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Facebook is acquiring Giphy, a search engine and database for short, animated images known as GIFs, adding to its growing stable of apps and services at a time when regulators are questioning the company’s reach.
Facebook, which announced the deal for an undisclosed sum in a blog post on Friday, said Giphy will become part of its photo-sharing site Instagram.
The tech giant said that 50 percent of Giphy’s traffic already comes from Facebook’s apps, which also include its popular social-networking service as well as WhatsApp.
Giphy is an app in its own right, but most people use it in the context of other services — as an add-on to Apple’s iMessage tool for texting, for example, or as a way to send viral images to co-workers using Slack.
In acquiring the company, Facebook signaled Friday it did not plan to change Giphy’s core functionality, pledging it would invest further in content while assuring developers “will continue to have the same access” to the underlying code.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...cquires-giphy/
