Post-GIF
WebP, APNG, MP4-as-GIF, AV1. The end of the loop, the rise of the video-disguised-as-gif, and the format that refused to die.
Part of GIfs
10 moments in this segment.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
- — 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.
