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Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
- pot8n 6y agoAnd I thought Coronavirus would end that kind of deals.
- whoisjuan 6y agoQuite the contrary. Expect to see a lot of M&A activity this year. These are times where companies with positive cash flow can do strategic acquisitions at a discount.
- codegladiator 6y agoAh shit, another site for my /etc/hosts I wonder reddit would be even more useless for me since half the content is from giphy.
- pwython 6y agoYou're probably thinking of imgur, which lost some steam when Reddit added their own image hosting. Only a few dozen giphy links get posed each day: https://www.reddit.com/domain/giphy.com/new/ https://www.reddit.com/domain/giphy.com/new/
- FalconSensei 6y agoAdding to that, I think gfycat should be more used than giphy, at least based on how much gfycat content I see there
- rodiger 6y agoGif trends are likely infinitely mineable for consumer trends. This makes sense for Facebook- the goliath grows another inch.
- gabagoo 6y agoIt's important to have hard data on how many people like The Office
- jcutrell 6y agoThe amount of nuanced information available in this dataset is incredible.
- loceng 6y agoI don't understand why someone downvoted you. Giphy is used by many services and Facebook owning, having access to that data and the insights it could provide into the whole landscape would lead me to looking for another solution, although them purchasing it will give them all of the historical data they'd need to find new niches, successful and growing competitors or market segments that they can just copy into FB. The laws certainly haven't caught up with this new age of anti-competitiveness that's possible with how a single entity is tied into so many competing companies, and so just a big competitor buying up that resource certainly gives an arguably unfair competitive advantage. Edit to add - TLDR: this essentially gives a backdoor to Facebook for usage at other companies who integrated the service.
- djsumdog 6y agoHmm .. wonder if this is primarily a acquisition to get training data and ML devs.
- minimaxir 6y agoPer Crunchbase, they raised $150M total, with the last raise being $72M in 2016: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/giphy https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/giphy 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 https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/4fbc4a
- nojito 6y agoMost 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.
- anbotero 6y agoML? For what? It’s not like it finds the GIF you’re looking for. Serious question.
- 908087 6y agoMost likely for buzzword value.
- tiborsaas 6y agoI would guess automatic tagging and content recognition.
- projektfu 6y agoIt chooses the appropriate gif based on a thorough analysis of your personality and preferences. Share and Enjoy!
- vorpalhex 6y agoIf you're not paying for it, you are the product. The ML isn't for us, it's for their customers.
- nojito 6y ago
- mikeryan 6y agoI've been watching this a bit in other sectors, but I'm fascinated to see if there's a real uptick in "Vulture Buying" as the effects of the financial markets really settle in. This may have been something in the works for a while but you have to wonder as some companies that have likely weathered the storm well start on a spree of discount shopping.
- dannyw 6y agoPublic markets are low down 15% now. It’s hardly a discount.
- mikeryan 6y agoI've not been looking really there, most of my thoughts have been around the commercial real estate market and media entertainment private equity companies. Giphy, could (total spitballing here) could be a company that was a bit overvalued in VC terms, and might not have consistent cash flows and solid fundamentals where an acquisition makes sense to take their money off the table now. There might be others. Or this marriage has been in the works since December and just got pushed through now. Strange times.
- basch 6y agoPublic markets (especially SP500) don't really reflect impact to small companies. There's a ton of constantly amplifying risk and bleed happening all over, it's just not evenly distributed.
- volkk 6y agoCongrats 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.
- Jestar342 6y agoThat's what happens when Joe Public sets the tags. There's nothing "smart" about giphy's search, it's just a tag match.
- naravara 6y agoThey 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.
- karatestomp 6y agoLike Pinterest, I don't understand why they show up on image searches at all. They make it almost impossible to actually get at the image.
- roldie 6y agoThanks, never knew about rightgif. Their search is so good!
- txcwpalpha 6y agoI'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.
- whatsmyusername 6y agoRIP giphy
- solarkraft 6y agoWas it ever good?
- loceng 6y agoDefine good? The data's worth at least $400M to Facebook.
- maest 6y agoThey probably mean from a user perspective. Most users don't care about the value of the data.
