STATE OF THE GIF: GIPHY 2016

Published in

ART + marketing

5 min readOct 26, 2016

2016 was a great year for the GIF and for GIPHY. We saw GIF search in Slack, FB Messenger, Twitter, Microsoft Outlook, Google GBoard, iMessage, Tinder, Bumble, Whisper, Telegram, Viber and countless others…all powered by GIPHY.

We’re proud to have contributed our small part along with all our friends in the GIF community: the artists, the startups and everyone who says GIF, hard or soft G.

GIPHY IS ALL THE GIFS

We built the first GIF search engine and the first GIF API. We helped bring GIFs to social networks and introduced GIFs to messaging. We are always building the best GIF creation tools. It all adds up to form the largest GIF sharing audience on mobile, desktop and everything in between.

GIPHY serves more than 1 billion GIFs per DAY, and growing.
GIFs via GIPHY are seen by more than 100 million Daily Active Users.
GIF viewers via GIPHY watch more than 2 million hours of GIFs per DAY.

GIPHY IS CULTURE

GIPHY works with thousands of official content partners every day to help them define and drive culture. We help their characters and mascots become part of everyday conversations. We help their players become a part of self-expression. We turn their brands into works of GIF art.

Everyone from Barack Obama to Lady Gaga to Conan O’Brien to Paul McCartney to Spencer Pratt relies on GIPHY. No matter who you are or what you do, GIPHY helps everyone get their point across.

For the 20th anniversary of South Park, we partnered with Viacom and South Park Studios to create the definitive GIF library of all 20 seasons. They’ve already seen over 830m views.

GIPHY IS REAL TIME

We’ve been live-GIFing events since the very beginning of GIPHY. We perfected the process this year. It’s not uncommon to have a GIPHY-assisted live-GIF every night of the week now! This is how just a few of our event partners have performed recently:

New York Fashion Week: 106m+ views
MTV VMAS: 355m+ views
Tony Awards: 250m+ views
iHeartRadio Festival: 250m+ views
FOX’s Empire: 360m+ views
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: 500m+ views

This season, we partnered with SNL, pioneers of live TV, to live-GIF every broadcast from our offices in New York and create the definitive GIF library of Saturday Night Live.

This year’s U.S. presidential election has commanded the attention of a global audience. GIPHY has been covering the 2016 Election as an official partner of the DNC and RNC. We’re live GIFing every convention, every debate and every key moment. So far, the GIFs created during this election season have more than 1 Billion views.

GIPHY IS ART

GIPHY Arts is a community of thousands of the best GIF artists in the world. Collectively their art has generated more than 20 billion GIF views. A few notable artists such as Denyse Mitterhoffer has more than 300m GIF views and G1ft3d has more than 330m GIF views across their channel pages.

This year we also fulfilled a dream project that has been in the works since the early days of GIPHY: an IRL GIF art gallery show in NYC. GIPHY, along with the curatorial help of Rhizome, commissioned the stunning work of 25 GIF artists. Loop Dreams drew thousands of people and is the first of many more to come.

GIPHY STUDIOS

In April, we launched GIPHY Studios in LA as an agency and studio dedicated to the GIF. GIPHY Studios clients include Nike, McDonalds, NBCU, Converse, Nestlé, Toyota, FOX, Chobani, Interscope, Paramount and Red Bull among many others.

GIPHY Studios Originals — GIFs created by our in-house artists and commissioned works from our global artist network — have generated more than 1 billion views since April. Our artists are experimenting with video, traditional illustration, stop motion animation, 3D animation, and even puppetry.

GIPHY IS MOBILE

We’ve made it easy to use GIFs on your phone no matter what you’re doing.

“The GIPHY search app is so fast and simple, it almost makes words feel obsolete.” — Apple
GIPHY Cam was one of Apple’s top 25 apps for 2015.
GIPHY for iMessage is the #1 GIF iMessage app in the store and #3 free iMessage app overall.

GIFs in chat apps, GIFs in iMessage, GIFs in your keyboard, creating GIFs, searching for GIFs. GIPHY made GIFs go mobile.

GIPHY IS HERE TO STAY

GIPHY has recently raised more than $75m, including its Series C from previous investors, joined by new investor GV (formerly Google Ventures). All of this guarantees we have everything we need to continue pushing GIF technology, GIF culture, GIF content, GIF art and continue supporting the GIF community.

GIPHY IS THANKFUL

2016 has been a coming of age year for the GIF and for GIPHY. We’re honored to be a part of the growing GIF community of creators, users and startups and hope to collaborate with everyone who is a fan of the GIF. And for that, we’d like to say thank you.

We promise we will always be champions of the GIF, its creators, its contributors and everyone who loves the loop. We can’t wait for 2017.