GIfs

An animated chronicle of the GIF, from CompuServe in 1987 to the post-TikTok afterlife. The format that refused to die, told as moments. Built from The GIF Oracle by Ludwig Vonmesser (https://gif-oracle.vercel.app/) — 73 moments across 7 eras.

A chronological documentary of 73 moments spanning 1963–2026 on Loreline.

last updated 2026-07-21

1. 1963-01-15 — Sketchpad and the Light Pen. Lissajous figures tracing on a CRT. Sketchpad ran in 1963 on a 7-inch oscilloscope tube wired to the TX-2 mainframe. Place: MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, Massachusetts Figures: Ivan Sutherland, 24, doctoral candidate · Claude Shannon, thesis advisor · Marvin Minsky and Steven Coons, thesis committee · the TX-2 mainframe Ivan Sutherland defends his PhD thesis at MIT in January 1963. The artifact: Sketchpad, an interactive graphics program running on the TX-2 mainframe at Lincoln Lab. The user draws with a light pen directly on the CRT. The system snaps lines to constraints, infers rectangles from rough sketches, lets the artist define a master shape and instance it across the canvas. Object-oriented graphics, vector primitives, and constraint solvers all arrive in one 88,000-word document. The hardware is hardly portable. The TX-2 fills a room. The CRT is a 7-inch military-surplus oscilloscope tube. The light pen is wired with a thumb-switch. None of this matters. The interaction model, the artist pointing AT the image and the image responding, is the conceptual ancestor of every painting program, every CAD package, every photo editor, and every web-canvas tool that the next sixty years will produce. Video: The 1963 demonstration film of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad running on the TX-2 at MIT Lincoln Lab.
2. 1975 — The Utah Teapot. A cubic Bezier curve constructing itself. Newell built the Utah teapot from 32 bicubic Bezier patches in 1975. Place: University of Utah Computer Graphics Lab, Salt Lake City Figures: Martin Newell, graduate researcher · Sandra Newell, his wife, who suggested the teapot over afternoon tea · Jim Blinn, Ed Catmull, and the Utah graphics cohort Martin Newell needs a test object for his rendering research at Utah. The object has to be familiar (so rendering errors are obvious), mathematically interesting (curvature, handle, spout, lid), and small enough that the geometry fits in 1975-era memory. His wife Sandra suggests the Melitta teapot on their kitchen table. He sketches it on graph paper, measures the control points by eye, and encodes it as 32 bicubic Bezier patches. The teapot, modeled in an afternoon, has the perfect surface topology for testing: a hole through the handle, a non-convex spout, a flat lid that catches light differently than the curved body, a base that demonstrates shadow accuracy. It is, by accident, the most pedagogically useful test object computer graphics has ever had. The original physical teapot now sits in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Video: Tom Scott visits the Computer History Museum to tell the story of Martin Newell's 1975 reference object.
3. 1982-09-19 — Scott Fahlman Proposes :-). Smiling eyes, blinking mouth. Scott Fahlman's :-) gets a moving descendant decades later. Place: Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science bboard, Pittsburgh Figures: Scott Fahlman, research professor · the CMU CS faculty and graduate students reading the cs.general bboard The CMU computer science department runs an internal bulletin-board system. Recent threads have been getting derailed because nobody can tell which posts are jokes. On 19 September 1982 at 11:44 a.m., Scott Fahlman posts a 19-line message proposing a solution. The full text:I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers::-)Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use:-(The post is read by a few dozen CMU researchers. It propagates from CMU to Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and the early ARPAnet within months. By the late 1980s the emoticon is a standard component of email and Usenet etiquette. Video: Scott Fahlman, in his own words, on the 11:44 a.m. CMU bulletin-board post that proposed :-) in 1982.
4. 1984-01-24 — MacPaint Ships. A pixel-art monster drawn frame by frame. MacPaint, shipped January 1984, made this kind of bitmap painting consumer software. Place: Apple Computer, Cupertino, California Figures: Bill Atkinson, lead developer · Susan Kare, icon and pattern designer · the original Macintosh team 24 January 1984. Steve Jobs unveils the Macintosh at the Flint Center in Cupertino. The 128K machine ships with two applications in the box: MacWrite and MacPaint. MacPaint is Bill Atkinson's, written in roughly 5,800 lines of Pascal and 2,700 lines of 68000 assembly. The canvas is 576x720, one bit per pixel, pure black-and-white. There is a brush palette, a fill bucket, a lasso, a marquee selector, and eight patterns designed by Susan Kare. The interaction model is descended directly from Sketchpad (see [[sketchpad-1963]]) but stripped to consumer simplicity. A child can use it. By the end of 1984, hundreds of thousands of Macintosh owners have produced bitmap images. The medium has, for the first time, a mass amateur production base. The PICT format that MacPaint saves to is the first consumer image format with real adoption. Video: Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld walk through MacPaint at the Computer History Museum.
5. 1984 — ANSI Art and the BBS Scene. Glitched pixels scrolling past. The visual descendants of ANSI block characters lighting up dial-up BBS screens. Place: The worldwide BBS scene; ACiD Productions, iCE Advertisements, the warez and demo BBSes Figures: RaD Man, co-founder of ACiD Productions (1990, with Shadow Demon, Grimm, The Beholder, Phantom) · Many Axe (later Frozen Tormentor), founder of iCE (1991, founded in Canada) · the artist scenes of Toronto, Montreal, Detroit, the European 4-color cracker boards The IBM PC ships with Code Page 437, an extended ASCII set that includes block characters (▀ ▄ █ ░ ▒ ▓), box-drawing characters (─ │ ┌ ┐ └ ┘ ╔ ╗), and assorted geometric primitives. Combine those 256 glyphs with the PC's 16 text-mode colors, drop them on an 80x25 character grid, and you have a working image format that transmits over a 1200-baud line in about three seconds. The image is the screen. By 1984 every serious BBS has an opening screen done in ANSI. ACiD Productions (1990) and iCE Advertisements (1991) formalize the scene as competing art groups, releasing monthly art packs distributed via the boards themselves. Some pieces are loading-screen ads for warez BBSes; some are gallery pieces with no commercial purpose. Resolution: 80x25. Palette: 16. File extension: .ANS. Some of the best of it survives in archive.org's textfiles.com mirror. Video: Jason Scott's ARTSCENE episode tells the history of the ANSI art crews who turned Code Page 437 into a scene.
6. 1985 — PCX, the IBM PC Bitmap. Vaporwave paint loop. ZSoft PC Paintbrush ships the PCX format and teaches DOS to draw. Place: ZSoft Corporation, Marietta, Georgia Figures: ZSoft engineering team · the PC Paintbrush user base ZSoft ships PC Paintbrush for the IBM PC in 1985. The companion file format, PCX (PC Paintbrush eXchange), is purpose-built for the program: header, palette, raster data, RLE-compressed run by run. Simple enough that a competent C programmer can write a decoder in an afternoon. By 1988 PCX is the dominant bitmap format on MS-DOS, supported by every PC paint program, every screen-capture utility, and every fax driver of the era. The compression is run-length encoding: a byte indicating how many consecutive pixels share a color, then the color. On screenshots and line art the ratios are excellent. On photographic or dithered imagery they are catastrophic; a typical PCX of a scanned photograph is LARGER than the raw bitmap. The format never solves this. RLE has a ceiling that LZW (see [[lzw-patent-1985]]) does not. Video: LGR traces the line from ZSoft PC Paintbrush and its PCX format through every Microsoft Paint revision.
7. 1985 — Barnsley's Fractal Compression. The Barnsley fern assembling under iterated function system rules. Barnsley's 1985 papers proposed compressing the equation instead of the pixels. Place: Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta; later Iterated Systems Inc., Norcross, Georgia Figures: Michael Barnsley, mathematician · Alan Sloan, co-founder of Iterated Systems · the IFS (iterated function system) research community Michael Barnsley publishes the Collage Theorem in 1985. The idea: any image can be approximated as the fixed point of a contractive iterated function system, a small set of affine transformations that, applied recursively, converge to the original picture. Store the transformations, throw away the pixels. The compression ratios on suitable imagery are spectacular, sometimes 100-to-1 or better. The Sierpinski triangle compresses to four numbers. A fern compresses to twenty-eight. Barnsley and Alan Sloan found Iterated Systems in 1987 to commercialize the idea. The encoder, which has to FIND the contractive transformations, is wildly expensive (hours per image on 1980s hardware). The decoder is fast and resolution-independent: the same compressed file renders at any output size. It is, on paper, the ideal format for the bandwidth-constrained future. Video: The chaos game and Barnsley fern, the iterated function systems behind Michael Barnsley's 1985 compression idea.
8. 1985-08-20 — The LZW Patent. Handcuffs and paperclips. Unisys patents LZW compression and quietly arms the lawsuit clock. Place: Sperry Corporation (later Unisys), patent USPTO 4,558,302 Figures: Terry Welch, author of the 1984 Communications of the ACM paper on LZ-Welch compression Terry Welch publishes A Technique for High-Performance Data Compression in IEEE Computer in June 1984. The paper describes a variant of Lempel-Ziv that uses a dictionary built on the fly during compression, so the decompressor can reconstruct the dictionary without it being sent. The compression ratios are excellent on the kind of repetitive bitmap data computer graphics produce. Sperry Corporation files for a patent. USPTO 4,558,302 issues on 10 December 1985 to Sperry. By the time CompuServe ships the GIF format two years later (see [[compuserve-ships-gif87a-1987]]), LZW is the only commercially-viable compression algorithm for the image data the format needs to carry. The format and the patent travel together for the next fifteen years. Video: Professor Brailsford explains the Lempel and Ziv dictionary lineage that Terry Welch's 1984 paper extended into LZW.