- mrkramer 6y ago"Most users don't care about the value of the data." In a world of micro transactions every user could for example be paid fraction of a cent every time he or she sees an ad thus sharing revenue with Facebook.
- jawns 6y agoI would not be surprised if the blatant copyright infringement that is rampant on Giphy has scared off potential buyers in the past. I know, I know, there's an argument that it's fair use, but that doesn't mean that legal costs won't be incurred to make that argument, nor that the argument will be ultimately successful. I suppose if there's any company that's able to take on that legal risk, it's Facebook.
- im3w1l 6y agoIanal but isn't this what the DMCA safe harbor is about? Comply with takedown requests and you are fine.
- henryfjordan 6y agoNot when your whole business relies on exploiting copyrighted content, which someone from Disney might argue about Giphy.
- 3131s 6y agoWell, Facebook gets away with absolute murder in regard to copyrighted infringement (especially in the non-English parts of the site) so it's a good fit.
- duxup 6y agoAre short clips that you see on Giphy a legal risk?
- huac 6y agoIANAL, probably fall under fair use?
- paxys 6y agoCopyright holders don't care about users sharing seconds' worth of content and bringing them free advertising. And even if they do, Facebook already handles DMCA requests at a massive scale. There's no legal risk for them.
- petercooper 6y agoInstagram seemed expensive at $1bn in 2012 and ultimately turned out to be a very savvy buy, so I feel like I should trust Facebook on this one. I'm kinda surprised Imgur hasn't sold in a similar way yet, it seems to have slightly more sense of community than Giphy which is more broadly known as a search engine for GIFs.
- bottled_poe 6y agoYikes. Feels like my privacy is leaking again. Time to find some alternative.
- nindalf 6y agoHow many times are you going to make the same comment on this thread? This is a pretty good angle for farming karma on HN but you have to be more subtle about it. Other comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23192779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23192779
- bottled_poe 6y agoI mistakenly posted it on the wrong reply. Should have deleted the other.
- FalconSensei 6y agoif you were already using giphy, it's not like you had your privacy before the acquisition...
- ArmandGrillet 6y agoGiphy shows good results but the search is quite slow IMO, I hope this improves in the future. If you haven't read Facebook by Steven Levy I recommend it, the book explains quite well what happened after the acquisitions of Instagram, Whatsapp, and Oculus.
- bottled_poe 6y agoYikes. Feels like my privacy is leaking again. Time to find some alternative.
- CamelCaseName 6y ago> If you haven't read Facebook by... Thanks! This is exactly the sort of thing I love to read. Got anything else you can recommend?
- avipars 6y agoHatching Twitter, Elon Musk - Biography, The everything store (amazon)
- ArmandGrillet 6y agoHatching Twitter is very interesting and has a lot of drama, I loved it. I found that Elon Musk had a boring writing style (very slow to start). I also recommend Bad Blood, it's hard to stop reading it once started. One great aspect of Facebook is that Zuckerberg interviewed with the author for years and the cut into parts makes a lot of sense (Harvard and before, "Move fast and break things", Trump, aftermath).
- marban 6y agoFounders at work is really the only anecdotal startup stories book you'll ever need.
- sjg007 6y agoFacebook search is still.. terrible... I don't get it.. They should have enough hires from Google that they could make it rock. I am not talking about regular Google style search but contextual person search etc... So much opportunity here.
- ronnieoverby 6y agohttps://gph.is/g/a99MK06 https://gph.is/g/a99MK06
- loceng 6y agoI tried to find a The Social Network movie overlay with the words "Dumb fucks" on Giphy - though it doesn't seem to have it; https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/oct/20/mark-zuckerberg-the-social-network https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/oct/20/mark-zuckerberg...
- scared2 6y agoThese kinds of acquisitions intrigue me. what is valuation crieteria? from technical and innovation perspective, what part of it is worth millions?
- dopamean 6y agoYou must not actually believe that the "technical perspective" is the only thing that drives value.
- johannes1234321 6y agoThe fact that it is embedded in tons of software and delivers information about usage and trends.
