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All Your Reaction GIFs Now Belong to Facebook, as It Buys Giphy for $400M

posted by Fnord666 on Monday May 18 2020, @05:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the all-your-gifs-are-belong-to-us dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

All your reaction GIFs now belong to Facebook, as it buys Giphy for $400M:

Seven years ago, Facebook claimed not to support the 21st century's new favorite communication tool, the animated GIF. Oh, how times have changed: Today, Facebook's newest acquisition is one of the Internet's most popular GIF hosting sites.

Facebook is making Giphy part of the Instagram team, the company said today. Axios, which was first to report the transaction, said the deal was valued at about $400 million.

According to Facebook, about half of Giphy's current traffic already comes from Facebook products, especially Instagram. That's perhaps unsurprising, given that Facebook's big three apps—WhatsApp, Instagram, and flagship Facebook—have literally billions of daily users among them.

[...] What the announcements did not mention, however, is that making Giphy a Facebook company can give Facebook access to all the data generated by those searches and API calls from other platforms. And using acquisitions to gather data on competitors is exactly the sort of behavior Facebook is under investigation for right now.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by MostCynical on Monday May 18 2020, @08:40AM (2 children)

    by MostCynical (2589) on Monday May 18 2020, @08:40AM (#995648) Journal

    for FB, it doesn't have to make money itself; it just has to help collect more tracking data across FB and other sites (which FB doesn't own, but now can track/trace and know all about the sites, the users of the sites, and where they go after they've been there ... so Giphy users are effectively 'giving' far more when they use/embed something than just the little embedded gif.
     

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    "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @08:51AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @08:51AM (#995651)
    Well if FB is willing to blow away 400 million for that, perhaps someone should come up with a giphy/imgurl "anonymizer"/cache/plugin... Then 5 years later sell out to FB for another 400 million.

    Repeat rinse etc.

  • (Score: 1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday May 18 2020, @08:31PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Monday May 18 2020, @08:31PM (#995999) Homepage

    It's not about making money anymore. It's about stopping memes from propagating. ZuckerJew knows his goose is cooked, so his only option is to go all-in with the censorship by any means necessary. Packing his Ministry of Truth with Soros' goons, pivoting to China, etc. And that includes stopping memes and other image macros dead in their tracks because as we all know Jews and leftists can't meme on the level required to win a fair meme war.