Internationalization support for a global audience
Gfycat has always had a very international audience. Our users come from all over the world to create delightful content and share it with the world on social media. This allows a worldwide audience to create visually enticing stories without the need for language overlays.
We did notice though that our international creators were less prone to adding titles to their content. In some cases, they did not have access to an English keyboard. So we decided to do something about it, by supporting UTF-8, a character encoding standard capable of encoding all possible characters in Unicode. This includes character sets used for most languages including Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and mathematical symbols and emojis among others.
We launched UTF-8 support a few weeks ago and are now seeing much more adoption of adding titles internationally. These titles are directly relevant to our search engine and greatly enhance the discoverability of GIFs on Gfycat.
To celebrate, we share this awesome GIF of a baby elephant drinking milk with a title in both Japanese and English. 素晴らしいね