- Nextgrid 6y agoThey don't have a "moat" though - no cutting-edge technology or even content licenses (it's all stolen). Anyone can build their own alternative to it very easily and I'm confident it'll quickly happen to any company that competes with and/or feels threatened by Facebook.
- colinmorelli 6y agoErr, no. This is a serious underestimation of the difficulty involved in acquiring users. Networks effects are a moat. Market share can be a moat. You don't need to just "build your own alternative to it." You need to get all the content (this is actually not as easy as you make it seem - stolen or not), then integrate that into Instagram, WhatsApp, Slack, and hundreds of other platforms across the world as the supported way of sharing gifs. Then you'll have to build a brand around the product that people remember, and whose website they actually visit when they want images and aren't using one of the hundreds of platforms that already natively integrates giphy. And in order to do all that, you'll have to somehow manage to convince everyone out there that your gif search system is better than their gif search system that they already know, are comfortable with, and generally happy with. Your pitch will probably be that theirs is owned by Facebook, and is therefore a violation of their privacy. But you know who else is owned by Facebook? Facebook. And yet Facebook is pushing close to 2 billion daily active users. Convenience trumps privacy in modern society most of the time. I'm sure there will be a changing of the winds - there always is - but there likely will not be significant competition for Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Giphy/Google/(put any other company in here) until that comes. The network effects are too strong, and the convenience is too great. There are so many posts about "(Twitter/Facebook/Giphy) clone in a (day/weekend/week/month)" and yet there's a distinct lack of commercial successes in these spaces. Edit: a word.
- tombert 6y agoDamnit, I turned down a follow-up interview with Giphy years ago since I didn't think they were sustainable and I had been burned by startups in the past. Shows how much business sense I have!
- curiousllama 6y agoIf it makes you feel any better, "business sense" is nonsense in situations like that. No need to feel bad about buying the wrong lottery ticket.
- derwiki 6y agoStatistically you were still right
- djsumdog 6y agoeh, it's silly to have those kinds of regrets. You can't predict the future, and you made a reasonable decision based on the information you had. I wrote this a few years back when thinking about what it means to regret something: https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/science/time/ https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/science/time/
- rwmj 6y agoIt happens. I turned down a job at Shazam very early on because I couldn't understand what on earth their business model was. They were recently acquired by Apple for (coincidentally) $400m. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(application) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(application) The actual start up I founded instead fizzled into administration.
- askafriend 6y agoRight but Shazam was founded in 1999 and took almost 20 years to exit. You can't look at these numbers in a vacuum.
- rwmj 6y agoBut also Shazam took about $100m in funding with no down rounds.
- xoxoy 6y agoIt’s a Trojan horse play. Giphy is used by all of FB’s competitors, including Tik Tok. Scummy imo.
- snazz 6y agoTikTok could switch to Tenor, which is already what Discord and a few other services use.
- xoxoy 6y agoI assume they must. Otherwise analytics sent to Giphy would make it too easy for FB to track growth.
- Nextgrid 6y agoDoesn't TikTok include the Facebook SDK already, thus giving them the metrics already (the SDK pings every time the app is brought into foreground)?
- xoxoy 6y agoI assume there’s some Great Wall that prevents growth teams from using data from the FB SDK to spy on competitors. Wouldn’t be true of Giphy analytics.
- gkop 6y agoNote that Tenor is owned by Google.
- FalconSensei 6y agoGoogle doesn't have anything competing with TikTok, as far as I know
- sokoloff 6y agoIsn't YouTube a (rough) competitor to TikTok?
- scared2 6y agoThese kinds of acquisitions intrigue me. what is valuation crieteria? from technical and innovation perspective, what part of it is worth millions?
- 0az 6y agoI'm guessing Data. Trends, among others.
- macintux 6y agoMakes me wonder whether you could use trends in use by employees at a large company to do some trading. If their gifs turn negative in advance of an earnings report, that’s probably not a good sign.
- yreg 6y agoAnother commenter pointed out that Giphy is integrated into many products and buying Giphy is a way to get metrics about those products.
- Macha 6y agoFor $400m?
- rhacker 6y agoEyeballs. It's used casually by many millions of people daily. That's all that's needed to justify price.
- scared2 6y agoMakes more sense. But it is easy to replace it with another giphy. Especially when there is privacy reason.
