Facebook announces acquisition of GIF sharing site Giphy for $400M

Now, it is not new that a platform like Giphy would be a good buy for a social media network like Facebook. However, Facebook was already having integration of Giphy inside their platform so we fail to understand why they needed to acquire it.

So to understand that, we need to look at what the company has said in its acquisition announcement. That will reveal what Facebook’s plans are regarding the future of Giphy and what they would like to use it for. Reading the announcement post from Facebook, it is clear that the company wants to integrate Giphy inside its popular photo-sharing platform Instagram.

Instagram’s VP says that “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,”.

However, we know Facebook and how they change their minds very frequently on their decisions. This was seen when they said WhatsApp will not have ads and they now plan to integrate ads inside WhatsApp.

So we should take the promise of Giphy being independent with a pinch of salt but then it is now a part of Facebook so the company has every right to do whatever they want. With this announcement, companies like Twitter, Reddit and others that integrate Giphy inside their platform will also have to worry since the integration could be killed at any time.