? Not surprising legally or for a move for Facebook, but this just feels incredibly wrong.
If Facebook bought this or developed it themselves and then these companies integrated Giphy, it's obviously very different. Basically this implies that any data you give to any third party can then basically be bought by your competition. I think legal language that prevents this would likely be a net good thing. I of course realize it's fair game, but that seems like a great way to discourage the use of any third parties generally.
The acquisition itself is very valid from a product standpoint, but I suspect a big reason for the buy was that data on competitors as Facebook claws back against pressure from rising platforms. I would bet a good deal of money this will be used to inform future acquisitions and fuel the black hole of Facebook acquisitions and squashing of any competitors.
Language that protects end user data across changes in company ownership basic doesn’t exist.
For one thing, if the company goes bankrupt, the data is an asset of values, and the court will allow them to void prior contracts so that they can sell off assets and pay their debts.
This is legal for the same reason pensions get zeroed out during bankruptcies and acquisitions.
If the new owners can steal retirement money from current and former employees, you can bet they can sell whatever treasure troves of data the company has amassed.
I genuinely think you should have to opt in to data sharing when a company covered by CCPA is purchased. I think you can make a very compelling case that this sale covers the sale of data from Giphy to Facebook which many users may not want them to do.
Your CCPA point is interesting though. However my guess is the CCPA is unlikely to be used in that way as it would affect nearly every acquisition in every industry.
A recruiter asked me to join them back in 2016 and they were paying $200k+ for a senior backend role. I turned them down because I was on a visa and wanted a company with financial stability. A gif-search engine startup sounded ludicrous.
Well, here we are...
You're trying to make it sound like it'll put a black mark on your resume or something.
Not to mention I was on a visa...
four years is a decent chunk of time im sure youve done fine since then dont beat yourself up over it - most startups arent really worth joining for the upside potential at IPO or acquisition anyway.
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.
Thanks! This is exactly the sort of thing I love to read. Got anything else you can recommend?
One great aspect of Facebook is that Zuckerberg interviewed with the author for years and the cut into parts makes a lot of sense (Harvard and before, "Move fast and break things", Trump, aftermath).
You can't look at these numbers in a vacuum.
Equity for employees is trash value. You would do well to just pretend it doesn't even exist when factoring decisions about where to work or if to change jobs. I never ask for equity, I never care about equity. I care about the salary.
Similarly, if you use something like giphy on your Twitter posts, twitter mirrors the gifv image on their servers to avoid leaking user info to Giphy
Developers: Time to remove the Giphy integrations from your apps/services.
IMO the bigger issue is that anyone integrating with them basically is telling Facebook about their app's usage stats now, which makes it easy for Facebook to see current and future competition as well as any emerging markets they can sink their fangs into. Adding Giphy is a great way to get your lunch eaten now as a startup in any remotely competitive space to Facebook.
To me it's kind of wild this type of acquisition doesn't violate some law (though not surprising) as this gives immediate historical data insight into dozens of direct competitors even if they stop integrating in the future.
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.
This can fuel better ads. So consolidating this stuff further could have that effect.
To me it is so creepy how much of even our casual thoughts outside of facebook now are going into facebook servers. There's just no escaping these data addicts. That's the concern.
Facebook does not have a monopoly on anything, and neither does Giphy.
Especially now, when you have companies like Giphy being tied into services across the globe and providing a surprising amount of data about users and usage patterns, the idea of monopolies is completely obsolete. It's time to bring back the idea of companies not being allowed to much reach, power and control over all aspects of our lives, as well as being able to use it to assert control over competitors and users alike.
Giphy, could (total spitballing here) could be a company that was a bit overvalued in VC terms, and might not have consistent cash flows and solid fundamentals where an acquisition makes sense to take their money off the table now. There might be others.
Or this marriage has been in the works since December and just got pushed through now. Strange times.
I wonder reddit would be even more useless for me since half the content is from giphy.
Kind of wild to see such a fun / not-so-serious seeming product have such a huge exit and profound impact on the way we communicate now
Anyways, here's a quick demo of RapBits: https://rapbits.com/video/ad.mp4
Even had a brief stint of fame on /r/hiphopheads: https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/64ea1v/my_room...
I wonder if FB will ban porn on Giphy like how Verizon banned porn on Tumblr after that acquisition.
More censorship.
Then again, I am very curious if Facebook's content board will do something about wearing a bikini being a account closure level offense for sex workers/cam models and completely okay for celeb influencers.
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.
Other comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23192779
Just ffmpeg your own clips, you can't find what you are looking for on giphy anyways.
So I guess if I post a giphy in a work chat they will now get an extra few seconds of ~100 people's screen time/day. What's the point? I doubt they will overlay ads. So what else? Some form of content control? Only show pics that ascribe to Facebook's agenda?
You start a campaign and suddenly you have people inserting meme-like-ads feature your content into their chat threads
It'll have a personal and convincing touch ( esp. with facebooks ad targeting) it's going to be amazing for our industry reaching customers, Pepe/Trump memes did win an election afterall
Also a great way to get ads into whatsapp messages without seeming intrusive
I am wondering what makes them more attractive than someone like imgur for example.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/09/giphy-held-talks-to-raise-...
from technical and innovation perspective, what part of it is worth millions?
You don't need to just "build your own alternative to it." You need to get all the content (this is actually not as easy as you make it seem - stolen or not), then integrate that into Instagram, WhatsApp, Slack, and hundreds of other platforms across the world as the supported way of sharing gifs. Then you'll have to build a brand around the product that people remember, and whose website they actually visit when they want images and aren't using one of the hundreds of platforms that already natively integrates giphy.
And in order to do all that, you'll have to somehow manage to convince everyone out there that your gif search system is better than their gif search system that they already know, are comfortable with, and generally happy with. Your pitch will probably be that theirs is owned by Facebook, and is therefore a violation of their privacy. But you know who else is owned by Facebook? Facebook. And yet Facebook is pushing close to 2 billion daily active users.
Convenience trumps privacy in modern society most of the time. I'm sure there will be a changing of the winds - there always is - but there likely will not be significant competition for Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Giphy/Google/(put any other company in here) until that comes. The network effects are too strong, and the convenience is too great.
There are so many posts about "(Twitter/Facebook/Giphy) clone in a (day/weekend/week/month)" and yet there's a distinct lack of commercial successes in these spaces.
Edit: a word.
Maybe they keep the ephemeral absurdity that was giphy...but it feels like the beginning of the end.
Nevertheless, giphy was just a gif image host. They do have access to current meme culture, which I imagine is useful to FB. But for me, thats just a less of a reason to use them. Im data-mined enough already.
Edit to add - TLDR: this essentially gives a backdoor to Facebook for usage at other companies who integrated the service.
gifs were fine, now some silicon tech forced them out and we get all the fun of copy rights and lack of saving the gifs for our personal use /s
(edit: they are already banned. Nothing to do.)
- “Its most recent private valuation was around $600 million.”
Seems like Giphy took quite a haircut to pull this off. Their outlook must have looked pretty bleak.