9. 1986 — TIFF, the Prepress Format. Inkjet doing its thing. Aldus releases TIFF so desktop publishers can move pages between scanners and printers. Place: Aldus Corporation, Seattle, Washington Figures: Aldus engineering team · the desktop-publishing vendor consortium · Adobe (post-1994 acquirer of Aldus and steward of the spec) Aldus Corporation, maker of PageMaker, releases Tagged Image File Format revision 3.0 in 1986. The brief: a single format that scanner vendors, prepress houses, color-separation services, and the new desktop-publishing software can all agree on. The solution is structural. A TIFF file is a header followed by an arbitrary number of image file directories, each containing tagged fields (resolution, color depth, compression, photometric interpretation, calibration data) and pointing at a strip or tile of raster data. The format supports 1-bit, 8-bit, 24-bit, 48-bit, multi-channel. CMYK. Lab. ICC color profiles. LZW was added in TIFF Revision 5.0 (October 1988), NOT in 6.0 (1992). JPEG was added in 6.0 (June 1992). Multiple images per file, multiple resolutions per image. It is, by 1992, the most powerful raster format in existence. A standard PageMaker workflow can produce TIFFs that are hundreds of megabytes.
10. 1987 — CompuServe Ships GIF87a. An interlaced GIF loading frame by frame over a simulated 28.8k modem, the exact viewing experience GIF87a was engineered to deliver to CompuServe subscribers. Place: CompuServe, Columbus, Ohio Figures: Steve Wilhite, lead developer · the CompuServe graphics team CompuServe needs an image format its subscribers can actually download. The competitors of 1987: JPEG was approved as ITU-T T.81 in September 1992 (five years after GIF87a), not two years. If 'standardization' is being measured against JPEG's earliest draft work, the working group was already organized in 1986; in either reading, 'two years from standardization' in 1987 is inaccurate., various platform-specific bitmaps (PCX, BMP) that don't compress well over a 1200-baud line. Steve Wilhite's team picks LZW (see [[lzw-patent-1985]]) for the compression and designs a container around it. The spec is small: a header, a logical-screen descriptor, optional global color table, a series of image blocks with local color tables, and a trailer. 256 colors maximum. Lossless. Cross-platform. Released to subscribers on 15 June 1987 as a free standard, with the famous note: GIF is intended as a free and open standard. The patent footnote will come later. Video: A short walk through the LZW dictionary scheme that Wilhite's team wrapped a header and color table around in 1987.
11. 1990 — XAnim and Cross-Platform Playback. Newton's cradle as an animated GIF, the kind of small looping demo Unix users opened in XAnim through the early 1990s. Place: University of New Hampshire FTP site; later widely mirrored Figures: Mark Podlipec, author and sole maintainer Mark Podlipec releases XAnim in 1990 from his FTP site at the University of New Hampshire. It is a Unix command-line viewer that plays animated formats on the X Window System: GIF, FLI, FLC, IFF/ANIM, AVI, QuickTime MOV, MPEG, plus dozens of obscurer formats added over the years. The codebase is a single sprawling C project that compiles on any Unix with a frame buffer and Xlib. Through the early-to-mid 1990s, XAnim is the reference implementation for animated-GIF playback outside CompuServe's own Windows decoder. If a Unix workstation can display animation at all, it is because XAnim is installed. Sun, SGI, NeXT, HP-UX, AIX, every academic Unix box of the era. Podlipec maintains the codebase alone, releasing updates roughly monthly through 1996.
12. 1990-07-31 — GIF89a and the Frame Loop. The canonical rotating Earth, the looping behavior that GIF89a's frame delay and graphic control blocks made possible. Place: CompuServe, Columbus, Ohio Figures: Steve Wilhite · CompuServe graphics team The 1989 revision adds application extension blocks: arbitrary metadata containers inside the file. One of them, the Netscape Navigator 2.0 application extension (added to common implementations in 1996), specifies a loop count. Combined with the format's existing ability to store multiple image frames and a per-frame delay, this turns the GIF from a still-image format into an animation container that any modern browser will autoplay. It is, in retrospect, a quiet revolution. The Web of 1996 has video as a download-and-launch-a-player affair. The GIF gives the page itself the ability to move. Video: Tumblr's David Karp hands Wilhite the lifetime achievement Webby. Wilhite's five-word speech is itself a GIF.
13. 1992-09-15 — JPEG Standardized. JPEG quality sweep from Q90 to Q100 looped as a GIF, demonstrating the lossy tradeoff JPEG made standard in 1992. Place: ISO/IEC, Geneva (JTC 1/SC 29/WG 1) Figures: Joint Photographic Experts Group, chaired by Gregory K. Wallace · the ISO/IEC working group on still-image compression JPEG is approved as ITU-T Recommendation T.81 in September 1992 (published as ISO/IEC 10918-1 in 1994), five years after the GIF (see [[compuserve-ships-gif87a-1987]]) and four years before PNG (see [[png-released-1996]]). The technical premise is the opposite of GIF's: lossy compression optimized for photographs, using the discrete cosine transform to discard frequency information the human eye cannot easily perceive. Compression ratios of 10:1 to 50:1 are achievable with minimal perceptible loss on photographic content. On 256-color iconographic images, JPEG performs worse than GIF and introduces visible artifacts. On 16-million-color photographs, JPEG performs better than any lossless format by an order of magnitude. The two formats are designed for different content. The web of 1995 onward will use both, side by side, on the same pages. Video: Mike Pound opens Computerphile's JPEG series by explaining what the 1992 ISO standard actually specifies.
14. 1993-04-15 — Mosaic Renders the GIF Inline. The NCSA Mosaic logo, itself a GIF, from the browser that put inline images into the document and built the visual grammar of the early web. Place: NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Figures: Marc Andreessen, 21, lead developer · Eric Bina, principal engineer · the NCSA software development group Tim Berners-Lee's original WorldWideWeb browser at CERN displays images in separate windows. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, working on Mosaic at NCSA, decide images should appear inside the document, alongside the text, autoplaying their animations the moment the page renders. They implement the IMG tag with this behavior in Mosaic 1.0, shipped April 1993, free for Unix, Mac, and Windows. The format of choice is the GIF (see [[compuserve-ships-gif87a-1987]]). JPEG is too new and photographic; XBM is monochrome and ugly; PCX and BMP do not compress for the modem-speed web. The GIF's 256-color palette, LZW compression, and small headers make it the only image format a 1993 web server can serve at scale and a 1993 browser can render before the user gives up. Video: An NCSA-era walkthrough of Mosaic sent to the US Copyright Office around 1994. Inline images, click-and-load.
15. 1993 — The First Web GIF. An under construction bulldozer GIF, the genre of small decorative loop that defined the inline-image web the moment Mosaic shipped. Place: CERN, Geneva; early NCSA-adjacent academic web servers Figures: Robert Cailliau, co-author of the WWW proposal · various unnamed academic webmasters There is no canonical record of the first GIF embedded in an HTML page on the public web. The candidates are all from 1993, all academic, all small. Horizontal-rule decorations on early NCSA pages. The LE GROUPE iconography on Robert Cailliau's CERN homepage. NASA mission badges on JPL's earliest web server. A geological survey map on a USGS page that may or may not predate any of them. What is documented: by mid-1993, GIFs are appearing on dozens of academic web servers worldwide, all rendered inline by Mosaic (see [[mosaic-1993]]). The format moves from CompuServe-internal to web-public in a single quarter. The transition is not announced; it is observed in server logs. Video: info.cern.ch rendered inside NCSA Mosaic. The earliest web GIFs lived on academic servers exactly like this.
16. 1994 — The Under Construction Sign. The canonical animated UNDER CONSTRUCTION sign, the universal placeholder that decorated half the personal homepages of the late 1990s. Place: Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, every personal homepage of the decade Figures: anonymous · copied without attribution · embedded in millions of pages The animated UNDER CONSTRUCTION sign emerges sometime in 1994-1995, no single author credited, as the universal placeholder for an unfinished section of a personal homepage. The canonical version: orange-and-black diagonal hazard stripes as a banner, the word UNDER CONSTRUCTION in bold sans, often accompanied by a small animated gopher in a hard hat swinging a shovel, or a flashing yellow police light, or a JCB-style digger with a rotating cab. Variants proliferate within months. There is a Geocities-blue version. A NASCAR version. A pink-glitter version for the Hollywood neighborhood. A tiny 88x31 BUTTON version for sidebars. None of the versions credits a creator. The GIF travels through right-click-save-as for years before anyone notices nobody knows who drew it. Video: A scrolling timelapse through hundreds of preserved GeoCities pages. The under-construction sign appears so often it functions as a sample rate.
17. 1994-11-15 — GeoCities Launches. The GeoCities branding banner served from geocities.com itself, the suburb-themed Web 1.0 city that gave amateurs a home. Place: Beverly Hills Internet, Beverly Hills, California Figures: David Bohnett, co-founder · John Rezner, co-founder Beverly Hills Internet, a small Los Angeles ISP, launches a free-hosting product called GeoCities on 15 November 1994. The organizing metaphor is geographic: signups pick a NEIGHBORHOOD (Hollywood for entertainment, SiliconValley for tech, Athens for philosophy, Tokyo for anime, RodeoDrive for shopping) and receive a street address inside it. Two megabytes of disk, an FTP account, no charge. By 1997 the company drops the Beverly Hills Internet name, rebrands as GeoCities, and crosses one million HOMESTEADERS. The neighborhoods will be quietly retired in 1999 in favor of flat URLs, but the early naming convention geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/4242 survives in millions of inbound links and is the reason every Wayback capture of the era reads like an address book of the imaginary. Video: A retrospective on the neighborhood model, the homesteader boom, and the Yahoo collapse, with screen-captures of original 1996-era pages.
