John Borthwick, one of Giphy's early investors and board members, describes how the Facebook deal came about and says talks began in late March
@ow https://onezero.medium.com/... https://twitter.com/... @vivekxk : 1/5 Seems like the Giphy deal is strategically great for FB and probably gave Giphy the lifeline it needed. FB gets valuable intelligence - Giphy is embedded into many top apps and the SDK requires disclosing user deviceIDs. What? You thought they bought it for the gifs? @techaltar : Woah, how did this pass antitrust? FB has just bought the perfect trojan horse that lets them track users across almost all competing social platforms (e.g. Twitter, Slack, Snapchat, TikTok), as well as show them Facebook ads while they are there. Wtf? Want a video on this? https://twitter.com/... @vectorpoem : It's cool how Giphy selling to FB is a reminder that economic crashes are an opportunity for already-huge evil companies to snap up smaller companies that can't weather the storm. Anyway use @firefox with the Facebook Container feature to block their tracking as much as possible. https://twitter.com/... @bran_dj : So giphy is just surveillance wrapped in copyright violations masked as a shared language using advertising as culture https://twitter.com/... Telegram Messenger / @telegram : @draane_ Yes, the Giphy API sees the search term, but doesn't get any of your data and doesn't know who you are. Glenn Gabe / @glenngabe : “The site will continue to operate.” Yep, I'm sure it will :) -> How Facebook Could Use Giphy to Collect Your Data “Giphy wraps each of its animated GIFs in a special format that helps the image load faster, and also embeds a tiny piece of Javascript...” https://onezero.medium.com/... https://twitter.com/... Tim Grieve / @timgrieve : “Seven years later, Giphy isn't just a company: It's the chief purveyor of an international language for what Borthwick calls the ‘post-literate media’ era.” https://www.protocol.com/... Hynek Schlawack / @hynek : «Of course Giphy is going to retain its own brand. If they renamed it to “Facebook Tracking Pixels”, usage might drop off.» 🔥🔥🔥 https://daringfireball.net/... Makena Kelly / @kellymakena : Facebook's Giphy acquisition is sounding the antitrust alarms in Congress. Statements from @SenAmyKlobuchar, @HawleyMO, and a @SenWarren spokesperson here: https://www.theverge.com/... @slpng_giants : Good. This should be a bipartisan effort. It places too much power in hands of a company that controls the way much of the world communicates. @facebook and @instagram should be broken up already. Instead, they're being allowed to further cement their monopoly. https://twitter.com/... Will Oremus / @willoremus : If you use Giphy, you need to read this story about all the data it collects when you use its gifs. With today's acquisition, all of that data will become Facebook's. https://onezero.medium.com/... https://twitter.com/... Moxie Marlinspike / @moxie : Now that Giphy has been acquired by FB, many have reached out to ask whether we should be concerned about Giphy search in Signal. Signal already uses a privacy preserving approach to prevent gif search providers from receiving user data: https://signal.org/... @facebook : Welcome to the family, @GIPHY! https://about.fb.com/... https://twitter.com/... Parker Higgins / @xor : Given Facebook's GIPHY acquisition, Signal's highly engineered privacy preservation for something “frivolous” like gif search seems pretty prescient https://signal.org/... https://twitter.com/... Karyne Levy / @karynelevy : This interview with a Giphy investor on the FB deal is great, but the best part is when @issielapowsky asked him his feelings on pronouncing it Jiffy. https://www.protocol.com/... Mathew Ingram / @mathewi : At $400 million, Facebook's Giphy acquisition is just a hair behind the largest media acquisition of the last decade or so, Axel Springer's purchase of Business Insider in 2015 https://twitter.com/... @om : Here is my basic problem with this deal. If ulook at the places Giphy is integrated, there are a lot of rivals to Facebook. Slack, for instance competes with Facebook Work. (Dis: own slack shares). Ditto for Twitter. Tumblr. Facebook has direct access to usage on those platforms https://twitter.com/... Biz Carson / @bizcarson : I like that there is just a gif of Mark Zuckerberg eating toast on the homepage of @protocol right now: http://protocol.com/ (and while you're there, you should read @issielapowsky's interview with @betaworks @Borthwick on FB's Giphy acquisition: https://www.protocol.com/...)
Context & Ripple Effects
The deal arc closes fast: Axios reported the ~$400M acquisition on May 15, and by the next day board member John Borthwick was confirming talks began only in late March — a roughly seven-week sprint to close. The price is the tell: $400M is well below the ~$600M valuation from Giphy's latest round, which fits the description of the sale as a lifeline for a company that had raised $150M while still searching for a working revenue model since its 2017 monetization questions.
The strategic logic is darker than gifs. As OneZero reported, Giphy's SDK sits inside many top apps and its tools can capture device IDs and even keystrokes — meaning Facebook now has a window into how people share content on Twitter, Slack, Snapchat, and TikTok, and U.S. senators have already raised antitrust objections.
First-order effects
- Facebook acquires cross-platform visibility into sharing behavior outside its own apps — device IDs and usage signals flowing from Giphy integrations embedded in competing social products.
- Giphy's investors and board, including Borthwick, exit at $400M after the company failed to monetize on its own — a discount to the ~$600M mark set in its last funding round.
Second-order effects
- Platforms like Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, and Slack that embed the Giphy SDK must now weigh whether every gif served hands usage data to a direct competitor, forcing keep-or-rip-out decisions on a widely deployed integration.
- The senator statements put the deal on the antitrust docket immediately, making Facebook's data-access rationale — not market share in gifs — the likely center of scrutiny.
Third-order effects
- If regulators engage, the case becomes a template for policing acquisitions of neutral infrastructure layers — SDKs and embeds that sit inside rivals' products — rather than headline consumer apps.
- Developers and platforms may start treating third-party embeds as data-liability surfaces, pressuring vendors toward contractual guarantees or self-hosted alternatives when an acquirer changes.
The trend: Platform giants are buying the shared infrastructure their competitors depend on, turning neutral SDKs into intelligence channels and forcing regulators to look past app-store market share to embedded-data deals.