Mainstream
Giphy, the keyboard integration, the GIF as reaction. The format escapes the web and becomes a layer of every conversation.
Part of GIfs
12 moments in this segment.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
