Giphy Is Serving Up 1 Billion GIFs a Day, but Is It Making Any Money?
Looping video service now the same size as Instagram Stories
The startup has 100 million daily users.
It's official.
GIFs are slowly but surely taking over the world. Today, Giphy announced in a lengthy blog post that it's delivering more than 1 billion of them every day and that viewers spend more than two hours watching the endlessly looping video daily.
The site also revealed it has 100 million daily users, putting its size on par with Instagram's 2-month-old Stories feature. Meanwhile, Snapchat counts 150 million daily users, while Twitter reportedly has 140 million daily users.
Giphy's new stats are up from the 50 million monthly users the company claimed in August 2015, according to a New York Times article.
One of the major drivers of Giphy's growth and goal of becoming the de facto GIF engine has been its API that powers looping video within Twitter, Facebook, Slack, Tinder and email service MailChimp.
Since launching in 2013, the New York-based startup has raised more than $75 million, valuing it at more than $300 million. With that huge valuation, it's unclear how Giphy plans to make significant money through advertising, media partnerships or payments.
In its blog post, Giphy pointed to its Los Angeles-based agency Giphy Studio as one example of how it's starting to make money from advertisements. The studio opened in April and recently worked with NBC to take over 19 LED displays in New York's World Trade Center transportation hub to promote the network's sitcom Superstore. Other clients include Chobani, McDonald's and Nike.
The creative studio isn't the only revenue source Giphy has its eyes on, though.
It also works with media companies and events to crank out real-time GIFs. Its work with CBS' The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has netted more than 500 million views. And NBC's Saturday Night Live is working with Giphy to capture and catalog funny GIFs from each episode to create the "definitive GIF library" to the late-night show.
In May, chief operating officer Adam Leibsohn told CNBC there are money-making opportunities around the company's search technology to create a Google-like ad product that would populate ads alongside GIFs in apps and messaging services. Searching for a burger, for example, could trigger a branded McDonald's image to pop up in search results.
"The whole premise underneath all these products—the web, all the integrations we do, apps we power, the messaging services we enhance—it's all a search experience," Leibsohn told CNBC. "And what we deliver in that search experience is a result, and our result is something that ticks off an interesting Venn diagram of information, search result, content, entertainment and communication."
