Highlights:
- Facebook buys Giphy to integrate GIF website with Instagram and other owned applications
- Facebook tried to buy Giphy back in 2015 as well but Giphy rejected the offer back then
- The deal amount is reported to be close to $ 400 million
In a blog post shared by the US-based tech giant, Facebook, on Friday, the company said that it is acquiring Giphy – the popular website known for making and sharing animated images, and GIFs – and it will integrate Giphy with its most famous photo-sharing application Instagram.
It is being reported that the amount for which Facebook bought Giphy is around $ 400 million (a little over Rs. 3,000 crores) by Axios, a news website. However, the real amount was not shared by either company.
The announcement which was made by Vishal Shah, Vice President (VP) of Product, through the Facebook blog, comes at a time where the social media network giant is already under scrutiny over antitrust concerns from the regulators.
According to a global news website, back in 2015 Giphy rejected an offer from Facebook and chose to continue integrating its products and services with multiple social media platforms.
This time as well, both the companies declined to comment on the earlier talks.
Now, Giphy will become a part of Instagram, which is Facebook’s photo-sharing platform. Giphy’s GIF library which could be integrated with other applications will now be further integrated with Instagram and other application which are owned by Facebook said the company.
Vishal Shah, in the blog post, said, “People will still be able to upload GIFs; developers and API partners will continue to have the same access to Giphy’s APIs, and Giphy’s creative community will still be able to create great content,”.
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In a post on Medium – a blogging website – Giphy wrote, “we’re thrilled to announce that GIPHY has been acquired by Facebook” and added, “we will continue to make GIPHY openly available to the wider ecosystem.”
The American Economic Liberties Project, a Washington-based antitrust advocacy group, urged regulators to investigate and block the acquisition.
Sarah Miller, who is the Executive Director at Economic Liberties said, “The Facebook-Giphy merger is just the latest example of the Federal Trade Commission standing by while Facebook and Google centralize control over online communications,”.
In 2018, Google, too, acquired a GIF platform called Tenor and integrated it into its image search function, which according to will undermine the competitive market Giphy created.
She said, “Now, Facebook is here to pick up the wreckage, and become even more powerful,”.
A spokesperson from Facebook confirmed Giphy’s statement saying Giphy’s current integration with any social platform such as Snapchat or Twitter would not change.
The spokesperson also added that the GIFs do not have any online tracking mechanism such as cookies or pixels, which is a concern for privacy advocates who are afraid of Facebook’s aggressive walk to collect personal data to use it for targeted advertisements.
In the blog post, Facebook claimed that 50% of the traffic Giphy sees comes from apps owned by Facebook, and out of that 50%, half comes from Instagram alone.
Read Facebook’s blog: https://about.fb.com/news/2020/05/welcome-giphy/
Read Giphy’s post: https://medium.com/@giphy/giphy-to-join-facebook-as-part-of-the-instagram-team-e7ea8d32d7b6
