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Good luck living up to that $600 million valuation with sponsored gifs before running out of money. Seems they raised 55 on 300 in February 2016 and then 72 on
by ejlangev 9y ago
Good luck living up to that $600 million valuation with sponsored gifs before running out of money. Seems they raised 55 on 300 in February 2016 and then 72 on 600 in October 2016. Seems like a lot of money to be burning for a gif search engine.
- DiThi 9y ago> for a gif search engine And for a really bad one. It's more of a gif aggregator that can give you gifs of approximate themes. But I very rarely find a specific gif I want and I know it exists.
- YCode 9y agoNote they actually acquire the rights to the gifs they show.
- DiThi 9y agoThat may make the task more difficult, but still, even when I search gifs from very well know series like the Simpsons and I get a bunch of random Simpsons gifs (therefore I assume they got rights for short Simpsons clips) but none is remotely similar to the one I'm looking for. Then I go to google images and there it is among the first results. Edit: It may have improved a bit lately, but it would be much, much better if they did OCR of text in gifs, and use the context of where the gifs are found (esp. page title) for additional search terms.
- et-al 9y agoIf you want Simpsons GIFs, have you checked out Frinkiac?
- DiThi 9y agoYes, currently I know it and use it. It was just an example on top of my head. Other series don't have an equivalent. And of course there's a lot of known gifs that don't come straight from TV. RightGif mentioned in another comment seems to work better for that purpose.
- debacle 9y agoMany of the gifs they show are not owned by the uploader. They acquire the rights in a limited fashion to a small portion of the gifs they show. They'll of course make the "user generated content" argument, but clipping a video is not user generated content.
- Kiro 9y agoHow does that actually work? GIFs are often made by random anonymous people and then they just spread. Seems like a big task.
- com2kid 9y agoUse RightGif, much better IMHO. It can find really obscure GIFs with ease. Giphy's Slack integration is a pain point, just pasting in the first result (or just a slot machine type system) is not the best UI. They do better on other platforms, but RightGif tends to get it right the first time. That said, the valuation is nuts.
- nolok 9y ago> $600 million valuation Holy moly, good luck with that ... I think there is a place for a company like theirs, at a much smaller valuation, running and making profits. But now that they took VC money on such a high value, they're bound to do all the classic tricks to burn through money keeping the illusion going ...
- lazyjones 9y agoBut if they only make $1/year profit on each of their 200M DAU, the valuation is easily justified. I'm sure FB, Google make much more than that and I haven't clicked on their ads for years.
- rplnt 9y agoFB did over a $5/year on a monthly active user in 2016. But they (and Google) are much better positioned at selling ads than a funny gifs engine ever could be.
- Sholmesy 9y agoThese are still 200 million pairs of eyes every day on their product. VC funding has looked like a joke recently, but 200million daily users at $600M doesn't seem ridiculous, regardless of how silly/bad the product is.
- rplnt 9y agoBut that's just users viewing content there, not interacting with the site at all. I'm sure imageshack had those numbers, easily. Until something better (read not monetized) came along to replace it for a while.
- Sholmesy 9y agoYou might be right. I've never thought of giphy as just an image hosting platform though. It's more about the integrations with apps that is their edge. Something imageshack/imgur never really nailed.
- tomjen3 9y agoHow is giffy worth 600 mill?
- api 9y agoHow can giphy with its current functionality possibility cost that much to run? I feel like it should be able to run for over a century with the amount that it has in the bank right now. Bandwidth is cheap and it's not exactly compute intensive or labor intensive. I could distribute that thing across a global cluster of VPSes with cheap bandwidth (Vultr, Digital Ocean, OVH) and host it for peanuts. Given that it's drowning in VC money my guess is that it's all at AWS, not using S3, and over-engineered to Juicero levels. They're probably using Kubernetes, a dozen different database and message bus protocols, and a whole sprawling Rube Goldberg machine of a microservices architecture to... host gifs. ... and yeah that nose candy valuation is ludicrous. There is no way.
- b212 9y ago200M users, 20 MB per user daily (optimistically) gives 4 petabytes per day. I'd say the average user transfer might be way higher in reality so we're talking here dual digit petabytes on daily basis. How much will it cost you on Vultr, Digital Ocean or OVH? I'm asking out of curiosity because I'm not much into hosting, but I think it might be quite expensive after all? ;)
- api 9y agoYou really think 200M people are transferring 20MB/day of gifs? If your numbers really are accurate then it underscores the insanity of the valuation. If the costs are intrinsically high then you'd need a high value advertising niche to make this profitable.
- b212 9y agoI think including bots (like Slack's /giphy) we're easily talking petabytes here.
- pryelluw 9y agoGifs are a good medium to sell stuff through the influencer model. They might not be setup to do it, though. They seem to just host.