“Marketplace commentary and user sentiment towards GIFs on social media shows that they have fallen out of fashion as a content form, with younger users, in particular, describing GIFs as ‘for boomers’ and ‘cringe’.”

This is a statement that GIF search engine GIPHY shared with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s competition regulator, in its attempt to get out of Meta’s acquisition. The usage of GIFs — which are basically animated images — has no doubt declined over the years, but nobody expects a company to go public and say, “Hey, we know we’re not cool anymore.”

On Tuesday, GIPHY finally got out of that deal and was acquired by Shutterstock for $53 million in cash. For context, Meta reportedly paid $400 million for the New York-based company in 2020.

Shutterstock is a paid stock image library and the acquisition of a service that has always been free to use is sure to raise some questions, the most important one being — will GIFs remain free for users? The answer to that is, probably not.

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The Shutterstock + GIPHY investor deck says, “We expect to execute against multiple monetisation opportunities across advertising, content and distribution.”

Shutterstock also shared a statement with CNBC-TV18, from its CEO Paul Hennessy, that reads, “We’re looking forward to leveraging 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.”

While it is unclear what exactly “commercialisation of our GIF library” means, it does hint towards a future where users will have to pay to access GIFs, as is the case with Shutterstock’s other services.

Social Media Today believes that Shutterstock could also be looking at restricting GIF re-publishing in order to monetise them.

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However, the media outlet added that GIPHY will still be supported via third-party integrations in apps, like how you (or your parents) share GIFs on Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc.

So what exactly will the deal mean?

From what it seems, the deal will mainly focus on making brands a part of people’s everyday conversations rather than limiting them to purely marketing and advertising content. “This acquisition is an important next step in Shutterstock’s journey as an end-to-end creative platform as it extends our audience touch points beyond primarily professional marketing and advertising use cases into casual conversations,” Hennessey added.

That makes sense because, over the years, GIFs have become a “deliverable” for brands which they want to leverage to reach a wider audience and turn their content viral. If you think about it, as users, we also tend to favour GIFs from TV shows or movies that we’ve watched. Remember “But did you die?” from Hangover 2? Your favourite Taylor Swift sticker? Ross squeakily saying “I’m fine” when he’s clearly not? That’s marketing at its peak.

In case you are wondering why things can’t go back to the Tumblr days when there were free GIFs everywhere and things were not so complicated, the answer is simple. Despite having a daily user base of over 1.7 billion globally and 15 billion daily media impressions, GIPHY was still going out of business.

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“GIPHY’s monetisation business has not been operating for the last two years, and GIPHY has not generated any revenues or benefitted from Meta's wider organisation to develop new products,” the company said in its filing with the CMA.

Things were so bad that when JPMorgan approached big names like Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Snap, Twitter, and others, for a potential acquisition, none of them showed any interest.

And that is when Shutterstock stepped in, and it makes all the sense for the company to take control of GIPHY. It has the technology, the platform and could utilise GIPHY’s huge user base to slip into casual conversations. Whether or not these GIFs will have the Shutterstock watermark, only time will tell.

The deal is set to close in June.

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