FB Buys Giphy For 40% Of What World Bank Is Loaning To India For COVID-19 Fight

Facebook has announced the acquisition of popular GIF-sharing platform, Giphy for its photo-sharing social media platform Instagram. The announcement came on Friday through a blog post by Facebook.

With this acquisition, the tech behemoth plans to use Giphy’s library in Instagram and other Facebook-owned services. Interestingly, most of Facebook services, including Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram already support integration with Giphy, thus supporting its library of content.

Reports mention that the deal cost Facebook a total of $400 million (~Rs 3,035 crore). This amounts to 40 percent of the funds granted to India by the World Bank in its fight against the spread of COVID-19.

The acquisition will result in a more seamless experience with Giphy content on Facebook-owned platforms for the end users. Facebook claims that while many of its users are already well versed with Giphy, the platform for GIF-creation itself gets 50 percent of its traffic from the Facebook family of apps. Within this, 50 percent is again accredited to just Instagram.

(Representative Image: Reuters)

Apart from an enhanced level of integration and a smoother experience for both Instagram Stories and Direct, Giphy will work for its users as it always used to. “People will still be able to upload GIFs; developers and API partners will continue to have the same access to GIPHY’s APIs; and GIPHY’s creative community will still be able to create great content,” the Facebook blog post reads.

Facebook will further develop the GIF creation platform too. While GIPHY will continue to operate its library (including its global content collection), Facebook mentioned that it will be open to “investing further in its technology and relationships with content and API partners.”

Facebook bases the decision on GIFs and stickers being creative ways to let its users express themselves. “We see the positivity in how people use GIPHY in our products today,” it said. Going forward, the Mark Zuckerberg led conglomerate of social media giants will expect more people to use such visual aids for content.