> $600 million valuation

Holy moly, good luck with that ...

I think there is a place for a company like theirs, at a much smaller valuation, running and making profits. But now that they took VC money on such a high value, they're bound to do all the classic tricks to burn through money keeping the illusion going ...

But if they only make $1/year profit on each of their 200M DAU, the valuation is easily justified. I'm sure FB, Google make much more than that and I haven't clicked on their ads for years.

FB did over a $5/year on a monthly active user in 2016. But they (and Google) are much better positioned at selling ads than a funny gifs engine ever could be.

These are still 200 million pairs of eyes every day on their product. VC funding has looked like a joke recently, but 200million daily users at $600M doesn't seem ridiculous, regardless of how silly/bad the product is.

But that's just users viewing content there, not interacting with the site at all. I'm sure imageshack had those numbers, easily. Until something better (read not monetized) came along to replace it for a while.

You might be right. I've never thought of giphy as just an image hosting platform though. It's more about the integrations with apps that is their edge. Something imageshack/imgur never really nailed.

but how is that integration monetizable?

The moment `/giphy cat` in slack returns sponsored content is the exact moment people will disable it.

Same.

But I think there are variations on this that work/make money.

`/giphy football` could return some relevant superbowl sponsored gif as one of the first N gifs. Kinda like how google gives you 3 "relevant" ads before showing you the actual search content. Start subtle, get more and more brash as time goes and people won't notice. I guess making it work without people leaving is the $600M question.

>> regardless of how silly/bad the product is

Isn't that the classic mistake of projecting your own opinion on that of the many, many other users that are using it?

This is my point. Regardless of how silly I think the product is, 200million other people think differently.

I wouldn't be surprised if they count someone who even views their gifs as a user. I guess at a $3 CPM they could make a buck off me in a year.

Yeah totally agree, raised too much money and won't be able to live up to the hype. Probably could have been bootstrapped into a modest company instead.

> for a gif search engine

And for a really bad one. It's more of a gif aggregator that can give you gifs of approximate themes. But I very rarely find a specific gif I want and I know it exists.

Use RightGif, much better IMHO. It can find really obscure GIFs with ease.

Giphy's Slack integration is a pain point, just pasting in the first result (or just a slot machine type system) is not the best UI. They do better on other platforms, but RightGif tends to get it right the first time.

That said, the valuation is nuts.

Wow it really seems to work better. But sometimes I would like to see several results.

This is impressive

Note they actually acquire the rights to the gifs they show.

That may make the task more difficult, but still, even when I search gifs from very well know series like the Simpsons and I get a bunch of random Simpsons gifs (therefore I assume they got rights for short Simpsons clips) but none is remotely similar to the one I'm looking for. Then I go to google images and there it is among the first results.

Edit: It may have improved a bit lately, but it would be much, much better if they did OCR of text in gifs, and use the context of where the gifs are found (esp. page title) for additional search terms.

If you want Simpsons GIFs, have you checked out Frinkiac?

Yes, currently I know it and use it. It was just an example on top of my head. Other series don't have an equivalent. And of course there's a lot of known gifs that don't come straight from TV. RightGif mentioned in another comment seems to work better for that purpose.

Many of the gifs they show are not owned by the uploader. They acquire the rights in a limited fashion to a small portion of the gifs they show.

They'll of course make the "user generated content" argument, but clipping a video is not user generated content.

How does that actually work? GIFs are often made by random anonymous people and then they just spread. Seems like a big task.

Gifs are a good medium to sell stuff through the influencer model. They might not be setup to do it, though. They seem to just host.

How is giffy worth 600 mill?

200,000,000 daily users is a lot... if they can successfully monetize, that valuation isn't too far off for the amount of potential revenue

Users? Or random browsers on the internet getting a file that happens to be hosted with them?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How can giphy with its current functionality possibility cost that much to run? I feel like it should be able to run for over a century with the amount that it has in the bank right now. Bandwidth is cheap and it's not exactly compute intensive or labor intensive.

I could distribute that thing across a global cluster of VPSes with cheap bandwidth (Vultr, Digital Ocean, OVH) and host it for peanuts. Given that it's drowning in VC money my guess is that it's all at AWS, not using S3, and over-engineered to Juicero levels. They're probably using Kubernetes, a dozen different database and message bus protocols, and a whole sprawling Rube Goldberg machine of a microservices architecture to... host gifs.

... and yeah that nose candy valuation is ludicrous. There is no way.

200M users, 20 MB per user daily (optimistically) gives 4 petabytes per day. I'd say the average user transfer might be way higher in reality so we're talking here dual digit petabytes on daily basis. How much will it cost you on Vultr, Digital Ocean or OVH? I'm asking out of curiosity because I'm not much into hosting, but I think it might be quite expensive after all? ;)

You really think 200M people are transferring 20MB/day of gifs?

If your numbers really are accurate then it underscores the insanity of the valuation. If the costs are intrinsically high then you'd need a high value advertising niche to make this profitable.

I think including bots (like Slack's /giphy) we're easily talking petabytes here.