- johannes1234321 6y agoQuestion os: How many will switch it out? Giphy has a big collection of images and works ... swapping is effort and brings different (unexpected?) results.
- dumbfounder 6y agoCongrats 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.
- snissn 6y agoThey'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.
- kennxfl 6y agoMakes sense because Whatsapp is a client.
- ogre_codes 6y agoI 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.
- basch 6y agoThe 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.
- 6y ago
- rofws 6y agoThe only time I use giphy is through google keyboard (yes, I send a lot of memes). I guess google will have to pay them now? Or will keyboard stop supporting giphy?
- FalconSensei 6y agoIMHO they will migrate to something else
- hetspookjee 6y agoI read in this thread that Tenor is the Gif service owned by Google. I do wonder why they dont use it in the first place?
- yalogin 6y agoDo slack and others pay Giphy when they integrate? Is that their main source of revenue or is it ads? I am wondering what makes them more attractive than someone like imgur for example.
- FalconSensei 6y agoYes, they pay. Because it helps keeping users active, in case of Instagram, for example. And in slack's case, I think when you install the app you can have it for free (with limitations), or pay to remove said limitations. In that case, slack may not (IMO) pay then.
- cecilpl 6y agoEvery time Facebook is buying something I feel sad and imagine Facebook like the black plague that will swallow that normal organism.
- jcroll 6y agoThe owners of giphy don't feel the same pangs I'm sure
- timdiggerm 6y agoI mean, it worked out great for the Instagram guys, right?
- baddox 6y agoNot just for the personal finances of the Instagram founders and team. The Instagram acquisition has been, as far as I can tell, a huge success for Facebook.
- nostromo 6y agoMaybe..? I can imagine an alternate 2020 where an independent Instagram is growing like a weed and the founders are much more wealthy.
- flunhat 6y agoMost people on this site couldn't imagine it back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817850
- LunaSea 6y agoDidn't work too well for the Whatsapp team ...
- M2Ys4U 6y agoAnd if they do I'm sure they'll have enough cash to dry their eyes with
- exabrial 6y agogreat, yet another way to get tracked
- lucideer 6y agoThe 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. This acquisition makes a lot of sense.
- netsharc 6y agoSo no longer SIGINT, but GIFINT.
- loceng 6y agoCertainly they can't claim that communication is private and/or encrypted then?
- gowld 6y agoYou are saying they can't lie about privacy?
- lucideer 6y agoThey 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).
- stevewodil 6y ago
- andy_ppp 6y agoThe web of surveillance capitalism Giphy has in every integration is worth at least $400m to Facebook... Crazy!
- savrajsingh 6y agoCongrats Alex Chung! Met him a couple times in NYC and he was gracious and kind. I remember him mentioning that Giphy is the largest search engine behind google or so, which makes sense as everyone's searching for cool gifs in chat whenever they can. :)
- maest 6y agoBigger than Bing?
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 6y agoAny good alternatives to GIPHY?
- waylandsmithers 6y agoIn my experience on slack I always thought RightGIF returned the gif I was thinking of more often than giphy.
- hckr_news 6y agoGyfcat?
- cannedslime 6y agoYeah, nothing... What do you even need giphy for? gifs on forums / social media is nothing new, we used to upload them manually. Just ffmpeg your own clips, you can't find what you are looking for on giphy anyways.
- quickthrower2 6y agoImagination. Creativity.
- Sevaris 6y agoAnd the inexorable march towards tech companies owning everything continues. I wish anti-trust law wasn't such a joke across the globe.
- Nextgrid 6y agoIn this case I'm not sure anti-trust would help? Giphy doesn't have a monopoly and the product is straightforward to replicate by doing the same thing they did - ie scraping and stealing content at scale.
- atonse 6y agoIt would because giphy is a great proxy to find out what people are CURRENTLY talking about, or how they are feeling, based on the gifs they're searching for. This can fuel better ads. So consolidating this stuff further could have that effect. To me it is so creepy how much of even our casual thoughts outside of facebook now are going into facebook servers. There's just no escaping these data addicts. That's the concern.
