Giphy valued at $600 million, serves over one billion GIFs a day

Giphy is a GIF search engine that is riding on the wave of a demand for short, looping video content. Giphy indexes Gifs, allows them to be easily shared on social media, and produces tools to allow for easy creation of GIFs. Giphy is now valued at $600 million after raising $72 million of equity funding, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Giphy released its State of the GIF report for 2016, a yearly round up of statistics on GIF sharing. Giphy serves over one billion GIFs every day to its users. The site enjoys more than 100 million active daily users. Viewers consume over two million hours of GIF content every single day.

Giphy listed popular users of the service, which included US president Barack Obama, singer Lady Gaga and talk show host Conan O’Brien. Giphy has partnered with Viacom and SNL to introduce dedicated libraries of content for South Park and Saturday Night Live. The South Park Library has over eighty million views since its launch. Live GIFs are created by event partners, including New York Fashion Week, MTV VMAS and the Tony Awards.

Giphy is covering the ongoing 2016 presidential elections in partnership with both the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee. There are channels for Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, opinions by commentators in the media, and for events. Giphy is pushing out GIFs after every event and major development. For Trump and Clinton, the channels are further sorted into reaction GIFs, quotes and a grab bag.

GIFs are small, highly compressed looping videos that are being increasingly used in various ways. GIFs are embedded in articles and blogs to make the content more visually engaging. Social media shares of GIFs are popular on Twitter and Facebook. Giphy partnered with Twitter to embed a GIF by simply sharing the url. GIF keyboards allow users to react to posts or transmit a GIF to one another in individual or group instant messaging conversations. Recipients of GIFs in these conversations do not even need to have the Giphy app installed.

The popular GIFs on the site are of two forms. Original content is created and shared by individual users, and does not offer much scope for commercialisation. A large volume of GIFs are however pulled from commercial content including music videos, tv shows and movies. These kinds of content can be monetised by the original publishers and marketing agencies. For publishers and advertisers, GIFs are by themselves an emerging medium of content.

Giphy launched Giphy Studios earlier this year, with in house artists dedicated to making GIFs for clients. These GIFs are created using a wide variety of techniques including hand drawn animations, videos, puppetry and stop motion. Clients for Giphy studios include Nike, Nestle, Red Bull, Fox and McDonalds. Giphy Studios originals are consolidated on the site and can be viewed on the Giphy Studios channel.

Despite the growing popularity, and increasing investment, Giphy has not found a way to generate revenues. Partnership with brands is one possible way to monetise the service.