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 while working with advertisers, movie studios, and political candidates. In it, the team frames the growth arc — 3,000 to 150M monthly users in three years — and announces Giphy Studios, an LA shop for original looped content, marking the shift from GIF search utility toward owned media.
First-order effects
- Giphy Studios gives brands and media partners a native production arm inside the platform where their audiences already share, deepening the advertiser relationships flagged in earlier coverage.
Second-order effects
- With scale proven but monetization unresolved — Giphy was still weighing revenue models after raising $150M — original content creates inventory and sponsorship formats beyond search placement, pressuring rivals to build equivalent branded-content capabilities.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the platform compounds: by late 2017 Giphy reported 300M daily users sharing 2B+ GIFs alongside major media partnerships, suggesting search-plus-studio platforms become de facto short-form advertising networks sitting inside messaging apps.
The trend: Messaging-layer content utilities are climbing the value chain from search and distribution into original production and advertising, turning loop formats into monetizable media inventory.