Facebook has purchased the GIF platform Giphy for a reported $400 million.
Facebook announced that Giphy’s library of content will soon be further integrated into Instagram and the company’s other apps.
“We see the positivity in how people use Giphy in our products today, and we know that bringing the Giphy team’s creativity and talent together with ours will only accelerate how people use visual communication to connect with each other,” Facebook said.
The deal to buy Giphy totals around $400 million, according to Axios, which first broke the news about the purchase.
“We look forward to continuing to make your everyday conversations more fun, more entertaining, and more you — all from our new home at Instagram,” Giphy wrote in a blog post after the announcement.
Giphy hosts millions of graphic interchange formats, or GIFs, of all sorts of content from clips of TV shows to memes, which are commonly integrated into messaging apps to give users a way to express themselves.
This includes being used in Facebook and its related apps, which the company says accounts for half of all Giphy’s traffic.
Giphy is expected to maintain its own brand presence, with its own library of GIFs, and Facebook assures users that they will still be able to upload GIFs and that developers and other API users will continue to have the same access to Giphy content as before.
“We will continue to make GIPHY openly available to the wider ecosystem,” the Giphy team confirmed.
“By bringing Instagram and Giphy together, we can make it easier for people to find the perfect GIFs and stickers in Stories and Direct,” Facebook said.
Facebook has not yet announced when Giphy will be fully integrated into Instagram and its other apps.
