Giphy refreshes its homepage to feature sets of GIFs around different trending topics, curated by an editorial team, called Stories
Anna Hensel / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
Giphy has spent years building distribution before building a destination: it quadrupled traffic as a pure search engine in 2015, then opened Giphy Studios in LA to make original loops, and by late 2017 was running at 300M daily users sharing 2B+ GIFs with major media partnerships and stated advertising ambitions.
Stories is the next step in that arc: instead of waiting for users to search, an editorial team packages trending-topic GIF sets on the homepage itself. That converts Giphy's partnership library and its ad ambitions into a curated front door — closer to a media property than a utility.
First-order effects
- Giphy's editorial team gains a daily homepage product to program, giving its media partners' content a promoted surface tied to trending topics rather than relying on search queries alone.
Second-order effects
- The advertising push described in Giphy's 2017 profile gets sellable, themed inventory — curated Story pages around trends are easier packages for brand placements than raw search results.
- Rival GIF and sticker keyboards now compete against a destination play: if users open Giphy directly for Stories, distribution shifts from embedded keyboard integrations toward owned traffic.
Third-order effects
- Editorial curation puts humans in the loop over what surfaces on the homepage — which raises the stakes of Giphy's content-moderation problem, since a report already found banned imagery on the platform despite its prohibitions.
- If the pattern holds, search-engine-style tools increasingly add curated layers to become destinations, blurring the line between utility and publisher across consumer internet products.
The trend: Consumer search utilities are layering editorial curation on top of algorithmic supply to turn themselves into daily destinations — and Giphy's Stories is one data point in that shift.