If you think about it for more than 2 moments you will see that owning Giphy allows Facebook to see which chat apps you're using (via the api key for the app's Giphy integration) and who you're talking to on them (by attaching an id to each gif similar to how tracking pixels work in email.) Most chat clients automatically load images, triggering the tracker.

This gives Facebook unprecedented visibility into the user counts, usage patterns, and social graph of any chat app with a Giphy integration. These apps compete with Facebook's own chat apps.

But it's just gifs, lol roflface. The shortsightedness of everyone on this thread who are all just too happy to hand everything to monopolies.

Could you provide an example of a competitor app that integrates Giphy? It feels like a lot of people _think_ this is the explanation, but the chat apps I use defer gifs to the keyboard.

Signal, for one.

Apple's Messages utilizes Giphy in their images search. I constantly see "Via Giphy from #images" tagged under gifs my gf sends me.

Discord has /giphy and Slack does as well, although Slack's is via addon. Slack considers this addon an Essential App which gives it top billing on their marketplace.

In addition to the others mentioned: Google Keyboard, Snapchat stickers, Instagram stickers. I think also Telegram

It would be more difficult to think of a popular chat app that doesn’t easily have Giphy available.

Giphy's primary functionality is pissing off people trying to use Google Image Search to find an actual .gif file only to find nothing but silent videos pretending to be gifs.

> nothing but silent videos pretending to be gifs.

Actually a good use of tech, does google image search allow searching silent videos ?