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I liked a lot of what Giphy was doing with TV show parsing and captioning, I feel like that could be a huge vector for sponcon, but this announcement about spon

by beager 9y ago

I liked a lot of what Giphy was doing with TV show parsing and captioning, I feel like that could be a huge vector for sponcon, but this announcement about sponsored GIFs and ad sales sounds go generalized on its face that I'm not sure it will be fruitful. Is BMW going to buy sponsored GIFs? Is McDonald's? Are major CPG companies going to buy sponsored GIFs? I think TV shows and major studios have a good use case for this, but even if the sales are constrained to suitable markets, and healthy, will those sales support a $600mm valuation, or even keep the lights on? Ad sales work well when you control a platform with a lot of eyeball-share, and when you have strong profiling. I don't think Giphy will have much of either, and if they do, I think the they won't have all of those attributes available (i.e., giphy.com is hard to build facebook-level profiling on, but is easy to control ad units on, GIF keyboards/facebook/various integrations are high-eyeball, but someone else controls the profiling and you can't control the ad units etc).

dave5104 9y ago
Starbucks did this back in 2015: http://www.adweek.com/digital/starbucks-whips-21-branded-gifs-starring-frappuccino-164691/ http://www.adweek.com/digital/starbucks-whips-21-branded-gif... I could see them being a clear buyer here. Some of the GIFs in that article are clear, in-your-face ads, but some of the others are a bit more subtle... yet still probably achieve Starbucks' ad goals. As for Giphy reach... I use Giphy on Facebook Messenger, Discord, and probably a few other places that I'm unaware of. They hook into a LOT of places.
- InternetUser 9y ago
  "hook into a LOT of places" - That optimism isn't well supported by acquisitions and IPOs in recent years. I maintain that the "pop-culture-image sharing" craze, which obviously includes gifs, hit its monetary-value peak when Yahoo bought Tumblr in May 2013 for $1.1B. It's been more than 4 YEARS since then, and what goin' on with Pinterest? I mean they are now 7 years into their existence and have neither IPO'd nor been acquired. Meanwhile, Imgur keeps chugging along--though downward, and since Reddit began hosting its own images, Imgur's decline has only accelerated, as even the Google Trends popularity graph reflects [0]. VIDEO is the future, and with AR, VR, and mixed reality on the rise (where the Almighty Facebook's Oculus is actually 5th place in sales [1]), images and gifs are looking about as exciting as innovations in the design of mobile flip phones. Snap, with Snapchat, went public earlier this year, but I don't think they ever could have done if they remained merely a photo-messaging app, rather than a photo-and-video messaging app, as well as a news-publishing app and now a TV app with its own proprietary programming. [0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=imgur,reddit https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=imgur,re... [1] https://uploadvr.com/psvr-vive-superdata-sales/ https://uploadvr.com/psvr-vive-superdata-sales/
- beager 9y ago
  I use Giphy daily, multiple times a day, on Slack. Unless Slack is paying a hefty SaaS fee to Giphy for use of their platform, I don't know how else they'd monetize it.
- zjaffee 9y ago
  Didn't we learn from Zynga that a business can never be truly successful when it completely depends on the participation of partners to have any successes. Facebook could decide tomorrow that they no longer want to give Giphy the power that they do, and completely destroy them no?
deleted 9y ago
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dawnerd 9y ago
Some of the HBO ones from Silicon Valley had to be sponsored. If they weren't they're missing out for sure. Definitely, think tv shows and movies are the way to go here. A McDonalds gif just doesn't feel right. Almost all of my friends just share clips with captions from shows.
flashman 9y ago
> Is McDonald's? I see McDonalds integrating Giphy into a larger ad campaign. Let's say they launch a campaign around happy moments with family. That gives them scope to includes moments from the TV or cinema spots as featured results when someone searches for a happy or family gif, which the user is more likely to do because they're aware of the campaign. That user then shares the campaign to friends on social media who may not be television watchers. Or consider the next Minions movie. They just animate and render a bunch of Minions acting out the top Giphy search terms (subtly tagged 'Despicable Me 4'), and suddenly the movie is being organically promoted by thousands of users.

by beager 9y ago

dave5104 9y ago

Starbucks did this back in 2015: http://www.adweek.com/digital/starbucks-whips-21-branded-gifs-starring-frappuccino-164691/ http://www.adweek.com/digital/starbucks-whips-21-branded-gif... I could see them being a clear buyer here. Some of the GIFs in that article are clear, in-your-face ads, but some of the others are a bit more subtle... yet still probably achieve Starbucks' ad goals. As for Giphy reach... I use Giphy on Facebook Messenger, Discord, and probably a few other places that I'm unaware of. They hook into a LOT of places.

InternetUser 9y ago
"hook into a LOT of places" - That optimism isn't well supported by acquisitions and IPOs in recent years. I maintain that the "pop-culture-image sharing" craze, which obviously includes gifs, hit its monetary-value peak when Yahoo bought Tumblr in May 2013 for $1.1B. It's been more than 4 YEARS since then, and what goin' on with Pinterest? I mean they are now 7 years into their existence and have neither IPO'd nor been acquired. Meanwhile, Imgur keeps chugging along--though downward, and since Reddit began hosting its own images, Imgur's decline has only accelerated, as even the Google Trends popularity graph reflects [0]. VIDEO is the future, and with AR, VR, and mixed reality on the rise (where the Almighty Facebook's Oculus is actually 5th place in sales [1]), images and gifs are looking about as exciting as innovations in the design of mobile flip phones. Snap, with Snapchat, went public earlier this year, but I don't think they ever could have done if they remained merely a photo-messaging app, rather than a photo-and-video messaging app, as well as a news-publishing app and now a TV app with its own proprietary programming. [0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=imgur,reddit https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=imgur,re... [1] https://uploadvr.com/psvr-vive-superdata-sales/ https://uploadvr.com/psvr-vive-superdata-sales/
beager 9y ago
I use Giphy daily, multiple times a day, on Slack. Unless Slack is paying a hefty SaaS fee to Giphy for use of their platform, I don't know how else they'd monetize it.
zjaffee 9y ago
Didn't we learn from Zynga that a business can never be truly successful when it completely depends on the participation of partners to have any successes. Facebook could decide tomorrow that they no longer want to give Giphy the power that they do, and completely destroy them no?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dawnerd 9y ago

Some of the HBO ones from Silicon Valley had to be sponsored. If they weren't they're missing out for sure. Definitely, think tv shows and movies are the way to go here. A McDonalds gif just doesn't feel right. Almost all of my friends just share clips with captions from shows.

flashman 9y ago

> Is McDonald's? I see McDonalds integrating Giphy into a larger ad campaign. Let's say they launch a campaign around happy moments with family. That gives them scope to includes moments from the TV or cinema spots as featured results when someone searches for a happy or family gif, which the user is more likely to do because they're aware of the campaign. That user then shares the campaign to friends on social media who may not be television watchers. Or consider the next Minions movie. They just animate and render a bunch of Minions acting out the top Giphy search terms (subtly tagged 'Despicable Me 4'), and suddenly the movie is being organically promoted by thousands of users.