18. 1994-12-28 — Unisys Enforces the LZW Patent. A flame GIF in the spirit of the Burn All GIFs campaign that the Unisys LZW enforcement announcement ignited in the week between Christmas and New Year 1994. Place: Unisys Corporation press release, Blue Bell, Pennsylvania Figures: Unisys legal department · the shareware authors who read CompuServe forums that week · Greg Roelofs and the nascent PNG working group Unisys, the merger-successor to Sperry, has owned the LZW patent (see [[lzw-patent-1985]]) since 1986. For eight years it does not enforce against GIF software. On 28 December 1994, in a press release timed for the week between Christmas and New Year, Unisys announces it will begin enforcing the patent against commercial software that creates or displays GIFs. The license fees: nominal for IBM and Adobe, ruinous for shareware authors charging $20 per copy. The announcement reaches the public web through CompuServe forum posts the same week, then through the comp.graphics Usenet groups, then through every webmaster mailing list. The reaction is immediate and uniform: PANIC, then ORGANIZED RESPONSE. Video: Stallman lays out the case against software patents using the LZW saga as one of his canonical examples.
19. 1995 — AOL Passes CompuServe. A 1996 spinning globe GIF, the iconography of the dial up internet that AOL was selling to five million subscribers by the end of 1995. Place: Vienna, Virginia (AOL) and Columbus, Ohio (CompuServe) Figures: Steve Case, AOL CEO · H&R Block, CompuServe's parent company through 1998 · the millions of new AOL subscribers who never knew CompuServe invented the format Through the early 1990s, CompuServe is the dominant online service for technical users; AOL is the dominant service for everyone else. In 1994 they are roughly even at three million subscribers each. By the end of 1995, AOL has crossed five million and is growing faster than CompuServe can respond. The mass-market consumer modem demographic that AOL captures is the same demographic that, by 1996, is using Mosaic and Navigator on dial-up (see [[mosaic-1993]]) to view GIF-heavy web pages. The format CompuServe invented in 1987 is, by 1995, being used most heavily by AOL's much larger and faster-growing subscriber base. AOL ships its own software with built-in GIF support. The format's primary audience has, without fanfare, switched providers. Video: 1995 broadcast segment comparing the two dial-up services in the year AOL's subscriber count overtook CompuServe's.
20. 1995-12-15 — The Netscape Loop Extension. A 22 frame looping butterfly, the type of infinite loop that the NETSCAPE2.0 application extension made the default behavior of every web GIF. Place: Netscape Communications, Mountain View, California Figures: Netscape Navigator 2.0 engineering team · the unnamed engineer who picked the bytes GIF89a (see [[gif89a-released-1989]]) allows multiple image frames in a single file, with per-frame delays. What it does not define is whether the sequence plays once and stops, or loops forever. Netscape's engineers, preparing Navigator 2.0 for release, need a default behavior and a way to override it. They use the format's application-extension-block mechanism to invent one. The bytes: 21 FF 0B NETSCAPE2.0 03 01 LOW HIGH 00. The application identifier is the literal ASCII string NETSCAPE2.0, eleven bytes long. The two-byte loop count is little-endian: 0000 means loop forever, any other value means loop exactly N times. Netscape Navigator 2.0 ships in December 1995 with this extension implemented. Every other browser follows. Video: Navigator 2.x, the build that first honored the NETSCAPE2.0 application extension and let GIFs loop forever.
21. 1996 — The Dancing Baby. Ron Lussier's animated GIF of Baby Cha-Cha, ripped from the Kinetix sample file and emailed into the first mass viral loop. Place: Kinetix Character Studio demo plug-in, 3D Studio Max Figures: Michael Girard and Robert Lurye, creators of the Biped plug-in · Ron Lussier, who shared the rendered AVI · LucasArts artists who converted it to GIF Kinetix releases Character Studio, a Biped-animation plug-in for 3D Studio Max. The sample file: a baby (model: Cha-Cha-Cha Baby) doing a side-step shuffle. The file ships as an AVI inside the plug-in's example folder. Ron Lussier at LucasArts emails the AVI to friends; someone converts it to GIF; the GIF is small enough to forward without questions. By winter 1996 it is on every other web page that allows animated images. It is the first viral GIF — an image that spreads across the consumer internet faster than any prior animation could, because the GIF requires no plugin and the browser will autoplay it the moment the page renders. Video: The Character Studio sample rig, set to Hooked on a Feeling, the way it actually shipped on screensavers and chain emails before Ally McBeal caught it.
22. 1996 — The Animated Cursor Trail. A GeoCities-era cursor accessory GIF, the kind that trailed sparkles, hearts, or fairy dust behind the mouse pointer. Place: JavaScript hobbyist tutorials, Dynamic Drive, Geocities scripting archives Figures: anonymous JS hobbyists · copied through view-source · DHTML community Somewhere in 1996, a JavaScript hobbyist posts a snippet that attaches a series of absolutely-positioned tiny GIFs to the document body and updates their coordinates on every mousemove event, each one trailing the cursor by a longer delay. STARS. SPARKLES. TINY HEARTS. PUMPKINS in October. A flock of bats around Halloween. The effect is called the CURSOR TRAIL and within eighteen months it is on hundreds of thousands of personal pages. Distribution is entirely view-source. Visitor sees the trail, hits View Source, copies the script and the GIFs, pastes both into their own HEAD tag. The original author of the canonical snippet is unknown; Dynamic Drive (a tutorial site) hosts the most-copied version by 1998 with a credit line that itself credits an earlier anonymous post.
23. 1996 — Webmonkey GIF Tutorials. An animated WebMonkey mascot pulled from a hobbyist GeoCities page, paying homage to Wired's how-to-build-a-website mascot. Place: Webmonkey, a division of Wired Digital, San Francisco Figures: Jeffrey Veen, founding editor · Taylor and Hodgman editorial team · uncredited freelance authors Webmonkey launches in 1996 as Wired Digital's how-to site for building things on the web. The GIF tutorials are among its most-trafficked content from day one. The topics: HOW TO OPTIMIZE PALETTES (down to 32 or 16 colors without obvious banding). DITHER VERSUS NO-DITHER (the Floyd-Steinberg pattern versus the flat-color look). TRANSPARENT BACKGROUNDS (the index-color trick with the fringing problem). BUILDING ANIMATIONS in GIFBuilder (Mac, free) or Animation Shop (Windows, bundled with Paint Shop Pro). These are the first reference tutorials for the format that anyone could find via Lycos or Alta Vista. Before Webmonkey, GIF-making knowledge was scattered across Usenet posts, README files inside shareware, and the cryptic help systems of the editors themselves. Webmonkey aggregates it into a stack of articles that a high-schooler with a 28.8k modem and an interest could read on a Sunday afternoon and emerge equipped to make a passable banner ad.
24. 1996-10-01 — PNG Released as W3C Recommendation. An under construction GIF, the late nineties aesthetic that PNG inherited a still image solution for while deferring animation to a spec that took two more decades. Place: World Wide Web Consortium, Cambridge, Massachusetts Figures: Thomas Boutell, working group chair · Glenn Randers-Pehrson, libpng author · Greg Roelofs, historian and documentation lead · Jean-loup Gailly, DEFLATE/zlib author PNG 1.0 ships as a W3C Recommendation on 1 October 1996, twenty-one months after the Unisys announcement (see [[unisys-enforcement-1994]]) made it necessary. The technical specification is, by every benchmark that matters, better than GIF: 24-bit true color instead of 8-bit palette, alpha transparency instead of single-bit transparency, DEFLATE compression patent-free instead of LZW, better lossless ratios on most image types. The format is designed by people who watched the Unisys ambush happen and are determined no future image standard will be hostage to a patent. The PNG specification includes explicit prior-art documentation for every algorithmic choice. The W3C process is fast for the era: from comp.graphics draft to Recommendation in twenty-one months.
25. 1996-11-06 — Flash Arrives. Animated typography, the move Flash was built for. FutureSplash becomes Macromedia Flash 1.0. Place: Macromedia, San Francisco Figures: Jonathan Gay, lead developer · Charlie Jackson and Michelle Welsh, FutureWave co-founders · Macromedia, acquirer FutureWave Software releases FutureSplash Animator in 1995, a vector-animation tool for the web aimed at users who wanted smaller files than GIF for line-art animation. Macromedia acquires FutureWave on 6 November 1996 and rebrands the product as MACROMEDIA FLASH 1.0. The browser plugin (FutureSplash Player, renamed Flash Player) is bundled with Internet Explorer 4 in 1997, which solves the install-base problem in one stroke. Flash's pitch against GIF: vector graphics scale without pixelation, line-art animation files are dramatically smaller, the format is scriptable via ActionScript (1.0 in 2000, 2.0 in 2003, 3.0 in 2006), audio and video stream in the same container, interactivity is native. The pitch is technically correct on every axis. It still does not kill the GIF. Video: A walk through FutureSplash Animator months before Macromedia bought it in December 1996 and renamed it Flash 1.0.
