The tach giant has bought Giphy and wants to implement it on Instagram.
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In a blog post, Facebook’s Vice President of Product, Vishal Shah, announced Facebook’s latest bulk purchase, triggering a virtual chain reaction: “Facebook welcomes Giphy as part of the Instagram team.” Giphy is the largest and most widely used service for integrating animated short videos that are popular on social media and messenger services like WhatsApp.
Our colleagues from horizon describe it as “to a certain extent the Wikipedia of the extremely popular ultra short video form”– and now it belongs to Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire has already been considerably strengthened by the purchase of WhatsApp and Instagram.
Highest gif usage on Instagram
Facebook plans to further integrate the gif library into Instagram and the other Facebook apps, Shah writes in the blog post. Already today, 50 percent of Giphy traffic comes from WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook (i.e. the entire Facebook app family). Instagram alone accounts for half of the Giphy data traffic, which does not make combining the two services seem senseless. Now Facebook argues that this step can make it easier for people to find the perfect GIFs and stickers in stories.
Giphy, however, is said to continue operating the library and “look forward to further developing the technology”. Users could also continue to upload GIFs, and both developers and API partners would still have access to Giphy’s APIs, Shah said in his post.
Are TikTok, Twitter and Co. losing access to Giphy?
However, it remains unclear what it looks like after the takeover with the use of Giphy in non-Facebook apps. The blog post does not clearly answer the question of whether the Giphy library Apple Apps, TikTok, Twitter and Co. will continue to be available. The next question that comes up is that of unfair competition.
According to the news portal Axiom, Facebook is already on the radar of the US antitrust authority, the Federal Trade Commission. Federal and state authorities examined Facebook for possible anti-competitive measures, and also small acquisitions are being examined. (red)
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