Following UK antitrust order, Meta sells Giphy to Shutterstock for $53M
techcrunch.com
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Have there been successful image hosters that weren’t just spending money to capture users in order to sell out or eventually enshitten (imgur, giphy, imageshack)?
Shutterstock is selling prints so it will be interesting to see what they do with giphy.
I remember when Imgur started and they were really nice and seemed to be a low cost (I think only one employee) so they could host barebones without making the experience bad for users (ads, data mining, etc).
Can this go in infinitely?
it's essentially just burning through VC money to provide free image hosting. every time the funders start trying to make their money back, somebody will start a new free image host funded by a new batch of suckers.
Assuming they don’t encrappen it, and there’s some tangential thing they can charge a nominal fee for that rides their network effects, they’ll have a lasting business that will provide ~5-10 people with comfortable income indefinitely.
I was wrong. It was worse. 75 was the limit for free users. I think I never reached the limit until they upped it to 225.
> In order to get ready for upcoming features, the number of recent images a regular user can have in his/her account has been raised from 75 to 225. Keep in mind that you will still be able to upload more if you go over the limit, it’s just that the older images will be hidden from the account (not deleted!). This is great news, because now you can create even more albums and share all your images at once.
> Also, imgur pro accounts have just been made cheaper! A 1 year imgur subscription is now cheaper than any other comparable photo service, including Flickr, Photobucket and ImageShack. With imgur pro, not only is there no limit to the amount of images you can have in your account, there is absolutely no compression, and your images are not modified in any way if they are under 5MB in size.
https://blog.imgur.com/2010/06/25/imgur-accounts-and-imgur-p...
if you were just using it as a image host for sharing images on other sites, it worked perfectly fine without an account. now they've crippled that functionality because they want to make money.
It’s a sensible thesis that appears to be invalidated for now.
I think the problem might be that advertisers can't control context. Someone might say something vile (but legal) on Twitter and get lots of meme GIFs in the replies that advertisers would be very unhappy about, and it's a more direct connection than having your sponsored tweet appear in the chain.
That should be enough to satisfy most brand advertisers.
why do you say so?
Advertising within the seller doesn't help "the ecosystem". (auditing, Ad networks, clearing house, more auditing, nsa-ish, etc)
If facebook kept it and integrated on whatsapp (their only upward active user product) then they would sell ads there and that's it.
With them forced to sell to a 3rd party, now that 3rd party will have to offer reverse auctions like every other publisher. Everyone will get their sweet stream of user profiles and "the ecosystem" will be happy. It is very much not invalidated now.
I can only imagine that Disney put some big bucks into advertising to help pivot the SW IP away from the sequel trilogy before additionally pushing hard on their streaming service.
I also imagine Disney made far, far, far more money from any deals with Giphy than Giphy got from Disney. Hence why they’re being thrown around like a stuffed toy.
Giphy seems to become a advertising platform itself, with advertisers using it as part of viral campaigns (i.e. have related gifs available when launching a movie), although I doubt that created alot of revenue so far.
That said, it's striking how well-embedded giphy is across a huge amount of messaging platforms, which is likely their biggest asset today...
It definitely used to be one at least, but with the rise of automatic generation I wonder how well will Shutterstock be in the next 5 years.
For their big customers their product might be the best of both worlds: AI-generated images based on prompts, with full legal clearance on use.
I doubt a marketing department of i.e. HP wants to risk a legal dispute about some image they used because it was generated by a model which was trained on unlicensed content.
Once this scenario is legally solid though....yes, I wonder how well Shutterstock will do...
The problem is that even if Shuttertock train model on the images they routinely sell it doesn't mean it's going to be free from IP issue. The subtleties are going to vary widely between jurisdiction, but it's not like Shutterstock was the author of most of the images in its bank: most if not all the pictures there have been taken by third party photographers, who (at least in some jurisdictions) keep the entirety of the copyright over their creation. So if court ends up ruling that images generated by ML models trained on copyrighted material is plagiarism, then Shutterstock will be plagiarizing their own suppliers.
Then maybe now their contract terms include a license to do so, but I'm pretty sure their old contracts did not, and even now, the said contract has to be ruled valid by a court.
In the US, where the big international players are, the legislator will probably shape the law in their favor (and against the photographers), but in many countries, where photographers are the actual business and where Shutterstock and others are just foreign service provider, the legislator can be tempted to protect the local businesses against Sutterstock.