26. 1997 — Every Image Under 5K. An 846-byte animated blinkie, the kind of sub-1K GIF the dial-up era depended on. The whole file is smaller than this caption block. Place: web-page-optimization culture · DEV.COM tutorials · Webmonkey audience Figures: uncredited optimization-blog authors · the 28.8K modem · the BANDWIDTH BUDGET as discipline By 1997 the consumer-web optimization norm has settled at roughly THIRTY KILOBYTES TOTAL PAGE WEIGHT for a homepage that should load in under ten seconds on a 28.8K modem. With HTML, MIDI, and one or two background images already eating half the budget, individual interface GIFs (buttons, dividers, navigation arrows, mascots) are squeezed to UNDER 5K each. Many to under 1K. The aesthetic discipline this produces is severe. GIFs of the period: 8-bit indexed-color palettes (often hand-reduced to 32 or 16 colors). Harsh dithering, because Floyd-Steinberg gives better small-file compression than flat fills on most images. Hard-edged anti-aliasing approximations because true anti-aliasing requires palette space the budget doesn't allow. Tile-friendly backgrounds because a 64x64 tile is cheaper than a single full-screen image. The whole TEXTURE of the 1997 web is the texture of bandwidth constraint.
27. 1997-08-15 — The Hampster Dance. Deidre LaCarte's tiled animated hamsters from the original Hampster Dance, four loops repeating in unison to a sped-up Whistle-Stop sample. Place: http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/7156, then hampsterdance.com Figures: Deidre LaCarte, art student at the University of British Columbia · her sister and a friend, who were in a competition with her to see whose Geocities page would get the most hits Deidre LaCarte, 24, a art student at Malaspina University-College in Nanaimo, BC, builds a Geocities page in tribute to her pet hamster Hampton Hampster. The page consists of four rows of small animated GIFs of hamsters dancing, each row stepping in a different rhythm, against a tiled background, with a looping 9-second slow-tempo midi sample (Whistle Stop from the 1973 Disney film Robin Hood, played at speed). She uploads it in August 1997. By March 1999 it has six hundred thousand visitors a week. It is, on every dimension a critic might evaluate, ridiculous. It is also one of the first sites whose only purpose is to be enjoyed as a GIF-and-sound assemblage. The page is the joke; there is no further content. Video: Deidre LaCarte's page rendered in period-accurate Netscape 4. Four GIFs, tiled, MIDI auto-playing, the original conditions of the infection.
28. 1998 — Blinkies. A demonstration of the blinkie aesthetic, the strobing animated badge form that LiveJournal, Xanga, and tween homepage culture turned into currency. Place: personal homepages · message-board signatures · Neopets userlookups (2000+) Figures: anonymous artists · pixel-art communities · the BLINKIE EXCHANGE sites The BLINKIE is a small animated GIF, canonical dimensions roughly 50x15 pixels (some at 88x31, the same size as a web button), bearing two or three words of looping color-shift text. I LOVE UNICORNS. VISIT MY SITE. BEST VIEWED IN NETSCAPE 4. PROUD ARIES. OBSESSED WITH BACKSTREET BOYS. The text colors cycle through three or four palettes per second. The background is often a tiled glitter pattern or a static gradient. By 1999 there are blinkie EXCHANGE sites whose entire purpose is to host thousands of blinkies categorized by topic, free for any visitor to right-click and embed on their own page. The exchange model anticipates by a decade the reaction-GIF directories of the 2010s. The format is tiny, the bandwidth cost is negligible, the social function is enormous.
29. 1999-01-28 — Yahoo Buys GeoCities. Sunglasses drop. Deal with it. Yahoo pays $3.57B for GeoCities at the absolute top of the bubble. Place: Yahoo HQ, Sunnyvale, California Figures: Tim Koogle, Yahoo CEO · David Bohnett, GeoCities CEO · Jerry Yang and David Filo, Yahoo founders Yahoo announces on 28 January 1999 that it will acquire GeoCities (see [[geocities-launches-1994]]) for approximately $3.57 billion in an all-stock transaction. It is the LARGEST WEB ACQUISITION in history to that point. Yahoo stock, then trading at a split-adjusted peak, makes the math arithmetically credible; the dotcom correction eighteen months later will not. GeoCities at the time of acquisition: 4.6 million homesteaders, the third most-visited site on the web behind AOL and Yahoo's own properties, an estimated 38 million pages by year's end. The GIF library that comes with the acquisition is, on a per-byte basis, the largest single archive of animated images on the consumer internet. Nobody at Yahoo, then or later, has a clear plan for what to do with it. Video: Bohnett tells Brian McCullough how the neighborhoods grew, why the IPO and Yahoo deal happened, and what got broken after.
30. 1999-11-05 — Burn All GIFs Day. This is fine. House on fire. The patent protest spirit, illustrated by KC Green's dog half a decade later. Place: the open web · the FreeGIF coalition · Free Software Foundation backing Figures: Jeff Bryner, lead organizer · Bruce Perens, FSF support · the PNG working group Burn All GIFs Day is announced for 5 November 1999 by a coalition organized around the FreeGIF mailing list, with backing from the Free Software Foundation and the PNG (Portable Network Graphics) working group. The protest target: the Unisys LZW patent (see [[lzw-patent-1985]]) and the enforcement campaign Unisys began in 1994 (see [[unisys-enforcement-1994]] in Era II). Participating sites pledge to, on that one day, replace every GIF on their pages with a PNG and post an explanation of the patent thicket. The FSF posts a long technical brief. Slashdot covers the protest twice. Roughly several thousand sites participate, mostly small personal pages plus a handful of larger sites like the GNU project. Major commercial sites do not participate.
31. 2000-11-15 — The Pets.com Sock Puppet. An animated Pets.com banner GIF preserved on GeoCities, a relic of the sock-puppet brand that became the headstone of the dot-com bust. Place: Pets.com homepage · TBWA\Chiat\Day, Los Angeles Figures: Julie Wainwright, Pets.com CEO · Lee Clow, TBWA creative director · Michael Ian Black, voice of the sock puppet Pets.com launches in November 1998 with $50 million in Amazon-backed venture funding. The mascot, developed by TBWA\Chiat\Day, is a tube-sock puppet with a microphone and a tag line: BECAUSE PETS CAN'T DRIVE. The TV ads (Michael Ian Black voicing) air through 1999-2000, including a $1.2 million Super Bowl XXXIV spot in January 2000 and a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon in November 1999. The homepage version of the sock puppet is a small animated GIF, waving from the corner of the page on every product category. It is, by mid-2000, the MOST RECOGNIZED COMMERCIAL GIF of the dotcom era. It rivals the Dancing Baby (see [[dancing-baby-1996]]) in name-recognition, with the additional commercial machinery of a national ad campaign behind it. Video: The full sock-puppet ad set, including the 2000 Super Bowl spot that cost more than the company would ever earn in revenue.
32. 2001-02-15 — eBaum's World and the First Watermark War. Numa Numa, Gary Brolsma's 2004 webcam lip-sync to O-Zone's Dragostea Din Tei. The Newgrounds Flash original was scraped by eBaum's, watermarked, and rehosted, the move that defined the forum era's villain economy. Place: Rochester, New York Figures: Eric Bauman, founder · Neil Bauman, father and business partner Eric Bauman launches eBaum's World from Rochester in February 2001 as a content-aggregation site. The model is simple and, for several years, very profitable: scrape GIFs, Flash animations, and sound clips from the rest of the web, stamp an eBaum's World watermark across each one, host on their own servers, sell display ads against the traffic. Within two years the site claims tens of millions of monthly visitors. The aggregation is not new. The watermark is. eBaum's brands stolen content as its own and removes the original creators' attribution as a side effect of the brand stamp. The site becomes the first industrial-scale theft operation directed at the animated GIF — a format whose lossless re-encode and absent metadata make ownership claims nearly impossible to enforce after redistribution.
33. 2002 — SomethingAwful and the Image Macro. An animated Photoshop Phriday entry of the kind SomethingAwful's goons industrialized after 2002, the rotating-image grammar that 4chan would inherit and Tumblr would scale. Place: Forums of SomethingAwful, somethingawful.com Figures: Richard Kyanka (Lowtax), site founder · the SA Forums Goons Lowtax launches the weekly Photoshop Phriday and Comedy Goldmine threads on the SomethingAwful Forums in 2001-2002. Each week the SA Goons take a source image (a photograph, a movie still, a news screenshot) and produce dozens of edited variants competing for laughs. The threads incubate the visual grammar of the modern image macro: bold Impact-font captions, exaggerated MS Paint effects, the deliberately-crude versus the technically-impressive. Many of the threads include short looping animations. The GIF, on a forum where every member is loading every page over residential broadband or worse, is the only animated format that loads fast enough to be worth posting. The medium constrains the joke; the joke shapes the medium.
34. 2002-12-15 — Peanut Butter Jelly Time. Ryan Gancenia Etrata's dancing banana set to the Buckwheat Boyz's nine-second hook. Originally a Newgrounds Flash from December 2002, mass-converted to GIF by forum users who wanted it loopable in signatures without the Flash plugin. Place: Flash animation by Ryan Gancenia Etrata, distributed via Newgrounds and college link-emails Figures: Ryan Gancenia Etrata, animator · the Buckwheat Boyz, 1996 source song Ryan Gancenia Etrata posts a short Flash animation to Newgrounds in December 2002: a yellow cartoon banana dancing across the screen, brandishing a baseball bat, set to the 9-second hook of the Buckwheat Boyz's 1996 novelty rap Peanut Butter Jelly Time. The Flash file is 200 kilobytes. The animation is fifteen seconds, looped. The piece spreads through college dorm-room email threads and forum signatures for the next eighteen months. By 2004 it is one of the most-linked items on the SomethingAwful Forums (see [[somethingawful-image-macros-2002]]). The dancing banana is a face the forum web recognizes on sight.
