Stock photography company Shutterstock Inc on Wednesday said it would buy animated-images platform Giphy Inc from Meta Platforms Inc. According to a report by Reuters, Shutterstock purchased Giphy for $53 million in cash. The deal has come months after the Facebook owner had agreed to divest the company of competition concerns.
Last year, UK’s competition regulator asked Meta to sell Giphy over fears that it could deny or limit competitors such as Snapchat Inc and Twitter access to the target’s content.
Meta reportedly paid $400 million for Giphy in 2020. A year later the deal was challenged by Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority. The regulator had forced the US tech giant to sell an already acquired company. That means, Meta has recuperated 13% only of its money.
Shutterstock said Giphy would add “minimal” revenue this year and it would launch efforts to increase revenue from 2024.
“This is an exciting next step in Shutterstock’s journey as an end-to-end creative platform,” said Shutterstock CEO Paul Hennessy.
Shutterstock has been experimenting into the Artificial Intelligence realm of late. The company also said that the deal helps it to bolster its burgeoning “generative AI and metadata strategy”. It added that the deal allows it to expand its content library to include GIFs and stickers for advertisers and brands.
“Through the Giphy acquisition, we are extending our audience touch points beyond primarily professional marketing and advertising use cases and expanding into casual conversations,” CEO Hennessy said.
“Giphy enables everyday users to express themselves in memorable ways with GIF and sticker content while also enabling brands to be a part of these casual conversations. We plan to leverage Shutterstock’s unique capabilities in content and metadata monetisation, generative AI, studio production and creative automation to enable the commercialisation of our GIF library as we roll this offering out to customers,” he added.
Giphy boasts the world’s largest repository of animated images, popularly called GIFs, and web-based stickers which are used on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Microsoft Teams.
Its content, which also includes official submissions from media firms such as Disney and Netflix, garners 15 billion daily impressions.
The Giphy deal will allow access to about 1.7 billion daily users, Shutterstock said.
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