BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

GIPHY Goes Long On Shortest-Form Video

Following
This article is more than 5 years old.

Getty

Short-form online video is all the rage these days, from YouTube to Jeffrey Katzenberg's unlikely billion-dollar venture Quibi to ShortsTV to Facebook Watch.

But forget all that. If you want short, think really short, like a few seconds, tops. It doesn't need audio, though text overlays help. It doesn't even need video, just a series of autoplaying still images that collectively look like video, built on one of the internet's oldest formats, the GIF.

That's what GIPHY has been doing for years now, bringing together snippets of snarky, funny, poignant or just spot-on brief video-based animations that drop into your text messages to make them so much more interesting.

In the process, GIPHY has been busily cornering what the company calls "conversational search," a segment that Google inexplicably overlooked while crawling and cataloging the rest of the online universe.

"As you’re having conversations, we give you a search box to brings expressions, news, entertainment, media,  all of that, into your conversation," GIPHY CEO Alex Chung told me recently when I caught up with him at the company's pop-culture-coated HQ in New York's Meatpacking District. 
"That’s our contribution to the internet platform," the soft-spoken Chung continued. "Google gave you a reason to research, and search on the web. And we gave you a reason to search while you’re having a conversation because we can bring all the parts of conversation. It’s not just memes and reactions. It’s everything we possibly can talk about." 

The company started in 2011 as a "thought experiment," Chung said. A veteran of the set-top box era of video distribution, Chung pulled together an early directory of all the web's GIFs. Much of that early wasn't very good, particularly safe for work or of adequate technical quality, but there was enough to get him to do more work.

And when the resulting project – putatively shared with just four friends – got loose in the internet wilds, it took off, soon becoming an essential, if practically unnoticed part of just about every messaging platform you've ever heard of.

Using brief animations and other material in messaging has since become an everyday habit for hundreds of millions of smartphone users around the world.

"And if you have that, then you have an ad platform," Chung said.

The company has "tens of thousands" of partnerships with major sports leagues, thousands of brands, media companies, and award shows. All those partners create content for the GIPHY platform that's effectively branded content. And plenty of just plain folks create and upload GIFs too.

These days, while plenty of users still drop in a meme-ish GIF to snark to a friend, increasingly the GIFs they seek are about what's happening in the world. The content, Chung says, is "23/7," for all the hours a day users aren't watching Netflix. And it's all kinds of content, especially from those brands, leagues and media partners.

"Every day we do something with a partner who’s doing an event," Chung said. "We’re giving people topics to talk about. We’ve moved away from a meme to actual news, entertainment, basically anything people are talking about, that’s what we deal with." 

GIPHY says that it serves 7 billion GIFs every day to 500 million daily active users. Now the company is branching into new territory on several fronts, says Chung.

One venture was the company's first-ever film fest, held this month in New York, to celebrate videos 18 seconds or less in length. The Grand Prize winner was Washed Up, by [Atlas] Acopian with drone camera work by Cody Guilfoyle. The 14-second film featured an overhead shot of Acopian on an Icelandic beach as waves wash over [his] body.

“Video doesn’t need to be long to get across an emotion, concept or story,” Acopian said in a statement. “I’m excited GIPHY wanted to do something to celebrate that.”

The film festival is just part of the company's effort to raise its profile while expanding its offerings. It's also a backdoor way to soft-launch GIPHY's new video platform, which will host more than just the winning five films.

This new layer will include actual videos up to 30 seconds in length, with several more types of content layers to come in the next few months.

"We're on the media side, building a short-form Comcast," Chung said.

The video platform isn't GIPHY's first expansion. It previously began offering stickers, little bits of images you can layer on top of a video. Chung says stickers, now omnipresent on most messaging services, allow you to comment on a GIF, functioning like "the commentary, the adjectives" to the main image's "noun."

GIPHY's not alone in the race to own the shortest content on the internet. Vine creator Dom Hoffman announced this week that his next looping-video site will be called Byte, and will launch next spring.

Hoffman told Tubefilter, “I’m working on this because I loved Vine and I want to see things through in another permutation, not because I see opportunity.”

Updated, Dec. 7, 2023: This article has been updated with the name and pronoun of the filmmaker Atlas Acopian.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedInCheck out my website