35. 2003-10-01 — 4chan and the Image-Required Post. Trollface, born on 4chan's /b/ board in the second half of the decade, became the canonical reaction-face the image-required-post rule made possible. The /b/ era's signature export. Place: Christopher Poole's bedroom, Westchester County, New York Figures: Christopher Poole (moot), 15 · the early /b/ regulars Christopher Poole, 15, launches 4chan from his bedroom on 1 October 2003. The software is a hacked-together English port of Futaba Channel's open-source code; the cultural model is 2channel, the Japanese text-board that had been running since 1999. The defining technical choice is the one Poole inherits from Futaba without much thought: every post on every board requires an image attachment. Text-only replies are allowed, but threads start with a picture. On /b/ (random) the constraint becomes the cultural lab. If every post needs an image, every poster builds an image library; if every poster has a library, the library becomes vocabulary; if it is vocabulary it gets reused, captioned, re-cut, looped. The grammar of the modern image macro and the reaction-GIF arsenal gets industrialized here over the next four years.
36. 2003-11-22 — ImageShack and the Free Hotlink. All Your Base Are Belong To Us, the canonical Zero Wing animated meme. Hotlinked into thousands of forum signatures across 2003 and 2004 via the free, no-account image hosting ImageShack provided. Place: Los Angeles, California Figures: Jack Levin, founder · the early ImageShack engineering team Jack Levin and partners launch ImageShack in Los Angeles on 22 November 2003. The product specification is exactly what the forum web needs and exactly what no incumbent is offering: upload an image (GIFs included) from any browser without an account, receive a permanent URL and a BBCode tag suitable for paste, no bandwidth limit, no per-image fee, no expiration. The site eats the cost; the forums get free inline images. Within eighteen months ImageShack is the default host for every phpBB and vBulletin forum running on the English-language web. Photobucket (founded 2003) and TinyPic (2004) build the same model in parallel. The animated GIF, which had been bandwidth-prohibitive for hobbyist forum operators to host themselves, suddenly works at scale.
37. 2005-02-14 — YouTube Launches. Chris Crocker's Leave Britney Alone, uploaded to YouTube in September 2007, one of the platform's first viral video-to-GIF cuts. The template the next decade of reaction-GIF excavation would follow. Place: San Mateo, California · above a pizzeria Figures: Steve Chen · Chad Hurley · Jawed Karim, three former PayPal employees Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim register youtube.com on 14 February 2005 and ship a beta within months. The technical proposition: upload any video, the site re-encodes to Flash Video (FLV) and serves it inline in a 425x350 player that the Adobe Flash plugin (already on >95% of consumer browsers by 2005) can render without a separate launch. Karim's first upload, Me at the zoo, goes up on 23 April 2005. The medium that will eventually displace the GIF as the primary reaction format of the consumer web (see [[tiktok-takes-over-2021]]) starts here. But the displacement is not immediate. For the next decade YouTube and the GIF complement each other: YouTube is the source pool, the GIF is the cut-and-loop excerpt format. The two co-exist as a pipeline.
38. 2006-06-14 — I Can Has Cheezburger and the Impact-Font Cat. Maru, the Japanese Scottish Fold whose box-diving YouTube clips became the canonical animated lolcat. The form I Can Has Cheezburger formalized in static macros lived parallel in motion, on every forum and Tumblr feed. Place: Honolulu, Hawaii · icanhascheezburger.com Figures: Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, founders · Ben Huh, who buys the site in 2007 Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami launch I Can Has Cheezburger? from Honolulu on 14 June 2006, named after the captioned photograph that becomes the site's founding image: a British Shorthair cat, mouth open, captioned in white Impact font with black stroke I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?. The photograph itself predates the site by a few months and was traced to a 4chan /b/ thread (see [[4chan-founded-2003]]). The site formalizes the visual grammar that SomethingAwful (see [[somethingawful-image-macros-2002]]) and 4chan had been developing in scattered threads: Impact font, white fill with black stroke, top-and-bottom caption placement, deliberately ungrammatical English (lolspeak). The form is rigid by design. The rigidity is what makes it a vocabulary.
39. 2006 — Gawker Media Adopts the Reaction GIF. Judge Judy's eye-roll, the exact register of reaction GIF Gawker, Deadspin, Jezebel, and Gizmodo systematically imported into edited journalism after 2006. The vocabulary walked across the class barrier wearing a smirk. Place: Gawker Media offices, SoHo, New York · Gawker, Deadspin, Defamer, Jezebel, Gizmodo Figures: Nick Denton, Gawker founder · Choire Sicha, Gawker editor · A.J. Daulerio, Deadspin editor · the rotating Gawker Media writer pool From roughly 2006 the Gawker Media blogs — Gawker, Deadspin, Defamer, Jezebel, Gizmodo, Kotaku — make sustained editorial use of reaction GIFs in headlines, sidebars, and body copy. The aesthetic comes directly from SomethingAwful (see [[somethingawful-image-macros-2002]]) and the forum web. The infrastructure (ImageShack, see [[imageshack-2003]]; YouTube, see [[youtube-launches-2005]]) makes the cuts and the embeds trivial. Deadspin under A.J. Daulerio is the most aggressive adopter. A sports highlight becomes a three-second GIF before the broadcaster's own clip site has the video up. The GIF appears in the post, in the headline image, in the social share. The site's reading experience is, by 2009, structurally dependent on inline animation.
40. 2007-01-17 — Dramatic Prairie Dog. The five-second head-turn cut from a 1999 NHK documentary, rescored with the Young Frankenstein orchestral sting and uploaded to YouTube on 17 January 2007. The template for every YouTube-to-GIF reaction cut of the following decade. Place: YouTube · clip originally from a 1999 NHK documentary, rescored by an anonymous editor Figures: Anonymous YouTube uploader · the prairie dog itself · NHK documentary crew (uncredited source) A YouTube user uploads a five-second clip on 17 January 2007: a black-tailed prairie dog turns its head sharply toward the camera. A three-note orchestral sting (lifted from the 1974 film Young Frankenstein) is overlaid on the turn. The source footage is from a 1999 NHK Japanese television documentary; the cinematic re-score is the anonymous editor's only addition. The clip is titled Dramatic Chipmunk despite the animal being a prairie dog. Within two weeks of upload, GIF conversions are circulating on SomethingAwful (see [[somethingawful-image-macros-2002]]) and 4chan (see [[4chan-founded-2003]]). Within a month it is on every forum that supports inline images. The GIF is approximately 250 KB and loops the head turn indefinitely, which is exactly the unit of meaning a reaction GIF needs to be.
41. 2007-02-19 — Tumblr Launches. Leslie Knope shrugs in Parks and Recreation, an archetypal Tumblr-era reaction GIF reblogged across every dashboard from 2010 onward Place: New York City Figures: David Karp, 20, founder · Marco Arment, lead developer Tumblr launches in February 2007. The product's defining feature is the reblog: any user can repost any other user's post to their own followers, with optional commentary, in one click. The format that benefits most from this mechanism, in 2007-2013, is the animated GIF. A photograph reblogs as itself; a GIF reblogs as the moment it captures, played again, on demand, on every reblogger's dashboard. Within five years the platform has 75 million blogs and serves animated GIFs at a scale no prior infrastructure has attempted. The GIF's bandwidth profile (small file, no plugin, loops forever) is the perfect fit for an infinite-scroll feed. Video: Founder Stories sit-down with David Karp, four years after Tumblr's February 2007 launch, on why standard blogging tools failed most people and what the dashboard was built to fix.
42. 2007-03-15 — The Rickroll. Rick Astley's pointing-finger dance from Never Gonna Give You Up, 1987. The bait-and-switch link began on 4chan's /v/ board in March 2007; the loop became a forum-web reaction GIF independent of the prank that surfaced it. Place: 4chan /v/ board · a fake Grand Theft Auto IV preview link Figures: Anonymous /v/ users · Rick Astley, unwitting subject · Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, Pete Waterman, who wrote the 1987 song On 15 March 2007 a poster on 4chan's /v/ board (see [[4chan-founded-2003]]) shares a link claiming to lead to the first-ever gameplay trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV. The link instead redirects to Rick Astley's 1987 music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. The first documented Rickroll. By April the prank has spread to /b/, then to SomethingAwful (see [[somethingawful-image-macros-2002]]), then to the wider forum web. The mechanism is older than the joke. Bait-and-switch links are as old as hyperlinks. What makes the Rickroll persistent is the choice of payload: a song familiar enough to be instantly recognized, square enough to be inherently funny in an ironic frame, and (crucially) the music video's specific aesthetic of mid-twenties Astley in a beige trenchcoat doing the cha-cha with a pointed finger. The finger becomes the GIF.
43. 2010-01-01 — r/reactiongifs Launches. A canonical reaction GIF of the kind that filled r/reactiongifs after its January 2010 launch, when the subreddit standardized the form on Reddit Place: Reddit Figures: Anonymous Reddit moderators · the early subscriber base of imageboard refugees On the first day of 2010 a subreddit called r/reactiongifs opens for business. The premise is simple to the point of being a tautology: post a looping animated image that captures a reaction; title it with the situation that reaction is for. The grammar already exists on imageboards and on Tumblr (see [[tumblr-launches-2007]]); the new thing is that a major US English-speaking general-interest platform now has a dedicated channel for it, indexed and votable. By 2013 the subreddit has over 500,000 subscribers. By 2020 it has 2.5 million. The reaction GIF, an unofficial language since 4chan's /b/, gets institutional shelf space on the front page of the internet.
