Interview with Giphy team on resurgence of GIFs, importance of the loop, and Giphy Studios, its new original content studio in LA
Mona Lalwani / Engadget : Tweets: @jeremysliew Tweets: Jeremy Liew / @jeremysliew : .@Giphy's growth in the last 3 years: “We went from 3k to 150M people a month” http://www.engadget.com/... @alexchung http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This interview lands two months after a Bloomberg profile showed Giphy had quadrupled unique visitors to 95M a month through 2015 by positioning itself as the search layer for GIFs across messaging apps. Here the team confirms the curve kept bending — 3,000 to 150M monthly users in three years — and uses that scale to justify a structural pivot: Giphy Studios, an original-content shop in Los Angeles.
The move matters because it converts Giphy from a distribution utility into a producer: instead of only routing other people's loops, it now makes them, which is the precondition for owning ad inventory rather than renting out search placement.
First-order effects
- Giphy's advertisers, movie studios, and political-campaign clients gain a native branded-content channel inside the product itself, since Giphy Studios can produce loops built for campaigns rather than repurposed clips.
- The 150M-monthly-user figure gives Lightspeed-backed Giphy fresh leverage in partnership and talent conversations in LA, where it is now competing for creative staff alongside traditional studios.
Second-order effects
- With $150M raised and no settled business model — the company was still weighing various revenue models a year later — Studios functions as the answer to the monetization question, pushing Giphy toward selling original and sponsored content rather than pure search licensing.
- Media partners whose clips Giphy distributes now face a counterparty that also competes with them for audience attention, forcing clearer terms about who owns and monetizes the loop.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, GIF infrastructure consolidates into editorially curated media platforms — visible later when Giphy added view counts for artists and partners and then launched its trending-topic Stories homepage run by an editorial team — shifting value from open search to packaged, ownable content.
- That same consolidation raises the moderation stakes: as Giphy became a primary visual-communication layer reaching hundreds of millions of daily users, illicit content slipping past its bans turned from a niche complaint into a platform-governance liability.
The trend: Messaging-layer content utilities are evolving from neutral search pipes into original-content studios as they chase advertising revenue on top of their installed audiences.