Meta has entered an agreement to sell Giphy, the animated GIF search engine, to Shutterstock for “$53 million of net cash paid at closing, inclusive of working capital.”
Three years ago, Meta bought Giphy for $400 million but was later ordered by a UK regulator to dispose of the company due to anticompetition concerns. Specifically, the Competition and Markets Authority said the acquisition could deny or limit competitors such as Snapchat and Twitter access to Giphy’s content.
GIPHY is the world’s largest collection of GIFs and stickers that supplies casual conversational content. Its content plays a vital role in enhancing text- and message-based conversations across various platforms, including Meta, popular social media platforms like TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat, as well as team collaboration platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. Moreover, GIPHY seamlessly integrates with a wide range of mobile devices, ensuring its widespread accessibility and utility for users across different platforms.
Shutterstock is the leading global platform for licensing from the most extensive and diverse collection of high-quality 3D models, videos, music, photographs, vectors and illustrations. It is a premier partner for transformative brands, digital media and marketing companies, empowering the world to create with confidence.
“This is an exciting next step in Shutterstock’s journey as an end-to-end creative platform,” remarked Shutterstock CEO Paul Hennessy. “Shutterstock is in the business of helping people and brands tell their stories. Through the GIPHY acquisition, we are extending our audience touch points beyond primarily professional marketing and advertising use cases and expanding into casual conversations. 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 monetization, generative AI, studio production and creative automation to enable the commercialization of our GIF library as we roll this offering out to customers.”
The transaction combines Shutterstock Studios and GIPHY Studios to enable world-class custom content solutions for brands and advertisers.
