Facebook is acquiring Giphy, a popular website for creating and sharing moving pictures, or GIFs, and will integrate it with its growing Instagram photo sharing app, Facebook said in a blog post on Friday.
The cost, which Facebook and Giphy refused to disclose, was place in around 400 million dollars (around Rs. 3,035 crore) on the Axios news website.
The announcement comes at a time when the largest social media network is being watched by regulators over antitrust concerns. In 2015, Giphy rejected a Facebook offer, choosing instead to continue integrating its products with multiple social media platforms, according to the news site TechCrunch.
The two companies declined to comment on previous conversations.
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Giphy will be part of Instagram, Facebook's photo sharing site. Its GIF library, which can be integrated with other apps, will also be integrated with Instagram and other Facebook-owned apps, the companies said.
"People will still be able to download GIFs; API developers and partners will always have the same access to Giphy's APIs; and Giphy's creative community will always be able to create great content," said Vishal Shah , vice president of products for Instagram. blog post
"We will continue to make Giphy openly accessible to the entire ecosystem," said Giphy in an article published on the blogging site Medium.
The American Economic Liberties Project, a Washington-based antitrust defense group, has urged regulators to investigate and block the acquisition.
"The Facebook-Giphy merger is just the latest example from the Federal Trade Commission pending as Facebook and Google centralize control of online communications," said Sarah Miller, CEO of Economic Liberties.
Google Alphabet acquired the GIF Tenor platform in 2018 and integrated it with its image search function, which Miller says undermines the competitive market created by Giphy.
"Now Facebook is there to recover the debris and become even more powerful," he said.
A Facebook spokesperson said that Giphy's current integrations with social platforms like Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok from ByteDance would not change.
The spokesperson also said that GIFs do not have online tracking mechanisms such as pixels or cookies, a concern for privacy advocates who are wary of Facebook's aggressive collection of personal data to use. in targeted advertising.
The Federal Trade Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Facebook blog post told me 50% of Giphy's traffic already comes from Facebook applications, and half comes from Instagram.
© Thomson Reuters 2020
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