- missedthecue 6y agoBig company != monopoly. Facebook does not have a monopoly on anything, and neither does Giphy.
- Sevaris 6y agoSee, I said anti-trust. Not anti-monopoly. Anti-trust was, traditionally, about preventing market distortions by market actors that are becoming too big and powerful. It wasn't solely about monopolies. The whole "we're not a monopoly" shtick has been pushed by corporations in recent decades as if that absolved them completely from behaving in anti-competitive ways, and for some reason your average schlub has eaten it up, hook line and sinker, and politicians are more than happy to cut them slack because of lobbying. Especially now, when you have companies like Giphy being tied into services across the globe and providing a surprising amount of data about users and usage patterns, the idea of monopolies is completely obsolete. It's time to bring back the idea of companies not being allowed to much reach, power and control over all aspects of our lives, as well as being able to use it to assert control over competitors and users alike.
- scoot_718 6y agoThis is the first (and I'm guessing last) I've ever heard of giphy.
- zemo 6y agoweird flex but ok
- floatingatoll 6y agoImagine how many billions of Referrer headers Giphy gets every day. Imagine all the AI training material that comes in when people try to turn a search term into an image. $400mil for a human-curated dataset that pays dividends in ongoing harvestable data over time is chump change for Facebook.
- alpb 6y agoMajority of the giphy usage probably happens on mobile apps —which don’t send referer headers. Similarly, if you use something like giphy on your Twitter posts, twitter mirrors the gifv image on their servers to avoid leaking user info to Giphy
- geocrasher 6y agoWelp. There goes the neighborhood.
- alberth 6y agoThere is a considerable amount of porn on Giphy. I wonder if FB will ban porn on Giphy like how Verizon banned porn on Tumblr after that acquisition.
- Mindwipe 6y agoThat was my first thought too. More censorship. Then again, I am very curious if Facebook's content board will do something about wearing a bikini being a account closure level offense for sex workers/cam models and completely okay for celeb influencers.
- partiallypro 6y agoI thought this too when I first read this, but I went on Giphy and did a quick search and couldn't find any.
- lovegoblin 6y agoAre you thinking of gfycat? (Who, tangentially, is now moving all their adult content to redgif.)
- annadane 6y agoCould you stop? Don't you have enough? Let me guess. Giphy will now be used to spy on people, it won't be chronological any more, Zuck bought this because it threatens his internet empire, etc etc...
- scared2 6y agoHow many gifs does it host and does it have rights to It??
- zemo 6y agoat least six
- antibland 6y agoFB can utilize Giphy for pixel tracking (similar to FB Like button) since these low-brow, comedic incantations appear all across the webosphere.
- tiborsaas 6y agoIt's a data grab. Just imagine how many places Giphy has "integration" with. And the contents of a gif might be really telling, they are already very well tagged.
- l1ghthouse 6y agoUsers: time to delete your accounts :P Developers: Time to remove the Giphy integrations from your apps/services.
- winrid 6y agoHaven't they already been selling the data?
- adjkant 6y agoMy guess/suspicion is that in isolation the data's depth is pretty tame. The issue is when all the nitty gritty data is then tied with Facebook's. IMO the bigger issue is that anyone integrating with them basically is telling Facebook about their app's usage stats now, which makes it easy for Facebook to see current and future competition as well as any emerging markets they can sink their fangs into. Adding Giphy is a great way to get your lunch eaten now as a startup in any remotely competitive space to Facebook. To me it's kind of wild this type of acquisition doesn't violate some law (though not surprising) as this gives immediate historical data insight into dozens of direct competitors even if they stop integrating in the future.
- stephencoyner 6y ago- “New York-based Giphy had raised around $150 million in VC funding.” - “Its most recent private valuation was around $600 million.” Seems like Giphy took quite a haircut to pull this off. Their outlook must have looked pretty bleak.
- bertman 6y agoI 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/ Quote from a Signal dev https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9628#issuecomment-629360756 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9628#issu...
- draven 6y agoI 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.
- BeautifulOrb 6y agoGiphy does not make an effort to pay or credit the artists whose gifs are on their site.
- ivanstame 6y agoFacebook and others should be put on hold for buying companies for a while...
