Facebook (+6.19%) is buying the popular GIF-making and sharing website Giphy for a reported price of $400 million, with plans to integrate the GIF-king into Instagram and other Facebook apps. What Happened, and Why? GIF from God... Giphy, one of the largest GIF sites on the internet, that creates, shakes, and shares GIFs on another level, will join the Facebook family but is expected to be joined at the hips with Instagram. More serious... Facebook and Giphy have been closely partnered for years helping us 'express ourselves' without having to actually say or type too much. With Facebook and Giphy already a fully-functioning partnership the integration with the Giphy API across the usual suspects: IG, Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp is already in place. The big question is... will Giphy be open to others in the long-run? 📽️ A Gif tells a million words... According to Facebook, +50% of the Giphy traffic comes from the 'Facebook Family", with The Gram making up the majority. Zuck & Co. are keen to shape this as a gesture of goodwill for all those years of GIF-ing but there is more than meets the eye than just a cat-wakeboarding in this deal... Express yourself... FB says it acquired GIPHY to help people better "express themselves" but we were doing that already... The Google Of GIF-ville... and GIFs are starting to pay. GIPHY doesn't own the rights to the vids but it does own the software that reads your thumbs. When you need a 'Dab', Giphy gets you a Dab and it will also advertise some 'relevant' GIFs in the process. 👑 There's no Lol in Empire... and Facebook's acquisition of the Lol-factory does kind of suck the life out of things. Not exactly one for the purists anyway. And the purists may be in luck as Facebook's Giphy deal, could raise more questions than answers for 'The Social Network' with the company under the lens of state and federal agencies who are lining up anticompetitive actions again the 'Big F'. It's A Big G-IF... The Federal Trade Commission is reviewing a decade's worth of smaller acquisitions by Facebook and other tech giants. Under its new ownership, Giphy will live on as part of the Instagram team, with the goal of making it even easier to send GIFs and stickers in Instagram stories and direct messages. Amen to that but R.I.P to the freedom of GIF. The Takeaway Backlash bet: Facebook has never been afraid of a backlash (bar Zuck in Congress) and as most feared and expected, those giant cash piles that have mounted over the past decade are coming in handy. With crashing valuations all around them, FAANG + Microsoft (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix & Google), are expected to make more purchases in the coming months, even if it does result in more squeaky-bum grillings and antitrust pursuits.
