What Facebook Wants To Do With Giphy

Ilustrasi Facebook (Photo by Alex Haney on Unsplash)

JAKARTA - Facebook has acquired the Giphy platform worth 400 million US dollars, equivalent to Rp6 trillion. The plan is that the company owned by Mark Zuckerberg wants to integrate all Giphy content into Instagram and Facebook.

Launching The Verge, Giphy is a platform for sharing images or short videos in the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) format, which was founded in 2013. With this purchase, at least Facebook wants to make it easier for users to share their work, be it memes or GIFs.

"Both of our services are big supporters of the creator and artist community. Therefore, we want to integrate the GIF library into Instagram and our other applications so that users can find the right way to express themselves," Facebook said in a statement, Monday, May 18.

In fact, Facebook has been using the interface from Giphhy for a long time for its platforms, both Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. Even in 2015, this social network created by Mark Zuckerberg has tried to bid on Giphy.

It's just that at that time, Giphy still wanted to partner with many other social media companies, including on Twitter, TikTok and iMessage. At least 50 percent of Giphy content is used on multiple social media every day.

The acquisition of Giphy by Facebook has also raised a big question mark among its users. This is because Facebook's reputation in managing users' personal data is not very good. For example, the Cambridge Analytica scandal or the Facebook bug problem that often shares user data with third-party developers.

On the other hand, it is also not clear whether Facebook will ban Giphy from being used by other social media platforms. Because it is known that Giphy still has an online database that can be operated independently.

"People will still be able to upload GIFs, just as developers and API partners will continue to have the same access to the Giphy API and the Giphy creative community will still be able to create great content," said vice president of Instagram products, Vishal Shah.