44. 2010-07-08 — Double Rainbow. Paul Vasquez (Yosemitebear) loops on the double rainbow over Yosemite, July 2010, in the Gregory Brothers Schmoyoho remix that locked the moment in Place: A property near Yosemite National Park, California Figures: Paul 'Yosemitebear62' Vasquez, videographer and reactor · Jimmy Kimmel, who tweeted the link Paul Vasquez uploads a three-and-a-half minute video to YouTube of his own emotional reaction to a double rainbow over his property near Yosemite. He sobs. He laughs. He asks what does it mean? in a voice that will be quoted back at him for the rest of his life. The video sits at a few thousand views for six months. On 3 July 2010 Jimmy Kimmel tweets the link. Within weeks the original is at twenty million views. The GIF cuts arrive within hours of the Kimmel tweet. The rainbow itself, the Vasquez face mid-sob, the WHOA mouth, the trembling camera. The video-to-GIF pipeline, which had been ad-hoc since the Dancing Baby (see [[dancing-baby-1996]]), is now an industry. Video: Paul Vasquez's original three-and-a-half-minute YouTube upload from his property near Yosemite, 8 January 2010. Sat at a few thousand views until Jimmy Kimmel tweeted it on 3 July; 52 million views and counting.
45. 2010-08-21 — Cat-Bin Lady. Cat rescued from fire. The dignified opposite of the Coventry CCTV clip that turned a stranger into a viral villain. Place: Coventry, England Figures: Mary Bale, 45, bank worker · Lola, the cat · Stephanie and Darryl Andrews-Mann, the cat's owners and CCTV operators On 21 August 2010, a CCTV camera mounted outside the Andrews-Mann home in Coventry records a 45-year-old bank worker named Mary Bale stopping to stroke a tabby cat named Lola on a garden wall, lifting the cat by the scruff, and placing it into the green wheelie bin on the curb. She closes the lid. She walks away. The cat is in the bin for fifteen hours before being heard and rescued. The owners post the CCTV clip to Facebook. By 24 August it is on every UK news channel. The Bale identification happens within 48 hours via Facebook crowdsourcing. The looping GIF of the dumping action arrives in parallel with the news story. Mary Bale receives death threats and police protection. Video: ITN news report carrying the Andrews-Mann CCTV clip from Stoke Heath, Coventry, 21 August 2010. Mary Bale lifts Lola off the garden wall and drops her into the green bin in under fifteen seconds.
46. 2011-04-02 — Nyan Cat. the 8-bit Pop-Tart cat by Chris Torres (PRguitarman) trailing a rainbow through space, posted 2 April 2011 and looped to infinity on Tumblr Place: YouTube, then everywhere Figures: Christopher Torres (PRguitarman), animator · Momo Momo (Daniwell-P), vocaloid composer of Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya Christopher Torres, 25, posts an animation on his site PRguitarman.com on 2 April 2011: a cat with the body of a strawberry Pop-Tart, leaving a rainbow trail, flying through space, on a 12-frame loop. Three days later a YouTube user named saraj00n pairs the animation with a sped-up cover of the Japanese vocaloid song Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya by Daniwell-P. The video racks up tens of millions of views in months. Within hours of the YouTube upload the animation exists as a GIF, then as a thousand GIFs, then as a Chrome new-tab extension that plays the loop indefinitely. By July 2011 YouTube ranks it among the year's top videos. The chiptune cover loops in the background of dorm rooms across at least three continents. Video: The official canonical upload of Christopher Torres' Pop-Tart cat animation paired with the sped-up Momo Momo vocaloid cover, posted 12 April 2011, seven days after saraj00n's now-deleted original. Source of every Nyan Cat GIF in circulation.
47. 2012-02-15 — What Should We Call Me. A Jim Carrey reaction GIF of the strain the What Should We Call Me Tumblr (launched February 2012) made canonical for two-panel internet comedy Place: Tumblr, posted from New York City Figures: Two anonymous law-firm summer associates, college friends, identities later revealed as Brooke Pollak and Lauren Caruso Two college friends, summer associates at a New York law firm, launch a Tumblr in February 2012 called What Should We Call Me. Every post follows the same template: a relatable situation as the title (when my boss asks if I have a minute), a single TV-or-movie reaction GIF as the body (a sustained close-up of a face slowly registering dread). No commentary. No tags beyond the title. The post is the joke. The GIF is the entire content of the post. By April 2012 the blog has over a million followers. The founders' identities are reported in the New York Times. They are, briefly, the most-imitated voice on Tumblr.
48. 2012 — Tumblr Adds GIF Search. A Jennifer Lawrence reaction GIF, exemplar of the catalogue Tumblr's 2012 GIF search treated as a first-class searchable medium alongside photography and text Place: Tumblr HQ, New York City Figures: Tumblr platform engineering team · David Karp, CEO Tumblr ships a search-filter update in 2012 that lets users search posts by file type, including GIF specifically. The animated image, until then a sub-category of photo post, becomes a first-class platform object. You can now search the entire Tumblr corpus for nothing but GIFs, sorted by tag, by date, by note count. The platform that scaled the reaction GIF (see [[tumblr-launches-2007]]) is now indexing it. The combination of the dedicated filter and the per-post note counter (the public tally of likes and reblogs displayed on every post) turns the GIF into something measurable: a social-status currency with a leaderboard.
49. 2012-11-13 — GIF, Word of the Year. A face-palm reaction GIF. By 2012 the format was so embedded in online vocabulary that Oxford American Dictionaries named GIF its Word of the Year. Place: Oxford American Dictionaries press release, New York and Oxford Figures: Katherine Connor Martin, head of US Dictionaries at OUP · the Oxford lexicography team On 13 November 2012 the Oxford American Dictionaries announce that GIF, used as a verb meaning to create a GIF file of, is their Word of the Year. The shortlist it beats includes YOLO, superstorm, nomophobia, and Eurogeddon. The choice is justified, per Katherine Connor Martin, on the grounds that the word has crossed from technical jargon into general verbal usage: I GIF-ed it, let me GIF that. It is the first formal lexicographic recognition of the format as a generalized cultural action. The press release notes that like Google, GIF can be used as a verb. The format is twenty-five years old. The acronym has finally outgrown the file extension.
50. 2013-02-15 — Harlem Shake. meme cuts from solo dancer to full-room mayhem on Baauer's bass drop, February 2013, the format that briefly ate YouTube Place: YouTube, then offices and gyms and college dorms worldwide Figures: Filthy Frank (George Miller), early uploader · TheSunnyCoastSkate, the breakout · Baauer, producer of the original 2012 track The format crystallizes in early February 2013: one person in a mask or helmet dances alone for 15 seconds while everyone else in the room sits or stands ignoring them. The bass drops at 0:15. Cut. Everyone in the room is now in costume, in motion, doing whatever ridiculous thing they can think of. The track is Baauer's Harlem Shake, released on Mad Decent / Jeffree's in May 2012, sleeping on YouTube for nine months. By mid-February 2013 there are approximately 12,000 uploads in a single week. Office versions. Locker-room versions. Fighter-jet-cockpit versions. The Norwegian Army version. A version filmed by Matt Damon. Today show hosts attempt one and look exactly like Today show hosts attempting a Harlem Shake. Video: George Miller's DizastaMusic upload of 30 January 2013, the Filthy Frank skit that establishes the format. Pink Guy alone, the cold open, then everyone in the room in costume when Baauer's bass drops at 0:15.
51. 2013-02-15 — Giphy Founded. Deal With It sunglasses, an Originals GIF. The reaction-image vocabulary that Giphy launched in February 2013 to organize and search. Place: New York City Figures: Alex Chung and Jace Cooke, co-founders Alex Chung and Jace Cooke launch Giphy in February 2013 as a search engine for GIFs. The site has roughly 10,000 indexed GIFs at launch; by year's end it has millions. The model is simple: index the entire animated-image corpus of the web, let people search by mood or topic or phrase, embed the GIFs in messages and tweets and slack channels via copy-paste or API. Within four years Giphy raises $150 million in venture funding at a $600 million valuation. The Tenor competitor (acquired by Google in 2018) provides the GIF-keyboard layer for Android. Giphy provides the same for iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, and most major messaging platforms. The animated image has, for the first time in its history, formal commercial infrastructure.
52. 2013-05-20 — Yahoo Buys Tumblr for $1.1 Billion. Yahoo logo, animated. Marissa Mayer's Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion on 20 May 2013; Verizon wrote most of it off four years later Place: Yahoo HQ, Sunnyvale, California · Tumblr HQ, New York City Figures: Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO · David Karp, Tumblr founder, 26 Marissa Mayer, eleven months into the Yahoo CEO job, announces on 20 May 2013 that Yahoo will acquire Tumblr (see [[tumblr-launches-2007]]) for $1.1 billion in cash. David Karp, 26, becomes Yahoo's highest-profile founder hire. Mayer promises, in the press release, not to screw it up. The promise becomes a recurring quote in the obituary coverage of the deal four years later. The same week, Giphy is founded (see [[giphy-founded-2013]]) and Steve Wilhite accepts his Webby (see [[wilhite-jif-2013]]). May 2013 is, by any reasonable accounting, the GIF's peak news cycle. Video: Charlie Rose interview with the 26-year-old Tumblr founder on Bloomberg TV, recorded the week of the $1.1 billion Yahoo announcement, 29 May 2013. Karp on the deal, on dropping out of high school, and on keeping the dashboard authentic.
53. 2013-05-21 — Wilhite Declares: It's JIF. A reaction GIF in the 2013 vocabulary Steve Wilhite defended at the Webby Awards when he insisted: it is pronounced JIF, not GIF. Place: Cipriani Wall Street, New York City; the Webby Awards ceremony Figures: Steve Wilhite, 65, accepting the Webby Lifetime Achievement Award The Webby Awards limit acceptance speeches to five words. Steve Wilhite, 65, the lead developer of the GIF format (see [[compuserve-ships-gif87a-1987]]), accepts the Lifetime Achievement Award by holding up a screen that reads, in white text on black: IT'S PRONOUNCED JIF NOT GIF. The audience cheers. The internet does not agree. Wilhite's reasoning, given in a New York Times follow-up interview: the format was named after Jif peanut butter, with the choosy developers choose GIF joke baked into the team's working culture. He had been saying JIF since 1987. He had never publicly insisted on it before.