- raiyu 6y agoLast private raise - https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/31/giphy-the-platform-for-all-things-gif-raises-72-million-in-new-funding/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/31/giphy-the-platform-for-all... - $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
- nostromo 6y agoSo did the last round of investors lose 1/3rd of their investment (and after waiting four years, too)? Was this a fire sale?
- pisarzp 6y agoNo, usually investors stock is preferred with 1x liquidation preference. This means they get their money back, then the rest is split among other shareholders
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nimish 6y agoI wonder what happened to employees who joined later on, with underwater options.
- jychang 6y agoNot 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.
- nimish 6y agoPresumably they were accelerated/repurchased out for $0? Replaced by ... what exactly? As a giphy employee what do you get out of the acquisiton beyond maybe some job security?
- OctopusSandwich 6y agoNow that Giphy has a rich owner, will hollywood try to sue them for using their intellectual property?
- badrabbit 6y agoSignal uses giphy. Hope they stop.
- schwag09 6y agoI had the same thought. Although it looks like Signal uses a proxy for GIPHY requests [1] and has at least thought about the privacy implications of GIPHY support [2]. [1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9628 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9628 [2] https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/ https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/
- annadane 6y agohttps://overcast.fm/+QLdurp-A8 https://overcast.fm/+QLdurp-A8 for a good overview of how Facebook treats its acquisitions. Absolutely disgusting. Throw Zuck in prison.
- annadane 6y agoI notice someone went around downvoting all critical FB comments I've posted recently. They legitimately have shills patrolling HN.
- lowdose 6y agoIts a multisided platform inside every app.
- kentosi 6y agoI feel so bitter right now. A recruiter asked me to join them back in 2016 and they were paying $200k+ for a senior backend role. I turned them down because I was on a visa and wanted a company with financial stability. A gif-search engine startup sounded ludicrous. Well, here we are...
- annadane 6y agoBe glad. You do not want to be associated with Facebook.
- KaiserPro 6y agoyeah but the pay is good and the share package would have been stella.
- paxys 6y agoFacebook has a lot of amazing engineers and developer tools, and many of them have great reputations in the industry. I know a lot of people working at Facebook in a variety of roles and they are all happy and proud of the work they do. You're trying to make it sound like it'll put a black mark on your resume or something.
- seemuch 6y agoWere you offered any stock/options? How much would that worth now? (If you don't mind sharing..)
- schoolornot 6y agoStruggling to understand the value-add for Facebook here. For a while they were buying businesses for the coveted "screen time" - VR, messaging, etc. Everyone expected that they would monetize or integrate those platforms, and they did for most apps. So I guess if I post a giphy in a work chat they will now get an extra few seconds of ~100 people's screen time/day. What's the point? I doubt they will overlay ads. So what else? Some form of content control? Only show pics that ascribe to Facebook's agenda?
- ComodoHacker 6y agoWhat kind of gifs you like/share/post would be a useful addition to your [shadow] profile, won't it? More training material for their AI projects.
- agigao 6y agoA few weeks ago I decided to completely stop using gifs and emojis in conversations, and goes what conversations got more meaningful and thoughtful.
- holler 6y agoIm working on a new conversation app and I'm explicitly never going to allow gifs or emojis as they degrade the conversation , distract, and prevent meaningful dialog.
- Causality1 6y agoFor me Giphy is the poster child of Google's infuriating decision to put videos in the image search results. It's almost impossible to find a gif you can properly embed an HTML these days. Sure, you can use search terms to filter out giphy.com but then a hundred other copycat websites only fill the void with more videos masquerading as image files.
- chadlavi 6y agoWell, frig. Time to find a new very good gif source.
- eecc 6y agoSo now the intention is to map corporate org charts?
- squnch 6y agoHow do the IP issues work here? I would think that Giphy is a massive copyright violation entity. Is Facebook just big enough to drop the lawyer-hammer on any rightsholders who complain?
- crankylinuxuser 6y agoGiphy was the reason why at my last job, a manager inadvertently posted porn to our slack channel. Nevertheless, giphy was just a gif image host. They do have access to current meme culture, which I imagine is useful to FB. But for me, thats just a less of a reason to use them. Im data-mined enough already.
