Facebook Acquires Giphy

MAY 15 2020 · 12:00

Saturday Night Live's Mark Zuckerberg sketch. Facebook bought Giphy for roughly $400M in May 2020, then was forced by UK regulators to unwind the deal. Place: Facebook (now Meta), Menlo Park · Giphy, New York Figures: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook · Alex Chung, CEO of Giphy · Vishal Shah, VP Product at Instagram · the UK Competition and Markets Authority, who will spend the next three years deciding this was a bad idea On 15 May 2020 Facebook announces it has agreed to acquire Giphy (see [[giphy-founded-2013]]) for approximately $400 million. The deal is announced eight weeks into the global COVID-19 lockdown; messaging volume on Meta properties is at record highs. The strategic logic is laid out plainly in internal documents that will later become public during the CMA investigation: Giphy supplies a majority of GIFs across Instagram, WhatsApp, and most rival messaging platforms; owning the layer matters more than the $400 million price. Giphy at acquisition is serving roughly 10 billion GIFs per day across partner APIs. The platform's previous funding round, in 2016, valued it at $600 million. Meta is paying a discount to the last private valuation, in exchange for control of a substantial portion of the format's distribution infrastructure.