If Facebook realized a certain type of GIF was trending on Twitter, for example, it could commission an artist to make a corresponding collection exclusively for Instagram, luring more users there. Facebook’s suite of apps already made up a huge chunk of Giphy’s traffic-50 percent, according to the company-but now it can collect data from other platforms, many of them competitors, and possibly spot emerging trends.

“Facebook says it will not collect information specific to individual people using Giphy’s API, but it will get valuable data about usage patterns across the web. So GIPHY is not going to be removed from third parties like Microsoft Teams, but should you be concerned? Will Facebook use GIPHY to track Microsoft Teams users? Instagram’s VP of Products Vishal Shah said third party firms would still have access to GIPHY in a blog. Facebook is going to make it part of the Instagram business unit.

Now Facebook has bought GIPHY, a report from Axios values the deal at $400m (£330m). Here is a blog where I talk about the risks of GIFs vs the benefits. I am a big fan of using GIF’s to humanize and add humour to what can be otherwise pretty dry workplace communications. As of 2018, they had around 300 million active users every day across all the platform it serves. GIPHY is integrated into many products such as Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok, Slack and Microsoft Teams. It provides an API to directly integrate into other products. For those still catching up, GIPHY is an online service for making and sharing GIFs.

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