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But Giphy faces challenges in building a business. It hasn’t figured out a way to bring in revenue, and it doesn’t own many of the GIFs or have exclusive di
by tyre 10y ago
But Giphy faces challenges in building a business.
It hasn’t figured out a way to bring in revenue, and it
doesn’t own many of the GIFs or have exclusive distribution
partnerships.
They have raised $150 million for a GIF search engine.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- riffraff 10y ago..Which also works crappily. I am exposed to giphy through the slackbot interface and it never finds anything relevant.
- yolesaber 10y agoI really hate it when there's that one coworker that insists on /giphy-ing everything in slack. Usually its a clueless manager who thinks cute little pictures will inspire team morale, but all the results are always random and oftentimes tone-deaf or, in some cases, straight up NSFW. It's very annoying, thank god I can turn off gif display automatically.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 10y agoWhy can't it just be "someone who finds it cute / fun". Why does it always have to be some cynical "MBA who thinks it will inspire team morale"
- yolesaber 10y agoBecause in my anecdotal experience it's always been the overeager manager. I also qualified that statement with "usually", ergo it's not the absolute "always" condition you specify in your unnecessary reply. Either way I find it mad annoying. Emoji reactions are perfectly fine and non-intrusive ways of non-verbally communicating in a slack or IRC environment. GIFs suck. They are possibly one of the worst image formats out there.
- chris_7 10y agoWork communications are not a place for fun. They are a place for productivity and focus. If your company's work is not fun by itself (interesting problems, no bs, etc.), that's a problem! Fix that, don't gloss over it with distractions (that thrash people's CPUs).
- ng12 10y agoThat sounds miserable. Have you never worked with people whose company you enjoy? It's really a motivating experience.
- yolesaber 10y agoIt's hardly miserable. I mean, I get along with my coworkers just fine in a professional way, but I'm not exactly buddy buddy crushing code sharing gifs like it seems like most startups want you to be. I don't go to work to make friends.
- chris_7 10y agoJust do it in the break room/kitchen, not in the workspace, which should be treated with the same respect as a library (if you provide private offices with doors that close, feel free to disregard). Group chat rooms that aren't #random (which I have /part-ed) are an extension of that workplace, and deserve the same respect. My current workplace offers neither. People shout what I'll describe as "verbal memes" to no one in particular. There is music blaring (dubstep currently), over which I have no control without risking social ostracization. Group chat is used poorly (what do you an all-day all-hands meeting with no agenda?).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pavel_lishin 10y agoThat sounds awful. We have work-related chats, which are 95% serious with the occasional joke - same as we'd make at our desks - and we have offtopic and specific-topic rooms (literally, #offtopic and #videogames and #music, etc.)
- spyspy 10y agoI have a very strict "only in private chats with coworkers I know well" rule for /giphy. The gifs are often wildly inappropriate.
- sssilver 10y agoWe call that the "Giphy Russian Roulette"
- paulddraper 10y agoAnd it's surprising how many people pay. Me? I just insert the URL of the image I actually want.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoI flat out refuse to have a giphy trigger in any chat-thing that I administer, and I argue strongly and vehemently against it in any that I'm a member of. My arguments are often backed up by the fact that 90% of the /giphy results are unrelated garbage. So far, four out of five slacks no longer have giphy integration, and my work Hipchat rooms (on- and off-topic) don't have it either. The other slack rarely uses it, because of the 90%-garbage rule, so I'm content to not harp on it too much. Stand up against giphy garbage.
- shaggyfrog 10y agoOh geez, yes. My team usually reacts with surprise whenever giphy gets one right. That's not the kind of brand association you want.
- conradev 10y agoThat's actually what makes it exciting. Giphy's results are so bad that you never know what you're gonna get. I'm surprised Giphy doesn't utilize something like this: http://tarzain.com/2016-09-22/building-a-deep-learning-powered-gif-search-engine/ http://tarzain.com/2016-09-22/building-a-deep-learning-power...
