Congrats to giphy I guess? But I'll be honest, any time I've ever used them as an extension in slack or anywhere, and tried to get relevant gifs, I got back some really bad results. I'll never fully understand why they're so successful short of just dominating the market through sheer popularity. I remember switching our team over to rightgif and the difference was astounding given the fact that giphy has millions upon millions and loads of developers.
I've always thought part of the "charm" of Giphy in Slack is that does give you those somewhat silly or "not exactly what I was looking for but actually this is funnier" type of GIFs.
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.
I'd just like this trend of sending reaction gifs to end.
<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.
This is kind of the charm we like in our slack. We have preview turned off so you can't cycle through, you just get whichever one it picks. It can be amusing.
That's a huge part of it, and what makes a huge difference compared to discord where all you get is the gif. In slack, you see a random gif and the intended message, so a weird gif just adds fun. In discord you just get a gif, so the gif has to convey more, which is hard.
May be it is just me. The worry that typing /giphy without knowing whether I am doing the “I am feeling lucky” version or “let me choose” version and end up embarrassing myself has kept me away from..... well I guess embarrassing myself.
My theory on why they were successful is that they made it possible for "anyone" to quickly respond with a gif response. Responding that way had become "cool" but it was difficult or impossible for people who didn't hoard a stash of gifs.
This sort of solution "Make it easy for the rest of us" is a tried and true winner of traction for products.
A friend of me added support for sending Giphy animations to a school project 2 years ago. He finished that in 2 or 3 hours. The API is basically give us 1 word and we give you givs / jif's / jivs / gif's idk. I atleast I understand why developers want to use it.
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.
Do any of these services let you share your own gifs over slack?
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.
This is the kind of the issue Facebook will help sort out. On the other hand, they will collect a lot of data about trending topics/searches in a bid to sell/suggest more trendy ads to advertisers.
I would guess their success is due almost entirely to solving the licensing issues with the content, and doing so with such competence that major services want to work with them without fear of exposing themselves to liability.
I had a recruiter from Giphy pursue me pretty hard, and all I could think was there's no way I'm going to go to a company that won't be around in a year.
Finally! THIS, rightgif, is exactly what at least 90% of people wanting to use. But another commenter on this very thread mentioned they pretty much just did SEO. Arrgh, hate it.
They prioritized showing up on searches over really precisely tuned results. If you search for an animated gif on any image search GIPHY hits are the main ones. It's all about that SEO.
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.
I was hyped when I read that there's a reasonable alternative with better search.
Then I realized that they're exclusively on slack.
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?!
The most ridiculous thing, I find, is that giphy on Slack prints your search term as well, so others can read it.
That completely takes the fun out of the *.gif for me.
For me, seeing the original search term only increases the hilarity. It often leads to amusing juxtapositions between what the sender wanted to search and the gif they chose, or maybe they included an in-joke or excessively detailed description of something, etc.
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.
Clearly this acquisition has nothing to do with either Facebook's or Giphy's businesses...
Not sure you can even call Giphy a 'business' because that would imply that an attempt had been made at creating value.
Yeah I can never find the clip im looking for with Giphy, and if its even slightly controversial of edgy you can forget about it.
I also turn gifs off on slack, its a waste of resources and the gifs are pretty lame anyways.
They are very very quick at creating integrations with other services and as a result they were able to push their brand alongside the growth of gifs these past 5-8 years.
Congrats to Giphy, but honestly it baffles me they are worth this much money. Do they actually bring in decent revenue, or was this all about eyeballs? Is this content even decently monetizable?
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.
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.
Woah, that's a great point. Imagine sharing a gif in Signal and still being tracked by Facebook because every person that loads it needs to first download it from FB servers.
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.
Does the fact that it is integrated into iOS keyboard have any implications? WlWhat kind of data does this have access to when I send gifs from iOS keyboard?
I'm still dubious. Giphy hit it's peak of power 2-3 years ago and has plateaued or even tapered since then. It was all over reddit and Slack for a while and then the novelty wore off and competitors popped up.
