This article was first published in the June 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
When you're CEO of a GIF firm, it's hard to be taken seriously - even if that firm is the biggest animated-clip search engine in the world. "When I say I work for this GIF company, they're like, 'What do you have, two guys?'," explains Alex Chung.
But in a typical month, Giphy, the 42-person GIF repository Chung set up in February 2013, receives more than 100 million unique monthly visitors; over four billion hits from its API; and serves more than 25 billion GIFs. Last winter it talked to Facebook about acquisition, but then went on to raise $17 million (£12m), followed by another $55m at a valuation of $300 million. "We grew 100 times the first year, and another 20 the next year. We grew five times this year," says Chung, 40. He gives a giggle. "It's kind of funny."
Giphy – that's a hard "G", internet pedants – began life as a web crawler that found and ranked every moving .gif file on the internet. (There are currently around 150 million original GIFs, according to Giphy's analysis.) When Chung created it, he was taking time out, disenchanted with startup life after years in the business, including spells making hardware for Intel and software for MTV.
One evening, he was discussing the limitations of language with his friend Jace Cooke. Moving images, the pair agreed, were so much more expressive than printed words - so, as an experiment, Chung decided to build a search engine to find them. Within a week his "Google for GIFs" had 30,000 page views and Chung and Cooke had an investment offer of $1 million from Betaworks, one of the original funders of Kickstarter. "It was like being an artist, and you do some sketches and someone's like, 'Here's a million dollars, go do more of this'," says Chung.
What do you do when you're making GIFS your business? "The first step was to own the GIF," says Chung. "It's the same thing that SoundCloud did with music and YouTube with video." Other GIF startups always come second to Giphy on search engines, says Chung. What's more, Giphy has been able to arrange licensing agreements with major content providers, meaning it's much less likely to get sued by angry movie studios for breach of copyright. "We invented GIF licensing," says Chung. "We barely get any DMCAs [takedown requests]."
Giphy's next move was to take control of distribution by arranging partnerships with key mobile platforms and messaging services. Giphy is now integrated into Slack, Facebook Messenger, iMessage and, most recently, Tinder, where a button in the app's chat function lets users flirt via GIF.
Giphy also has a studio that works with brands and broadcasters to create new GIFs for big releases, such as Star Wars: The Force Awakensor the return of The X-Files. The resulting combination of distribution and content is strangely reminiscent of a traditional publisher or broadcaster. "We're a GIF media company," says Chung.
Giphy doesn't make any revenue yet, but Chung paints a vision of a future in which people go to Giphy for real-time news, and search engines provide animated results instead of bland lists of links. When GIFs are this popular, anything seems possible. "We have this side project called Giphy TV," says Chung, "and this does 300 million views a month, as some random thing. It's the new way of browsing TV - you don't want to watch the shows, you just want to watch the highlights. That could be an entire cable network."
A TV channel for cats and Game of Thrones memes? "When MTV launched, everyone laughed, saying 'No one's going to watch two-minute music videos'," he says. "Now they're making the same argument about GIFs."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
