Shutterstock, a popular partner for brands, digital media and marketers, has signed to acquire GIPHY from Meta Platforms who bought the platform for $315 million in 2020.
The $53 million deal will provide Shutterstock with the world’s largest collection of GIFs and stickers for casual conversational content, providing advertisers with dynamic creative optimised ads on a global scale.
UK regulators ordered Meta to sell the service, arguing that the merger was bad for competition. The deal is expected to close next month.
Owning GIPHY offers Shutterstock access to a user base consisting of 1.7 billion daily users, who collectively generate 1.3 billion search queries, powering more than 15 billion daily media impressions.
These impressions are distributed via GIPHY's more than 14,000 API/SDK integrations and its owned website and mobile app.
The content serves as an ingredient in texts and message-based conversations on platforms such as Meta, TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat, Slack and Microsoft Teams, as well as integrations with most mobile devices.
GIPHY's content library is fueled by original content from individual artists and verified media partners such as NBC, Disney, Netflix, NFL, MLB, and NBA, supplying fresh, culturally relevant content and garnering a 75% positive sentiment from consumers, according to the release.
Paul Henessy, Shutterstock CEO, said: “This is an exciting next step in Shutterstock’s journey as an end-to-end creative platform.
“Through the GIPHY acquisition, we are extending our audience touch points beyond primarily professional marketing and advertising use cases and expanding into casual conversations.”
GIPHY is used by everyday users and also enables brands to take part in the same casual conversations. Hennessy continued: “We plan to leverage Shutterstock’s unique capabilities in content and metadata monetization, generative AI, studio production and creative automation to enable the commercialization of our GIF library as we roll this offering out to customers.”
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