- 91bananas 10y agoI'm surprised they don't just pipe the query to google image search and pick any random result from the top 100 google finds. That would be better in 99% of cases I've seen
- dilap 10y agoit's really amazing how bad giphy is. rightgif works a lot better, but isn't as nicely integrated (not their fault -- 3rd party integrations don't get the same abilities as built-in giphy; come on slack...).
- crisnoble 10y agoWe use /gif instead of /giphy, which uses RightGif: https://rightgif.com/ https://rightgif.com/. Ironically RightGif does have a business model while serving up better gifs 90% of the time.
- shagie 10y agoPay to get SFW only gifs. :frown: Sure, if you're paying for slack already... but if its "just" a bunch of friends, the idea of shelling out money to make sure that NSFW images don't show up in the wrong window... Yes, I know its a business model, but it disappoints me that that is one of the price differentiators between the plans. I've switched my team's integration to gif keyboard which has a search and approve workflow so that someone has to say "I want that one" to have something NSFW show up.
- brown9-2 10y agoThe search results are based on user-submitted tags, right? So the quality should be expected to be shaky.
- twinkletwinkle 10y agoForgive my ignorance - is a GIF search engine any different from a text search engine? They assign text tags to GIFs (maybe in a clever, machine learning type way?) and then search those, right?
- yolesaber 10y agoI believe they scrape metadata about the gif, a lot of them come from tumblr which has a lot of tagging associated with the posts.
- josu 10y agoAFAIK they host the GIFs themselves, meaning that they are more of a GIF hosting site than a search engine. This creates two problems: 1. Copyright infringements 2. Hosting costs. EDIT: I opened their main page and scrolled down a little bit. It downloaded 70MB.
- toosmart4u12 10y agogiphy.com/partners
- duaneb 10y agoNot to mention, google image search is already better from indexing giphy + the rest of the internet. Just select "animated" from the type dropdown.
- arkitaip 10y agoI bet their next thing is a chat app. It has to be.
- mdellavo 10y agocough Minus -> Meow
- summarite 10y agoEven Evernote is not profitable yet. Or Snapchat. Huge company valuations with little to no profitability. Sounds familiar?
- illicium 10y agoSounds like Twitter a few years back. These companies are on the same track.
- exogeny 10y agoExcept that with Twitter, you self-identify as so many different things on the basis of the content you contribute. Giphy is nowhere close that. Selling inventory is only valuable if you can sell the targeting to go with it. It's arguable if Giphy has the former, but it sure as fuck doesn't have the latter.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- drakonandor 10y agoLuckily for us, valuation does not and should not have much concern with profitability. If this was not the case, the only businesses would be the size of lemonade stands. Cardboard ones at that, that can be profitable on their first day.
- evanelias 10y agoI wish Giphy well, but one random thing about them that's always perplexed me: literally 1/3 of their staff have Director titles [1] I get that vanity titles are a way to help startups hire good talent, but once you reach a nontrivial team size, this seems rather odd -- who are all these people directing exactly? It would make me very hesitant if interviewing a candidate who worked at Giphy, since their titles appear meaningless. [1] http://giphy.com/team http://giphy.com/team
- 27182818284 10y agoIf they actually are like trying to be a managerial role and 33% are acting like managers (mostly meetings and more meetings for example) that I think would be worry some indeed. For some organizations, though, Director isn't really a "Director" but more of a rank like "Senior." By this I mean there would be Assistant Director of Blah blah Development that didn't actually direct a group of people, but were was a more senior-ish developer earning the Director part of their name. It is odd, but it wouldn't be the first place I've seen that.
- evanelias 10y agoSure, I mean in finance everyone is a Vice President :) But in a consumer-facing startup like Giphy, I've honestly never seen a company at that size and stage do that. "Director of Engineering" typically has a particular meaning that differs from "Senior Engineer".
- dddrh 10y agoCase in point, they have seven in the role "Director of Engineering"
- gozur88 10y agoTitles are free, so there's not a huge downside. I worked at a mutual fund company which had dozens and dozens of vice presidents. The reason was vendors and institutional customers take you more seriously if your title is "vice president".
- rhino369 10y agoDoes bing have an API because their gif search capabilities are amazing.