Decade in Review: GIPHY Celebrates 10 Years with All Things Animated
Remember 2013? Vine stars, Beyonce at the Super Bowl, the Harlem Shake? Yeah, neither do we (Beyonce is the exception…she’s unforgettable), but we DO know that’s when GIPHY launched. That’s right, it’s been 10 years of GIPHY and we are celebrating the best way we know how — with all things animated.
In 2023, short form media is ubiquitous. There’s a “GIF button” in all major messaging apps. Looping video dominates the social media landscape. Punctuating your stories with animated stickers isn’t just easy, it’s basically a requirement.
GIPHY is proud to have spearheaded that ubiquity. At every step of the way, we’ve been there to help make the format we love more accessible. First by making GIFs easier to discover, then allowing you to use them on platforms where they had previously been impossible to access. We created accounts to allow creators to take control of their content and distribute it for millions of people to see. We’ve collaborated with some of the biggest entertainment partners to take realtime GIF recaps of live events from the “impossible” to the “commonplace.” And we’ve even evolved what a traditional GIF is, introducing use cases for transparent Stickers and Clips (GIFs with sound).
GIFs are all about being succinct, so we won’t bore you with the details of every little thing we’ve done (because there’s a lot!). Instead, we’ve broken this post down into two chapters through which you can experience GIPHY’s Decade in Review:
- A highlight reel of some of our most proud and even outlandish moments.
- A data-driven look at how GIPHY evolved over 10 years and our current impact today.
Also be sure to check out our homepage for a 2013 throwback (hint: it’s in the trending feed!) and keep an eye on our social accounts for more Decade in Review content and chances to engage with us.
Part 1: 10 Years of GIPHY in Motion
We’re what you would call visual storytellers. So instead of listing out every accomplishment we’re proud of from the past 10 years, we made a video! The video below contains some of our favorite moments and launches from the past decade. From launching our very first creation tools, to GIPHY Studios, GIF vs Jif, a lovely shout-out by Drew Barrymore…(ok, so we listed a few) we are immensely proud of everything our team has done.
While it might seem like magic elves are making all these GIFs, there are many colleagues responsible for bringing GIPHY to life: the teams tasked with sourcing, curating and moderating content from our massive community of media partners, the team responsible for distributing that content via our wide network of integration partners, GIPHY Arts’ undeniable dedication to promoting the works of artists from around the world, GIPHY Studios and our GIPHY brand teams’ efforts to create some of the most popular GIF content on the Internet, and of course the product, data, and engineering teams turning all of this into the functionable platform that we know and love.
Part 2: GIPHY by the Numbers
In this section, we’ll let the numbers speak for themselves in showing how GIPHY’s been such a mainstay in bringing positivity and celebration to online conversations around the world. That’s not an exaggeration when we say around the world. Since its launch in 2013, GIPHY has grown to reach users across 242 countries (by ISO code standards). And if there’s one thing we know about this global user base it’s that they sure love their animated content. When looking at partners whose channels have 10+ billion views we found that there are nearly 180 of them, meaning it’s safe to say GIFs are delivering billions of views of expression all across the globe.
But, as we’ve said before, GIPHY isn’t just GIFs. We’ve evolved into new content formats that allow users to express themselves via Stickers and even with sound via Clips. Throughout the decade we’ve seen a steady growth in new content on GIPHY resulting in an increase of 8,878% in daily average uploads compared to 2013.
Since it’s technically our “birthday,” we decided to stay on theme and also look at one of our most consistent top search terms — “Happy Birthday!” — to see which GIFs have been a mainstay over the past 10 years. To put into context just how popular “Happy Birthday” is on GIPHY, people have spent the equivalent of 4,018,424 hours wishing each other Happy Birthday with this GIF alone. Check out some of the top birthday content, below!
From its roots as a searchable GIF library, GIPHY has grown to be the dominant way Internet users animate their emotions and bring life to their conversations all over the Internet. By understanding GIF searches, we can also understand how people are feeling and reacting. To get a sense of the most prevalent emotions from the past decade we looked at the most popular search terms over this time period. What we found solidified our understanding that GIPHY exists to bring positivity to other people (with a splash of boredom because who hasn’t sent a GIF when there truly isn’t anything else to do?).
The past three years alone have been a wild ride for GIPHY with the acquisition by Meta, the investigation into the acquisition by UK regulators, and now the pending divestiture, so we couldn’t reflect on the past decade without acknowledging this truly unique time in our company’s history. However, while there is some uncertainty in the air in regards to our future, looking back at all we have accomplished in the past ten years has been a thoughtful reminder of what GIPHY is and what GIPHY will always be — a weird, wacky, expressive platform trying to make the Internet a little more animated and a lot more positive.
Stay animated friends and thanks for a really awesome decade of GIFs.