- autokad 6y agoi hate giphy, its a SV solution to a problem that never existed. gifs were fine, now some silicon tech forced them out and we get all the fun of copy rights and lack of saving the gifs for our personal use /s
- jondubois 6y agoThe title is misleading. It should be "Facebook executives give free money and Facebook shares to Giphy executives and save Giphy from bankruptcy."
- reubensutton 6y agoIt's a significant discount from previous funding rounds according to Techcrunch: "Giphy last raised $72 million at a reported $600 million valuation at the end of 2016" [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/09/giphy-held-talks-to-raise-a-massive-new-funding-round/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/09/giphy-held-talks-to-raise-...
- lx0741 6y agowhy on earth does fb exist?
- lx0741 6y agouse cases: - monetize gifs - suggest gifs to their users based on their feeds - nothing relevant just #deletefb and save your brain and the planet
- mrkramer 6y agoZuckerberg is really desperate paying $400m for this, this is worth $100m max. Like somebody said earlier Imgur would make more sense. And btw VCs who invested late stage in Giphy lost money.
- zumachase 6y agoNo they didn’t: liquidation preference.
- block_dagger 6y agoGifs in Slack (or anywhere) are a distraction imo. I disable them where possible and never post them. I encourage others to do the same :)
- didip 6y agoFor a silly product, this is a great success despite its "down round". Congrats to everyone who has equities.
- jondubois 6y agoI can't help but think of all the millions of economically useful people who lost their jobs over the past couple of months because of COVID19... And contrast that with all the economically useless Giphy employees and executives who not only get to keep their jobs but get massive bonuses.
- oiasdjfoiasd 6y agolol sour grape juice with pinch of salt
- dang 6y agoCould you please not post flamewar style comments to HN? We're looking for curious conversation, not denunciatory rants, and you've done this 4 times in this thread alone. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- stiray 6y agoNice to know, their domains are going directly to my banned sites list. They have acquired gliphy to extend reach of their pixels and well... I can live without gifs. (edit: they are already banned. Nothing to do.)
- davidwitt415 6y agoGifs may be fun to watch the first time, but I have to say it drives me crazy to have a bunch of looping animations running all over the screen when i'm trying to focus on something.
- dblock 6y agoTime to finally remove support for it, https://github.com/slack-ruby/slack-ruby-bot/issues/261 https://github.com/slack-ruby/slack-ruby-bot/issues/261
- iambateman 6y agoGiphy...by Facebook. https://www.dropbox.com/s/2zmo6nl7mmtnhzf/giphy.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/2zmo6nl7mmtnhzf/giphy.png?dl=0 Maybe they keep the ephemeral absurdity that was giphy...but it feels like the beginning of the end.
- frusciante29 6y agoGuys, I’ telling you. Gif is the next instagram.
- wdb 6y agoThe only GIF you need in Slack is this one: https://media.giphy.com/media/n59dQcO9yaaaY/giphy.gif https://media.giphy.com/media/n59dQcO9yaaaY/giphy.gif for when a new user signs up :)
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoI wonder what happens to Giphy porn.
- FalconSensei 6y agoprobably it'll be gone. gfycat already banned it, creating another service (redgifs I think) and moving that content there
- infused 6y agoOne more app removed from my phone now. Thanks Facebook.
- iphone_elegance 6y agoMakes sense, it seems like a great way to inject ads coupled with facebooks profile information it's likely a goldmine You start a campaign and suddenly you have people inserting meme-like-ads feature your content into their chat threads It'll have a personal and convincing touch ( esp. with facebooks ad targeting) it's going to be amazing for our industry reaching customers, Pepe/Trump memes did win an election afterall Also a great way to get ads into whatsapp messages without seeming intrusive
- jdkee 6y agoI hope this transaction undergoes a deep antitrust review. As Instagram should have.
