Congrats to Giphy, but honestly it baffles me they are worth this much money. Do they actually bring in decent revenue, or was this all about eyeballs? Is this content even decently monetizable?
Disclaimer: I am the jaded creator of Twicsy, a Twitter picture engine with many millions of visitors over its lifetime, and I apparently missed the boat on this trends and had to shut it down.
Think of Giphy images as a giant, organically shared version of web tracking software. Which complements the coverage of the FB Pixel[2] well, as it worms its way into privacy-conscious areas they might not have FB Pixel coverage such as private communications and security/privacy-minded apps. And without implementing something like a proxy server to pre-cache/sanitize images and strip tracking identifiers in both directions, it's a tracking vector that's hard to keep out of your app without introducing user friction.
Given that cynical viewpoint, the valuation makes a ton of sense.
Woah, that's a great point. Imagine sharing a gif in Signal and still being tracked by Facebook because every person that loads it needs to first download it from FB servers.
It really is getting to the point that if you want privacy, don't touch anything owned by the top 5 tech companies. Better yet, only use Open Source. I never used to be a OSS only person, but the past few months I've started to go that way.
From Giphy's end they can still so useful traffic analysis by generating a unique URL for the search result obtained by User A and subsequently sent to his chat cohort. Each cohort app retrieving the same URL could then be enumerated. It's not user-identifying but it would generate a sort of contact graph.
Also the Signal service could do a transparent TLS MitM between the app and Giphy instead of a passthrough TLS tunnel and the user apps would be unaware. In fact from that page I'm not sure they're even doing a tunnel anyway.
While you aren't wrong, in this day and age it's not enough to simply pay. Even if you pay for something, you are still the product being sold. Why would a company leave money on the table, when violating people's privacy is profitable and there is no backlash?
It's not this day and age. Analytics and data mining of customers data is as old as business. 2000 years ago merchants were also tracking who's buying what, in what city, what time of the year, etc.
It's waaaaay more efficient nowadays and way more creepy, but it's not a new invention.
In a society which doesn't care enough and a legal system that doesn't punish unethical behaviour any company tapping unethical revenue streams in addition to the ethical ones will have a competitive advantage and given otherwise similar conditions eventually outperform ethical companies. Once a sole actor goes down that path it puts a lot of pressure on all other actors to throw ethics overboard as well as otherwise their company's survival and in extension their livelihood will be threatened. This is why we can't just rely on market forces sorting everything out, consumers making decision, etc. but have to actively legislate to protect our privacy and personal rights.
What you're describing with that quote isn't cynicism. Especially as far as FB is concerned. That is absolutely business as usual for them and has been for years.
"Cynical" usually implies an element of assuming the worst when such an assumption is far from certain. In this case I think the assumption is spot-on and not at all surprising.
Does the fact that it is integrated into iOS keyboard have any implications? WlWhat kind of data does this have access to when I send gifs from iOS keyboard?
iOS keyboards given “full access” in settings can see literally everything you type. That’s why I don’t use GBoard on my iPhone, also why I don’t enable “enhanced spellcheck” in Chrome.
swiftykey (now owned by MSFT) is terrible as it is constantly trying to call back to microsoft services, even with all "personalization" disabled. I've got my phone locked down with multiple "blocks" I can see it constantly trying to phone home.
It's behavior is no different from Windows 10 telemetry. The keyboard does not even work if you disable one of the underlying telemetry services in the app (if you have a rooted device).
Google messenger (the default texting app) has a gif search that includes giphy, and Discord and slack also use giphy. What I don't see is what data FB is getting when the gif loads. OK, so they can see I am using giphy in Discord. Now what?
Hypothetically speaking, fb gets a request for an image for each person in a chat at roughly the same time. Now they know know what chat platform you're using and who is participating in the chat. I'd venture a guess those participant identities could be de-referenced with data collected from their various [other] trackers. Now they can extend their social graph to include communication patterns on 3rd party platforms.
I'm fairly sure this is False. GBoard uses Tenor (the next largest Giphy competitor), which Google also happens to have bought 2 years ago (undisclosed amount of money). I also just tested Messages and can confirm that the results look like Tenor too.
For Discord, while they initially used Giphy and has a /giphy command, it now uses Tenor too in the GIF picker.
