Facebook resells Giphy to Shutterstock, at a much lower amount than it had mobilized to acquire the platform specializing in gifs.
It’s clearly not the best week for Meta, Facebook’s parent company. On May 22, the American company was sanctioned by the Irish data protection authority. Amount of the fine: 1.2 billion euros. On the 23rd, the company recorded the sale of Giphy, a platform specializing in gifs. The site, bought at a golden price in 2020, is sold for a fraction of this price.
It is the Shutterstock service which becomes the new owner of Giphy, at a price of 53 million dollars. It’s a financial disaster for the social networking giant, because the resale price only covers a very small portion of the starting amount to afford Giphy: around $400 million, according to estimates at the time. THE deal today is almost eight times lower.
The refusal of the British regulator
Meta’s ambitions with Giphy began to seriously falter barely a month after the takeover was announced in May 2020. At that time, the UK regulator launched an investigation. Then in October of the same year, a first fine of 60 million euros was pronounced by the institution, sanctioning the bad cooperation of Meta.
Specifically, the authority blamed Meta for having ” knowingly infringed » an injunction obliging him to transmit information about the takeover of Giphy. She also noted a rapprochement between the two entities, while the investigation was still ongoing. It was from this period that we began to see the specter of a blockage of redemption.
In November, the ax fell: the British regulator demanded that Facebook sell the Giphy platform. The social network has certainly appealed, but without success, the competition appeal court confirming the decision of the authority on almost all of the disputed grounds (5 out of 6). In October 2022, the authority issued a new opinion: the buyout is too problematic, you have to give up.
For Facebook, the case quickly to industrial disaster. Both for the difference between the two sums at stake, but also for the reconciliation in progress for three years which has been reduced to nothing. It is also a miss at Google, which has also embarked on a process of buying a gif platform with Tenor, in 2018. Except that he was able to reach the end of the acquisition.
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