- cityzen 6y agohttp://i.imgur.com/e8a5w9s.gif http://i.imgur.com/e8a5w9s.gif
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lowkeyokay 6y agoCongrats. That’s it for me then. Deleted
- xd_dino 6y agoDuh. I am sure of one thing what is going to happen for pretty little Giphy service. Instagram was cool. now, I see sponsored Ads for every two posts. It is annoying to be in Insta nowadays. I suppose this is going to happen for Giphy as well. How frustrating if you are searching for quick witty gif and you see a sponsored ads in it.. you never know FB monster can do this.
- adjkant 6y agoSo Facebook basically just bought inside usage info on a ton of direct competition, even if they stop their integration in the future. Messaging: Signal, GroupMe, Telegram, Viber Social Media: Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, Tiktok Dating: Bumble, Tinder Video: Skype Does anyone else kind of feel weirded out that this isn't illegal? Not surprising legally or for a move for Facebook, but this just feels incredibly wrong.
- throwaway4715 6y agoAre you saying that Facebook shouldn't be allowed to own any product that can be shared on a competitors platform? Seems kinda ridiculous.
- adjkant 6y agoNo, I am saying that them retroactively buying it without warning and getting access to the historical data, which users and developers did not intend to give to Facebook, is the off part. If Facebook bought this or developed it themselves and then these companies integrated Giphy, it's obviously very different. Basically this implies that any data you give to any third party can then basically be bought by your competition. I think legal language that prevents this would likely be a net good thing. I of course realize it's fair game, but that seems like a great way to discourage the use of any third parties generally. The acquisition itself is very valid from a product standpoint, but I suspect a big reason for the buy was that data on competitors as Facebook claws back against pressure from rising platforms. I would bet a good deal of money this will be used to inform future acquisitions and fuel the black hole of Facebook acquisitions and squashing of any competitors.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hedora 6y ago> I think legal language that prevents this would likely be a net good thing. Language that protects end user data across changes in company ownership basic doesn’t exist. For one thing, if the company goes bankrupt, the data is an asset of values, and the court will allow them to void prior contracts so that they can sell off assets and pay their debts. This is legal for the same reason pensions get zeroed out during bankruptcies and acquisitions. If the new owners can steal retirement money from current and former employees, you can bet they can sell whatever treasure troves of data the company has amassed.
- arnklint 6y agoIs it for tracking purpose?
- a4wtaw4tawtawt 6y agogiphy is so laughably bad. maybe 1% of the time you get an actual relevant gif. seems like a perfect match.
- bilekas 6y agoYay, now our memes will be monetized! +1 FB
- techguruseo 6y agoGiphy is so lucky. All the best to them.
- fritex 6y agoSo, what's next they will buy? :D
- fritex 6y agoSo, what's next they'll buy? :D
- arsome 6y agoWonder what will come of the Signal integration... not exactly a good look...
- lyime 6y agoFacebook might have been trying to / already have a data deal in play and probably decided to just buy it out right.
- zuhayeer 6y agoWow, this is crazy to hear about! Back in college I worked on a fun way to share snippets of music with friends directly in iMessage called RapBits (essentially audio gifs). I reached out to Adam Leibsohn who was the COO of Giphy at the time. He immediately replied to my cold email excited about the idea and offered to help. He also asked about how we were handling legal. We didn't have an answer, in fact UMG had basically threatened to shut our app down in a meeting we had with them in LA originally thinking it'd be a great partnership meeting (the music industry kinda sucks). Really appreciated his response in that moment, he basically told us to keep going and see what we could do with it and just have fun! Kind of wild to see such a fun / not-so-serious seeming product have such a huge exit and profound impact on the way we communicate now Anyways, here's a quick demo of RapBits: https://rapbits.com/video/ad.mp4 https://rapbits.com/video/ad.mp4 Even had a brief stint of fame on /r/hiphopheads: https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/64ea1v/my_roommates_and_i_are_building_this_rap_imessage/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/64ea1v/my_room...
- Priem19 6y agoAnd yet another domain I'll block with uMatrix.
- hyko 6y agoOh ffs. Where’s the justice department when you need them?
- anupamchugh 6y agoFacebook has now got a foot into its competitor's data. Retrieving unique device ID from Android phones(below Android 11 of course) is a cakewalk and Giphy requires that for its client SDK
- ceothrowaway 6y agoAny idea what level/compensation FB is offering to Giphy engineers?