I think the promise of giphy was that advertisers would pay for sponsored gifs. So The Voice gets top placement for “wild crowd” gif and then gets shared X,000,000 times in a native way.
It’s a sensible thesis that appears to be invalidated for now.
I agree. It's interesting because nearly all the GIF searches I use on a regular basis are terrible, yet I wouldn't be too perturbed if I were given relevant/funny/interesting GIFs that contained product placement (say, a GIF for "cheers!" might be someone raising a glass of Coke).
I think the problem might be that advertisers can't control context. Someone might say something vile (but legal) on Twitter and get lots of meme GIFs in the replies that advertisers would be very unhappy about, and it's a more direct connection than having your sponsored tweet appear in the chain.
A gif sharing service could provide code to the big embedders (ie. twitter, facebook, whatsapp) which scans for bad words and phrases and decides if a particular gif is to be suggested for posting in that particular conversation. If the conversation isn't advertiser suitable, the user just gets to choose from mundane non-branded gifs.
That should be enough to satisfy most brand advertisers.
That reminds me of how unnaturally “Baby Yoda” spread. They show it one time and suddenly it was all over Reddit (which didn’t shock me, they’re the textbook example of consumer), Giphy, Imgur, etc. Including scenes that hadn’t been revealed yet.
I can only imagine that Disney put some big bucks into advertising to help pivot the SW IP away from the sequel trilogy before additionally pushing hard on their streaming service.
I also imagine Disney made far, far, far more money from any deals with Giphy than Giphy got from Disney. Hence why they’re being thrown around like a stuffed toy.
I think giphy more tried to play the analytics tracking angle. They made it prohibitively difficult to right click > copy .gif url from their site seemingly so they could control sharing through trackable means
Right. the reason why Facebook wanted Giphy was because they can use that to track users and develop deeper profiles to better sell ads to corporations. eg User searches for "drink", and chooses from a picture of Coca Cola or Pepsi, but chooses Pepsi. Coca Cola'll pay to advertise to current Pepsi drinkers.
Advertising within the seller doesn't help "the ecosystem". (auditing, Ad networks, clearing house, more auditing, nsa-ish, etc)
If facebook kept it and integrated on whatsapp (their only upward active user product) then they would sell ads there and that's it.
With them forced to sell to a 3rd party, now that 3rd party will have to offer reverse auctions like every other publisher. Everyone will get their sweet stream of user profiles and "the ecosystem" will be happy. It is very much not invalidated now.
It’s a sensible thesis that appears to be invalidated for now.