Facebook Buys GIPHY for $400 Million
Mushon Heinisch — May 19, 2020 Facebook has announced it has acquired GIPHY for a whopping $ 400 million.
Pretty fly for a GIF site, no?
But, what does it really mean, and how will it impact eCommerce advertisers and users? According to Facebook, max engagement potential. Announcing the ‘merger,’ Facebook has this to say:
“A lot of people in our community already know and love GIPHY. In fact, 50% of GIPHY’s traffic comes from the Facebook family of apps, half of that from Instagram alone. By bringing Instagram and GIPHY together, we can make it easier for people to find the perfect GIFs and stickers in Stories and Direct.”
But is GIPHY, which is the most popular GIF database with 500 million daily active users, worth this hefty price tag, just make it easier for Facebook’s users to share really cool cat-wearing-sunglasses GIFs?
Well, the full answer probably relies on what Facebook does best – data analysis. Facebook is no stranger to using data-rich acquisitions to learn about its rivals. It acquired the VPN app Onavo, in 2013, which it later used it to gather data about apps like WhatsApp. The Onavo data proved that users were sending far more messages on WhatsApp than on Messenger, which helped to justify paying $ 19 billion for the competing app.
And GIPHY knows a lot about its users.
Going on vacation? Planning to buy a new car? Looking for new shoes, dog food, or a place to live? You probably shared a related GIF about it.
If you’re thinking to yourself, “But, the Zuck already knows I’m planning to buy a new Air Jordan shoes because I’m sharing it on Instagram stories or WhatsApp”… Then, the question you should be asking yourself instead is, what about all that juicy data shared on Twitter, Snapchat, Telegram, or TikTok?
GIPHY is integrated into a whole bunch of social media platforms using its unique SDK and API. That means Facebook is about to get a lot of information! Please note that, in Telegram, GIPHY can see the search term but does not see any user data and does not know who the user is.
Twitter reports having 152 million active users, Snapchat reported its daily active users are reaching to 218 million already, Telegram has 400 million and TikTok has 500 million users. And all these social platforms are integrated with GIPHY, which means a colossal database Facebook has had no access to it – up until now, that is.
And what will Facebook do with all this new information access? You guessed it right; sell ads!
Facebook will make its audience targeting methods even better so advertisers can bid for the most accurate users to get the best results possible. This means that if you advertise on Facebook, as many of StoreYa customers do, you will be able to get better targeting options and larger daily reach for each specific targeting audiences. Simply put, better ROAS, more sales, or both.
It may take some time for the deal to actually go through, but when it does, the combination of this and the new lower Facebook CPMs already reported, will make Facebook Ads an even bigger opportunity for advertisers than it is already.
So, in a nutshell, this good news to all you Facebook Ads advertisers. And if you ask me, good news to Facebook users as well! Why? Because to a user, there’s nothing more annoying than seeing irrelevant ads in your feed, and ads are about to get relevant AF – or more so than they are now.
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