Bought for 400 million in 2020 by Meta, the Giphy platform has just been sold.
And it’s Shutterstock who wins the bet, paying barely 13% of the initial sum.
Buying Giphy was not a genius idea…
In 2020, Facebook bought the Giphy platform, which specializes in GIFs, for $400 million. Like the current situation between Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard, this transaction quickly raised eyebrows with the British competition authority, which opened an investigation.
After two long years of proceedings, the verdict fell, and the Meta company was then ordered to resell Giphy to the highest bidder. TechCrunch explains that the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued its final verdict last January, leaving Meta a period of 6 months to resell Giphy.
Shutterstock is full of GIFs
And so this is the platform Shutterstock who got their hands on Giphy, against the sum… of 53 million dollars. Recall that the British regulator had estimated that the takeover of Giphy by Meta was likely to cause negative effects on the online advertising and social media markets.
If Meta has signed a commercial agreement allowing it to continue to exploit the many GIFs hosted by Giphy, the American group has only recovered 13% of its initial bet. The transaction should be completed during the month of June.
In total, the vast library of GIFs and other stickers offered by GIPHY attracts more than 1.3 billion search queries every day, and generates more than 15 billion daily impressions. In addition, Giphy has no less than 14,000 API/SDK partners.
For the Facebook user, nothing changes therefore, the GIFs are still accessible, but for the parent company Meta, this is yet another blow in this year 2023, already weighed down by a major wave of layoffs.
Source : TechCrunch
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