The other interesting thing about this one, is that they dont even attempt to license content do they? They dont have any content costs?
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.
GIPHY has agreements with pretty much all the major content studios, including ones historically protective of their content, such as HBO, the NFL and Disney.
Facebook, Twitter and Google (YouTube) have used that strategy to ignore their obligations to filter their content by getting into some type of "too bug to fail" situation and throwing their hands up when they are asked to do their duty. Those products didn't fill a niche by innovating, they filled a niche by ignoring the obligations that were preventing others from filling the niche.
I wonder if it's similar to music, where you can play a short piece without compensating the artist? Since most gifs are <5 seconds, it's not content stealing.
They're integrated into a lot of apps and maybe even apple's OS. In addition to those integration and business relationships they probably have some sort of data sharing / ad tech thingy that's worth some money on its own.
I was surprised it it carried this kind of valuation too, but I think this is a matter of finding the right buyer. This isn't about revenue, it's another way for Facebook to harvest metrics, this time across competing products.
That's not how simple preferred works. That would be participating preferred. And I'd strongly suspect this is simple preferred, as participating preferred is exceptionally rare for Silicon Valley-type companies (it does happen though).
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.
No, usually investors stock is preferred with 1x liquidation preference. This means they get their money back, then the rest is split among other shareholders
Why would any of their options be underwater? Going off of those estimates above, the pot split between shareholders after liquidation preference is 250million. Anyone who has shares is able to cash them out I imagine (how much profit dependent on how many shares someone is granted, which varies obviously but is still a positive net) — unless you’re implying the strike price is less than the share value?
Not much, I'd imagine. It'd be like getting FB stock options upon joining and having it drop in price when the stock market tanked in March. That's the point of stock.
FB has dramatically reduced ad spend waste. Not sure how anyone can call that valueless. Moreover, though you may be annoyed by your mother-in-law's minion memes, Facebook is a (free) vital communication tool for millions who are less privileged than you.
The facebook hate really just gets out of hand sometimes.
That interview was bad. They're trying to make you feel bad for the Instagram founders because they were too stupid to realize that after you _sell_ your company you don't own it anymore. Also, per that interview, Instagram only became sustainable under Facebook.
> 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.
Why wouldn’t they just buy the data under the table if they wanted this info instead of publicly acquiring the company? Would be less likely to cause immediate move off the service by competitors and would be cheaper?
The Giphy integration that Facebook put into WhatsApp lets Giphy track who sends what GIFs to whom, so while the message is transmitted encrypted, a lot of context can be gleaned.
They can, as it is end-to-end encrypted; the ends are always the most likely points of leakage. In this case, it's the sender's end.
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).
Most likely because their operational costs are borderline obscene due to reliance on Google Cloud for their ML pipeline and moving all their metadata to dynamodb.
I wonder if Signal will now remove their Giphy integration...
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/
I saw this on my twitter feed this morning. They don't include the Giphy SDK. They act as a proxy and (ab)use range requests so they don't even see the size of the returned GIF. It's a really interesting read.
And that blog post is from 2017 so those measures have been in place for 2.5 years already.
Readit News
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…
So... confirmed?
This sort of solution "Make it easy for the rest of us" is a tried and true winner of traction for products.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like a perfect match for Facebook :)
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.
Deleted Comment
1/2 joking
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.
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...
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.
I wouldn't even call that cynical. It's just the state of things.
Developing such a tool might be valuable for privacy-conscious application developers.
Paraphrasing: emojis serving as web bugs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon
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.
- $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.
Deleted Comment
The facebook hate really just gets out of hand sometimes.
Dead Comment
Hard to feel bad about it.
Scummy imo.
> 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
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
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
I suspect that actually it was closer to 75-150 range.
edit: Guess they won't ...
Quote from a Signal dev https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9628#issu...And that blog post is from 2017 so those measures have been in place for 2.5 years already.