Dive Brief:
- Giphy, a search engine for GIFs, is worth $600 million, doubling its value from February according to The Wall Street Journal.
- The company just raised a $72 million round which takes its total investment to around $150 million.
- Giphy reported that more than 100 million view its GIFs daily, and that it serves more than one billion GIFs each day.
Dive Insight:
Given the self-reported impressive daily numbers along with the enthusiastic investment, it seems like GIFs are a content piece that marketers should be looking into. In fact, GIFs are potentially an easy type of content to create given that most marketers are likely creating video that could be repurposed into clever GIFs.
For example, a recent Hyundai campaign urged Facebook users to challenge friends over the results of NFL games and included GIFs of the winning team. More marketers are likely to follow suit going forward.
“We believe GIFs are emerging as a format that consumers love and will be really important to advertisers as well,” Barry Schuler, a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, told the Journal.
Giphy has emerged as a leader in organizing GIFs, positioning it to play a key role in a burgeoning marketplace.
The popularity of GIFs ties into the rise of messenger marketing, conversational bots and emojis. All of these loosely related technologies are centered in messaging shorthand.
When it comes to delivering messages, GIFs are a natural fit for short-form looping video that doesn’t eat a lot of bandwidth, something that can be an issue depending on the market and mobile service where the campaign is active.
