GIPHY

About

GIPHY is an online database and search engine used to create, find and share animated GIFs. Since its launch in 2013, GIPHY has grown into a major media hosting service for moving images, in part due to its close integration with popular social media platforms, most notably Facebook and Twitter.

History

GIPHY was founded in February 2013 by Alex Chung and Jace Cooke, who created a solution for cataloguing and tagging archived GIFs while working together after dreaming up the idea during a hackathon.^[1] The weekend of its release, the search engine had more than 30,000 visits; a Gizmodo article criticized the returns of the engine as "hilariously bad," but within a few months the author of that article changed her mind.^[2] Improvements that Chung and Cooke had made to the search engine had improved it dramatically, and it now returned useful results.

After integrating the ability to search with keywords and post GIFs directly to a series of social media networks, GIPHY became the biggest search engine for GIFs by 2014. In 2015, GIPHY partnered with a series of social networks, including Facebook Messenger, Slack, Tinder, and Twitter to integrate GIF search functionality directly into the interface. In addition, GIPHY launched a mobile app for searching for and sending GIFs in 2014.^[3] In 2015 it launched GIPHYCam, an application that allows users to make GIFs using their phone's camera with a variety of filters. In 2016, GIPHY announced that it had acquired a desktop application called GIFGrabber, re-releasing it as GIPHYCapture; this application allowed for the creation of GIFs through desktop screen capture.

Features

GIPHY acquires GIFs for its database in two ways: an aggregator program that scrapes sites like reddit and Tumblr for GIFs, and a direct-upload functionality. Once a user uploads a GIF they made to GIPHY, they can tag it to make it easy to find. They are also given a wide variety of popular methods of embedding GIFs into external sources, including Javascript, HTML5, and iFrame, as well as direct-transfer buttons to many different social networks.

GIPHY also has two mobile apps, GIPHY and GIPHYCam^[5] and one desktop app, GIPHYCapture.^[7] They also provide an open and free API that people can use to create new applications using their GIF content, which they catalog in their GIPHY Labs section.^[6]

Users texting with GIPHYCam

In addition, GIPHY curates a wide selection of GIF-creating artists on their site, promoting the artists' work as original content and connecting them with brands who are interested in making unique GIFs. In 2016, GIPHY launched GIPHY Studios, a venture devoted to working with brands to create original GIF content.

Traffic

As of April 27th, 2016, Alexa Web Traffic claims that GIPHY is ranked 381 worldwide and 258 in the United States, with over 2.7 million daily unique visitors and almost 5 million daily page views. As of the same day, GIPHY is the number one search result in Google for "GIF".^[9]

Search Interest

External References