It's going to be a mess in the next few decades (but IP has always been a mess, that's what happen when you artificially construct an exclusive “property right” out of something immaterial: intellectual property is trying to get a square peg in a round hole)
You could even have a lawyer add something like, "You are purchasing hosting rights for yourself and therefore take all responsibility for what you host. We will work with any relevant government authorities whose jurisdiction you are under to provide them information of your activities on this service if the products you provide violate local, state, or federal laws. You agree to post nothing illegal and if you violate that you agree to own all responsibility, legal, personal, or financial, for your posted materials... blah blah blah"
And then submit everything posted to csam scanners.
Wouldn't that be enough?
the problem is that costs money. you either pay the staff to do the moderation at upload, or you pay the staff to handle all the various governments that come after you. either way it's expensive, but dealing with the government's lawyers is probably more expensive. and no, just running through a CSAM scanner isn't nearly enough.
They are in the margins of positive income at least last I checked.
(Where "okay" means "you may get subpoenas you have to answer.")
But.. their business just went down the plughole with the advent of text-to-image AI. Now you can get pretty much exactly the image you needed without having to spend hours trawling through pre-made photographs.
For all I've listed, Shitt's Creek watermark is visible near the top. That said, it's not the worst one. While I experimented with such prompts, I've seen a lot more (HBO) Max watermarks, but they don't do show-specific watermarks.
I guess deals with a given id holder was one way to monetize this sort of service, and totally stifle the organic weirdness and randomness at the same time.
Their whole argument was based on the fact that Giphy was CONTEMPLATING expanding their advertising business to the UK so the acquisition could hurt potential, future competition. Give me a break
https://www.klgates.com/CMA-Blocks-Meta/Giphy-It-Might-Be-th...
My guess is that when the Tenor sale happened back in 2018 there were still enough of small companies that competed, Giphy being one of the last major ones to get taken over.
I don't know if antitrust watchdogs can still start a successful case five years later, but I would be very happy if they could undo that sale too. These tech companies are big enough already, they don't need more power.
Once monopolies form they’re exceedingly hard to break up. Proactive action is the only way we’ll prevent them in the long term
The original order for the sale came in 2021, after an extended investigation from that same year, following an initial investigation started June 2020, about a month after the sale became public knowledge.
Giphy and Facebook didn't give the CMA an opportunity to block the sale before it happened, so of course antitrust action had to occur after the fact. That's not regulatory overreach, that's lack of a time machine.
> … Shutterstock said it expects the deal to close next month, with Meta also signing a commercial agreement to continue accessing Giphy’s content across its product suite.
So, Meta still sees value in a Giphy they don’t own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_and_Markets_Author...
From wikipedia:
Type Non-ministerial government department
"A non-ministerial department (NMD) is a government department in its own right, but does not have its own minister. However, it is accountable to Parliament through its sponsoring ministers."
> https://www.gov.uk/guidance/public-bodies-reform
UK ministers (politicians) can absolutely influence the CMA, there is no vote on its leaders - they are simply appointed by the Business Secretary, who can pick whomever they find most favorable to their own objectives. The Business Secretary can be replaced at any time without a vote by the Prime Minister too in a reshuffle.
The only real check on the CMA would be the UK's judicial review process, if a decision was especially egregious.
> In the UK, the term quango covers different "arm's-length" government bodies, including [...] non-ministerial government departments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quango
> The Competition and Markets Authority [...] is a non-ministerial government department
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_and_Markets_Author...
But this specifics of what is and is not a quango don't matter. The original claim implied that the decision was made by a politician for political reasons and this isn't the case.
It also seems like most of the ones I see are screen caps of older tv shows.
actually reading the article in full, it's clear GIPHY and Meta are mentioning this with a BIASED motive to present their investment as non competitive.
Am I in a bubble? I post and receive like 20+ gifs per day with my IRL friends and family. The rate has shown no signs of declining.
[EDIT] And what's replacing them?
Sending gifs from TV shows hasn't been popular since 2012 maybe. On Twitter it means you're attracting a horde of middle aged moms.
In all seriousness, I completely disagree with your stance. My friends and I send gifs to each other almost daily.
I understand that Shutterstock's customers need royalty-free, high-res images with clear copyrights. Is the lack of clear copyrights the biggest hurdle to generative AI art adoption, or is the quality of the art itself the bigger hurdle?
I would assume AI would also be good at formulaic stuff like jingles and basic pop music.
It will be in a lot of advertising really quickly, advertising uses a lot of image and footage fodder for lack of a nicer way to put it. "Lady walking with smile" slap the brand assets on it, hide the AI hands, done.
https://i.imgur.com/Oqxaru6.png https://i.imgur.com/Vcp6JdQ.png
- Quality is still pretty big. And if I have to spend hours prompt engineering, is it really a win?
