Meta, the parent company of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, has reached an agreement to sell Giphy, an animated image (GIF) service, to image and visual tools provider Shutterstock for a whopping $53 million (€49 million). That’s down from the $315 million (€290 million) paid by Mark Zuckerberg’s company three years ago.
The decision to divest from Giphy, just three years after announcing its acquisition in May 2020, echoes a request by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which last October ordered the divestment after concluding that the transaction would harm Giphy. Users of social networks. and advertisers in the UK.
In connection with the sale, which could be completed by June 2023, Meta Platforms has entered into an application interface (API) agreement to provide continued access to Giphy content on its platform.
“Through the acquisition of Giphy, we’re expanding our audience touchpoints beyond primarily professional advertising and marketing use cases and expanding into casual conversations,” said Paul Hennessy, CEO of Shutterstock.
“We plan to leverage Shutterstock’s unique capabilities in content and metadata monetization, generative artificial intelligence, studio production and creative automation to enable the commercialization of our GIF library for clients when we launch this offering,” he added.
Shutterstock expects Giphy to add minimal revenue in 2023, focused on monetization efforts through 2024, and maintained its revenue and Ebitda margin forecasts for 2023.
In May 2020, Facebook announced that it would buy Giphy, a platform for creating and sharing animated images (GIFs), for more than $300 million, to integrate it into its social network Instagram.
A month later, the CMA decided to open an investigation into the potential negative impact of the acquisition that it could have on competition, which became an in-depth examination in January 2021, and which ultimately led to the decision of the British regulator. Request to sell gifs.
Source: El Diario