54. 2013-08-12 — The /giphy Slash Command. Animated Slack wordmark. The /giphy slash command, introduced 2014, made the reaction GIF a fixture of workplace messaging. Place: Slack Technologies, San Francisco Figures: Stewart Butterfield, CEO · the Slack integrations team · Alex Chung at Giphy as the integration partner Shortly after Slack launches in August 2013, the Giphy integration ships as one of the first third-party apps in the Slack directory. Typing /giphy [keyword] in any channel returns a random GIF matching the keyword from Giphy's index (see [[giphy-founded-2013]]), with the option to shuffle until something funnier appears. Discord ships the equivalent shortly after launch in 2015. The slash command is a Trojan horse. The GIF, previously confined to social media and personal messaging, now lives in the channel where engineers, marketers, lawyers, and executives coordinate work. By 2016 most tech-company Slacks have a dedicated #gifs or #random channel; many have a #celebrations channel where every shipped PR is marked with a Leonardo DiCaprio toast.
55. 2014-05-08 — The Obama Reaction Set. President Obama drops the mic at the 2016 White House Correspondents' Dinner, the gesture the Tumblr reaction-GIF era had been priming the political vocabulary for since 2012 Place: The West Wing, the White House Press Briefing Room, the Washington Hilton ballroom Figures: Barack Obama, 44th US President · the West Wing communications team · the Tumblr and Buzzfeed editors who cut the loops Barack Obama is the first US president whose body language gets systematically converted into reaction vocabulary at scale. The slow clap during a speech. The smile-and-look-down deflection. The late-2012 inauguration fist-bump. The 8 May 2014 mic drop at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Each becomes a GIF in heavy rotation across Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, and the long tail of group chats. The administration leans into it. The official White House Tumblr (launched 2013) sides with the hard-G pronunciation in a 2014 post (see [[wilhite-jif-2013]]). Press secretary briefings include reaction-friendly moments that look engineered for the GIF cut. The medium has reached the institution. Video: Obama's closing line at his eighth and final Correspondents' Dinner, 30 April 2016 at the Washington Hilton. Two more words, then the mic. The frame that the reaction-GIF web had been training the presidency to deliver since 2012.
56. 2014-05-21 — The White House Takes a Side. President Obama drops the mic at the 2016 White House Correspondents Dinner. The Obama-era White House made the GIF an instrument of statecraft, posting reaction loops to its Tumblr from 2014. Place: whitehouse.tumblr.com Figures: Obama White House communications team · Jason Goldman, Chief Digital Officer (later) · the unnamed staffer who picked the GIF Exactly one year after Wilhite's Webby acceptance speech (see [[wilhite-jif-2013]]), the official White House Tumblr posts a reaction GIF with the caption: animated GIFs (hard g). The parenthetical is a direct rebuttal of the format's creator. The Obama administration has, in the most low-key possible way, sided with the internet majority on the pronunciation question. The post is reblogged 50,000+ times within a week. Coverage runs in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and BuzzFeed. The pronunciation question briefly becomes a head-of-state matter; the White House communications team declines to elaborate further.
57. 2014 — Tenor Founded. Animated Tenor wordmark. Founded 2014 as Riffsy, Tenor built the keyboard search engine that powered iOS, Twitter and Facebook GIF pickers before Google acquired it in 2018. Place: Palo Alto and San Francisco; originally branded Riffsy Figures: David McIntosh, CEO · Erick Hachenburg, CTO · Frank Nawabi, co-founder David McIntosh and Erick Hachenburg launch Riffsy in 2014 as a GIF-keyboard app rather than a search-engine destination. The bet: nobody is going to navigate to a website to find a reaction GIF; they want the GIF inside the keyboard, one tap from any text field. The app rebrands to Tenor in 2016 and ships as the default GIF picker in Android's Gboard the same year. While Giphy (see [[giphy-founded-2013]]) optimizes the embed-in-a-browser model, Tenor optimizes the embed-in-the-keyboard model. The two products converge on similar back-end indexes but reach users through different surfaces. By 2017 Tenor claims 12 billion GIF searches per month.
58. 2016 — The GIF Enters the Campaign Playbook. Hillary Clinton's shimmy at the first 2016 presidential debate. The shoulder-shake became one of the defining political reaction GIFs of the campaign within minutes. Place: Twitter, primarily; campaign accounts on both sides Figures: Hillary Clinton campaign social-media team · Trump campaign accounts · the 4chan and Reddit pro-Trump meme operations · the ADL classifications team The 2016 US presidential cycle is the first in which both major-party campaigns deploy reaction GIFs systematically. The Hillary Clinton account posts a Joe Biden side-eye in response to a Trump tweet; the Trump account posts Pepe variants; both run organized GIF-meme operations alongside the conventional ad spend. By the general election, the format is in formal campaign social-media playbooks at both party committees. What had been forum vocabulary in 2007 (see [[somethingawful-image-macros-2002]]) is now appearing in the official Twitter feeds of major-party presidential candidates. The medium has fully crossed from subculture to power.
59. 2016-09-13 — iOS 10 and the System Keyboard GIF. Kermit the Frog furiously typing, one of the most-searched reaction GIFs of the mobile-keyboard era that arrived on iOS in 2016. Place: Apple, Cupertino; iOS 10 public release Figures: Craig Federighi, SVP Software Engineering · the iMessage Apps team · Giphy and Tenor as launch partners iOS 10 ships on 13 September 2016 with a major iMessage redesign, including the iMessage App Extension framework. The framework lets third-party developers ship apps that live inside the iMessage keyboard rather than as standalone apps that have to be context-switched to. The launch partners include Giphy (see [[giphy-founded-2013]]) and Tenor (see [[tenor-founded-2014]]) as GIF pickers. Within months, sending a reaction GIF on iMessage drops from a multi-step copy-paste exercise to a single keyboard tap. iOS has roughly 700 million active users at the time of release. The format crosses from web-browser context into the messaging substrate of the dominant Western mobile platform.
60. 2017-01-02 — Wendy's Twitter Roasts the Internet. Boom, roasted. Wendy's official sticker from the Twitter era that turned the brand account into a roast-with-GIFs template for corporate social media in 2017. Place: Wendy's corporate Twitter account, headquartered in Dublin, Ohio Figures: Amy Brown, social-media manager 2012-2017 · Carter Wilkerson, the teenager who asked for free nuggets (and got 3.4M retweets) · the rotating cast of agencies that maintained the voice On 2 January 2017, Wendy's Twitter account responds to a customer asking how long beef stays fresh with: where do you live so we can recommend a Wendy's not run by you. The exchange goes viral. Over the following months, the account systematically deploys reaction GIFs against rivals (McDonald's primarily), customers who try to dunk on it, and any account that mentions frozen beef. The account's follower count quadruples. Three months later, Carter Wilkerson asks Wendy's how many retweets for a year of free nuggets; the answer is 18 million; he gets 3.4 million, the most-retweeted tweet in Twitter history at the time, and Wendy's gives him the nuggets anyway. The reaction GIF is the primary visual currency throughout.
61. 2017 — APNG Finally Supported Everywhere. Slothilda still working from home. APNG was drafted by Mozilla engineers in 2004 and only achieved universal browser support in 2020, twelve years too late. Place: Apple WebKit · Google Chromium · Mozilla Firefox · Microsoft Edge Figures: Stuart Parmenter, Vladimir Vukićević, Andrew Smith, the Mozilla team that drafted APNG in 2004 · twelve years of W3C politics Animated PNG (APNG) is drafted by Mozilla engineers in 2004 as a patent-free animated-image format. The PNG working group rejects it as an official extension in 2007; it remains a Mozilla-and-Opera private extension for a decade. Safari adds APNG support in 2017 (macOS High Sierra / iOS 11). Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave) add support in 2019-2020 via the Chromium codebase merge. By the end of 2020, APNG works in every browser on earth. The format the PNG team had originally designed in 1996 (see [[png-released-1996]]) as a non-patented GIF alternative finally has the universal-support property that made the GIF unbeatable in the first place.
62. 2018-12-15 — Giphy of the Year. Robert Redford's nod of approval from Jeremiah Johnson, the canonical clip behind Giphy's most-used reaction loops of the late 2010s. Place: Giphy editorial, New York Figures: Giphy's data and editorial teams · Robert Redford as the head-nodding Tom Booker (the 2018 winner) · the rotating GIF-of-the-year subjects in subsequent reports In December 2018 Giphy publishes its first Year in GIFs report, ranking the most-served animations on the platform across the year. The 2018 number one is a head-nodding Robert Redford as Tom Booker, from the trailer for The Old Man & The Gun. Served roughly 220 million times. The number two is a Cardi B okurr. It is the first time the animated image has a year-end industry chart equivalent to Billboard's or Spotify's. Giphy frames it as cultural data; it is also a marketing artifact for the platform's $600 million valuation.
63. 2019-11-12 — Baby Yoda Saturates the Feed. Baby Yoda sipping. The Mandalorian's November 2019 debut produced the year's dominant reaction-GIF subject before Disney's lawyers asked Giphy and Tenor to pull the clips. Place: Disney+, simultaneously global launch; The Mandalorian Episode 1 Figures: Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, showrunners · Disney's legal department, briefly · Werner Herzog, who reportedly told Disney not to CGI the puppet · the entire English-speaking internet, briefly The Mandalorian premieres on Disney+ on the platform's launch day, 12 November 2019. Within 24 hours the character internet-named Baby Yoda (canonical name Grogu, not revealed until December 2020) saturates Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and Instagram in GIF form. Cup-sip, ear-twitch, head-tilt. Every reaction is covered. By the end of week one, Baby Yoda is the most-served subject on Giphy and Tenor combined. It is one of the fastest character-to-GIF-vocabulary conversions in the format's history. The puppet has more reaction-shot variety than most live actors; the GIF infrastructure (see [[giphy-founded-2013]]) is mature enough to absorb and distribute the entire vocabulary within hours.