- That said, there is some copyright murkiness and I probably wouldn't use generative AI in a marketing campaign as a large company. A lot of more incidental use like conference presentations, I wouldn't worry too much.
https://analyticsdrift.com/coca-colas-generative-ai-advertis...
Coca Cola is also getting in on UGC GenAI and trying to engage customers in participating.
GenAI in ads is going to be huge.
Shutterstock makes most of it’s money from two operations:
1. Editorial content - images/video of news related events. Pictures of celebrities or photos of Biden, pictures of the Met Gala, etc. They have exclusive deals that keep this pipeline alive.
2. Commercial licensing - HBO/Netflix will often bulk buy a set of a couple hundred images for promoting their new show.
Everything else is trash web development and tech. They fired their AI team and their current AI tech is just rewrapped existing engines such as DALL-E. In the last five years they’re internal teams redesigned their website/marketplace at least 3 times. From React to React to NextJS. They frequently purchase companies and lay off the teams after about a year (see ya Giphy).
Shutterstock doesn’t have to be good at tech because they can feed off of the work of other companies doing it for them. That’s why they let companies like Facebook blatantly train off their data set. That’s why they consumed PicMonkey.
To make it seem like they are an innovator they rely on yearly announcements of investment in new fads (like their current AI efforts) and lay off tons of teams to boost their stock price so they can say they save on labor costs.
They are ripe to be displaced either by a smarter competitor that can offer better compensation per image or by Getty Images.
There's two paths. Either copyright claims lock down training, and Shutterstock now licenses their training dataset to companies; or generative art trained on open images lose their novelty (think Comic Sans but for photos) and Shutterstock gains an upper hand by having an existing pipeline of novel images to train with.
Last week they spun out Kustomer https://www.kustomer.com/blog/new-chapter-standalone-company...
You don't have to tell the UK Competition & Markets Authority about an acquisition before it happens, but if you don't then you risk something like this happening. While an investigation is ongoing it may block some steps towards integrating companies and it gets about six months to make a decision. Facebook then spent a few years appealing and negotiating. Presumably giphy spent all of this time in some sort of limbo.
The idea (pre-aquisition, afaik Meta deprioritized that) was letting companies pay to push their gifs. Since companies can't directly buy ads in your private conversations, giphy could offer them the exciting opportunity to push people to send ads in meme-format to their friends! (I wish I was joking, but that was their framing)
Dumb question, but why can’t they?
But most “GIFs” are not GIFs but rather Mp4, mov, or webm or some other compressed file format. Actual GIFs are extremely wasteful of bandwidth and not hardware optimized. The name lives on though.
Is there a reason for this?
And no, a GIF is a GIF, nothing else is a GIF, an mp4 is not a gif, webm is not a gif.
I think a GIF is likely the smallest wide-supported resources format (force the browser request a URL to load a specific resource). The 43 bytes is the minimum size for a valid GIF, so the browser won't log an error loading the image and go through all load events.
It looks like in modern browsers it's 35 bytes: https://stackoverflow.com/a/15960901/407650
I wonder if they could've just cut off Giphy in the UK (likely much smaller), which would theoretically keep the UK wide open for gif-sharing competition.
What they can't do is operate in the UK, and at the same time avoid UK regulations.
Incorrect.
What the UK decided is that this acquisition can be harmful for UK citizens, and in order to continue doing business in the UK, they must comply with regulation.
This is actually the regulatory institutions of the country acting on behalf of the citizens instead of allowing corporations to freely pursue their monopolistic tendencies.
There's no overreach here. Meta is free to tell the UK to just fuck off and ignore the regulation. But then they would have to stop doing business in the UK (and possibly later on the EU, that tends to be even stricter).
These are countries acting on their own jurisdiction, and companies deciding that doing business in that jurisdiction is more profitable than keeping the acquisition.
If this were not the case, it would be impossible to regulate multinationals _at all_; a multinational thwarted by its home country would simply relocate (this happens anyway at the edges; note that most of the giant gambling countries are domiciled in weird island nations, say).
Surely somebody is making loads of money from an almost 10x change in price.
I guess it's theoretically possible that Americans colluded with the British civil servants to scam Meta out of $350 million, but it seems unlikely.
That sounds... strange. Would China or Russia also have an ability to force US companies to sell parts? Has Facebook complied because they wanted to maintain good relations with UK regulators?
The potential of a loss is pretty good I think.
> Be BigCo
> Buy something for lotsa money
> Sell it for a fraction of the buying price
> ???
> Profit!