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.
