Facebook has made another prey on its campaign of conquering the whole internet. Today, Mark Zuckerberg’s company announced that it is acquiring the popular GIF-sharing platform, Giphy. According to the report, the deal cost Facebook over $400 million and its plan is to integrate the Giphy library in Instagram and other Facebook-related services like WhatsApp and Messenger.
Facebook’s integration with the platform comes from long ago. The platform allows users to share, make, and edit GIFs. Currently, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram all work with the library. Moreover, Facebook states that about 50% of the Giphy traffic comes from the company’s services.
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If you’re a user of Giphy, don’t worry. At least for the near future, Facebook doesn’t intend to do any drastic changes on the platform. For now, Giphy will be part of the Instagram team and will allow users to share GIFs in stories and private messages. In the future, we may see the company expanding Giphy’s presence in other services. Or in the worst-case scenario, at least for Giphy-only users, the service will be integrated in one of Facebook apps.
Facebook’s strategy of buying platforms comes from a distant past. If you recall, neither Instagram or WhatsApp was originally part of the social media conglomerate. Instagram was bought by around $1 billion, while WhatsApp cost $16 billion. Near these two platforms, the GIF platform seems like a “weekend-purchase”.
I really doubt the numbers that the Americans publish, 1B, 16B, richest man and all that… My mind tells me this is another propaganda to show the world that they own the most money in the world…