64. 2020-04-15 — Zoom, the Lockdown, and the Last Mass GIF Moment. Work-from-home Zoom call animation from GIPHY Cares, 2020. By April Zoom carried 300M daily participants and shipped GIF integration in chat by default. Place: Zoom Video Communications, San Jose · locked-down households worldwide Figures: Eric Yuan, Zoom CEO · approximately 300 million daily meeting participants by April 2020 In December 2019, Zoom reports 10 million daily meeting participants. By the end of March 2020, with most of Europe and North America under stay-at-home orders, the number is 200 million. By April it is 300 million. The product becomes, briefly, the social fabric of the white-collar pandemic — the platform on which weddings, funerals, classrooms, AA meetings, and birthday parties happen. Zoom's chat layer ships with GIPHY integration (see [[giphy-founded-2013]]) baked in by default. The animated-emoji reaction layer follows in 2020-2021. For approximately twelve months, the GIF gets a final mass-use case it had not previously occupied: the lubricant of the work-from-home video call, where typing nodding into the chat surfaces the standard Tina-Fey-thumbs-up loop and lets a meeting move on.
65. 2020-05-15 — Facebook Acquires Giphy. 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.
66. 2020-09-15 — TikTok Takes Over. Endless scrolling on TikTok, the gesture that displaced the reaction GIF. By September 2021 the app crossed one billion monthly active users. Place: ByteDance, Beijing · TikTok operations worldwide Figures: Zhang Yiming, ByteDance founder · Shou Chew, incoming TikTok CEO TikTok crosses one billion monthly active users by September 2021, less than four years after its international launch. The Instagram Reels feature ships in August 2020 in direct response; YouTube Shorts launches globally in July 2021. Short-form vertical video — with sound, with a recommendation algorithm that does not require following anyone — becomes the dominant medium for reaction content for users under 30. The animated GIF retains its keyboard-embedded position in iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, and Teams. What it loses, between 2020 and 2022, is the cultural primary slot. The reaction-GIF as a unit of online vocabulary, scaled by Tumblr (see [[tumblr-launches-2007]]) and industrialized by Giphy (see [[giphy-founded-2013]]), is now an older generation's vocabulary.
67. 2021-02-18 — Nyan Cat Sells for 300 ETH. Nyan Cat in flight. Chris Torres minted a one-of-one remastered NFT on Foundation for the tenth anniversary; it sold for 300 ETH on 18 February 2021. Place: Foundation marketplace, Ethereum mainnet Figures: Christopher Torres (PRguitarman), creator of Nyan Cat On the tenth anniversary of Nyan Cat (see [[nyan-cat-2011]]), Christopher Torres mints a one-of-one NFT of the original animation on Foundation. The auction closes at 300 ETH — approximately $590,000 at the closing block. The buyer is an anonymous wallet. The animation itself remains freely available on the open web; what changed hands is a signed token pointing at it. It is the first major Web3 monetization of an iconic GIF, and it triggers a brief minor genre. Within eighteen months, Pepe the Frog, Bad Luck Brian, Disaster Girl, Overly Attached Girlfriend, Side-Eyeing Chloe, and the Doge Shiba (Kabosu) all receive comparable NFT mintings, several at six-figure sums.
68. 2021-11-30 — The CMA Orders Meta to Sell Giphy. Walking away. The UK Competition and Markets Authority's Phase 2 report on 30 November 2021 ordered Meta to divest Giphy in full. Place: UK Competition and Markets Authority, Canary Wharf, London Figures: Stuart McIntosh, CMA inquiry chair · Andrea Coscelli, then CMA chief executive The UK Competition and Markets Authority opens its investigation of Meta's $400 million Giphy acquisition in June 2020, two weeks after the deal closes. The CMA's Phase 2 inquiry report, published 30 November 2021, concludes that the merger would substantially lessen competition in two markets: UK display advertising (where Giphy had been developing a paid-search business that Meta extinguished post-acquisition) and the worldwide supply of animated content to messaging platforms. The remedy is unconditional divestiture. Meta is ordered to sell Giphy in full, to a buyer approved by the CMA, with no behavioral remedies considered sufficient. It is the first time a non-US regulator has forced the complete unwind of a major US Big Tech acquisition.
69. 2022-03-14 — Steve Wilhite Dies. Animated Jif jar from the 2020 Jif x Giphy #JifVsGif campaign. Wilhite died at home in Milford, Ohio on 14 March 2022 at age 74, still insisting on the soft G. Place: Milford, Ohio Figures: Steve Wilhite, 74 · complications from COVID-19 Steve Wilhite, the lead developer of the GIF format (see [[compuserve-ships-gif87a-1987]]), dies at his home in Milford, Ohio at age 74 of complications from COVID-19. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and most major tech outlets carry obituaries. He had retired from CompuServe in 2001 and had spent his retirement, by his wife's account, doing model trains. He had given exactly one significant public interview about the format in his lifetime: the five-word Webby acceptance speech in 2013 (see [[wilhite-jif-2013]]). He left a wife, Kathaleen, eleven grandchildren, and an animated image format that, on the day of his death, was being served by Giphy and Tenor approximately 10 billion times.
70. 2022 — WebP Overtakes GIF in Bandwidth Served. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Lossy WebP animations land about 64 percent smaller than the GIF equivalent; by 2022 major CDNs were serving more WebP bytes than GIF. Place: Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, and major image-CDN telemetry Figures: the Google WebP team (format released 2010, animated variant 2013) · Safari engineers at Apple Apple ships Safari 14 in September 2020 with WebP support, ten years after Google released the format. The animated WebP variant (introduced 2013) is finally usable across every major browser engine. Average file sizes for equivalent visual quality come in 25-50% smaller than GIF, depending on content. The mechanical case for GIF — universal browser support, no plugin required — is now matched by a smaller and faster competitor. Through 2021 and into 2022, the major image CDNs report a crossover: aggregate WebP bytes served exceed aggregate GIF bytes served. Most users notice nothing; the keyboards on iMessage and WhatsApp still call them GIFs, and most of them, in the back end, increasingly aren't.
71. 2022-08-15 — AI-Generated GIFs Flood the Platforms. A cyberpunk robot from the Stable Diffusion era. After SD's release on 22 August 2022, AI-generated reaction GIFs began flooding Giphy, Tenor, and Reddit. Place: Stable Diffusion (Stability AI) · Runway · Pika Labs · Giphy and Tenor backends Figures: Emad Mostaque, Stability AI founder · the Stable Diffusion open-source community Stable Diffusion releases publicly on 22 August 2022. Within weeks, image-to-image variation and frame-interpolation techniques produce the first wave of AI-generated reaction-style GIFs uploaded to Giphy, Tenor, and Reddit. The aesthetic is recognizable on sight: the slightly too-glossy faces, the inconsistent backgrounds between frames, the hands. Quality is variable. Quantity is overwhelming. Runway's Gen-2 (March 2023) and Pika 1.0 (December 2023) raise the quality floor substantially and add native short-video generation without the frame-interpolation step. By 2024 the median new upload to a Giphy cute or reaction tag is more likely AI-generated than human-filmed.
72. 2023-05-23 — Meta Sells Giphy to Shutterstock. Skippy peanut, a peanut not in the deal. On 23 May 2023 Meta sold Giphy to Shutterstock for $53M, a 13 percent recovery on the $400M purchase price. Place: London (CMA jurisdiction) and Menlo Park (Meta) and New York (Shutterstock) Figures: Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO · Andrew Tyrie / Sarah Cardell, successive CMA chairs · Paul Hennessy, Shutterstock CEO The UK Competition and Markets Authority opens its investigation of the Facebook-Giphy merger (see [[giphy-founded-2013]]) in June 2020, two weeks after Meta announces the deal. In November 2021 the CMA orders Meta to sell Giphy. Meta appeals. The Competition Appeal Tribunal upholds the CMA in July 2022. Meta runs out of appeals. On 23 May 2023, Meta announces it has sold Giphy to Shutterstock for $53 million, against the $400 million purchase price three years earlier. The 13% recovery is the most expensive single regulatory unwind of a tech acquisition in history. It is also the most public concession that the platform-monopoly era of US-and-UK tech regulation is, however briefly, operative.
73. 2026 — The GIF Keyboard Is Still the Default. Dr Fauci, wash your hands. Three years after the unwind, this exact iconic GIPHY reaction is still one tap away in every iMessage, WhatsApp, and Slack composer. Place: iOS · Android · Slack · Discord · Microsoft Teams · WhatsApp · Signal · Telegram Figures: approximately 10 billion GIFs served per day across Giphy and Tenor combined Three years after the Meta-Giphy unwind (see [[giphy-unwound-2023]]) and four years after Wilhite's death (see [[steve-wilhite-dies-2022]]), the GIF keyboard is still the default animated-image picker in every major messaging platform on earth. iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Signal, Telegram, Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger — all of them ship with a GIF tab in the composer, all of them route to Giphy or Tenor or both, all of them call the result a GIF regardless of whether the underlying bytes are GIF, WebP (see [[webp-overtakes-gif-2022]]), or short MP4. Giphy (Shutterstock-owned) and Tenor (Google-owned) together serve, on the available 2025 disclosures, approximately 10 billion animated images per day. The format is not the cultural primary; the format is the infrastructure.

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