They can also see that you use Discord, as well as how often and how heavily. And potentially other facets that can be derived from whatever metadata is provided to Facebook in the course of serving that image request.
There's also all kinds of shenanigans that they can play in the process of serving that request to harvest other meta data and help fingerprint you. Which Giphy's privacy policy mentions is already done to an extent, in the form of dropping cookies while servicing your request. Cookie abuse itself is a bit of a losing battle, as browser vendors increasingly layer on limitations and restrictions for cookies. But they're far from the only method of fingerprinting possible during the servicing of a web request.
Google already does it with Gmail[1][2], so it's not unheard of. But it adds another layer of complexity, plus is somewhat antithetical to the privacy viewpoint as it then exposes all of the images to the app developer now since it's routed through the proxy server instead of direct end-user -> image server requests.
[1] Can't find a page specifically detailing it, but [2] gives a basic synopsis on it in the context of allowing GSuite admins to whitelist internal domains from routing through the proxy.
I'm still dubious. Giphy hit it's peak of power 2-3 years ago and has plateaued or even tapered since then. It was all over reddit and Slack for a while and then the novelty wore off and competitors popped up.
... which might be what made it cheap enough to be snapped up by Facebook. Who knows, maybe the valuation of giphy would have been much larger 2 to 3 years ago.
Acquisitions often happen after some value is lost from the company being acquired, like when Microsoft bought Nokia or when Yahoo bought Tumblr.
Cookie-based tracking, sure. But there are plenty of other avenues for fingerprinting. This[1] help doc from Adobe Analytics even makes reference to a Subscriber ID header you can get mobile carriers to give you, if you get onto the carrier's whitelist. Nothing the vendors do device/browser-side to restrict tracking will help if your mobile carrier is transparently appending an identifying header to your request after it leaves your phone.
I don't know enough about TLS < 1.3. In TLS 1.3, the whole handshake on both sides is covered by the handshake completion --- if the client handshake was modified in the middle, the client will not accept the server handshake completion.
However, that doesn't stop carriers from inserting something at the start of the stream that the client doesn't see. It would need to be coordinated with the origin server, but that's already true for HTTP header insertion. Sending a pre-handshake blob to a TLS server that isn't expecting such a blob would fail hard though, rather than going on its merry way like an extra header usually would.
I'm really not certain, as I've never seen an implementation that involved it. There was a lot of stink about it 5 years ago[1], which called out the exact argument of it not working for HTTPS traffic. Which, is a substantially larger portion of traffic now than it was at the time.
But you still see nondescript references to the capability in places like that that up-to-date Adobe Analytics doc, and the carriers aren't trying to use legal means (a la lobbying) to slow down the uptick in HTTPS traffic and preserve their revenue stream. Which leads me to presume they've developed technical solutions that are compatible with HTTPS traffic. They can't really use the spray-and-pay method[2] they were using. But all bets are off when they destination site and the carriers are coordinating with each other, as that coordination can involve technical modifications to facilitate it in addition to just the whitelisting itself.
[2] Some carriers would inject a header into all traffic, and any interested party could slurp them up. But you'd have to pay the carrier to access any of the other information the carrier had for that particular identifier.
The other interesting thing about this one, is that they dont even attempt to license content do they? They dont have any content costs?
Theres been this fake (steal) it till you make it, wild west approach to growth. Youtube, Buzzfeed, Imgur. You just host anybodys content regardless of if the poster is the owner, and once you get to scale, then you handle copyright and creating your own content so you arent as dependent on external creators.
But in Giphys case, they never have to take the extra step. Because they are so short, they are much more likely to pass fair use, and they can just host anybodys anything, barring some illegal fringes, without having to pay for the rights.
GIPHY has agreements with pretty much all the major content studios, including ones historically protective of their content, such as HBO, the NFL and Disney.
I think the main problem is not movie studios (where fair use is likely to apply as we're talking about a 10-second GIF out of a 1h+ movie) but all the meme creators on Reddit and other social networks. I assume those make up the majority of GIFs out there and as of now they aren't being compensated or even credited properly.
This is an unpopular opinion, but if the meme creator violated copyright when they made the meme, and they want credit for their “derived version” then they need a license.
I disagree that they violated copyright. If they're using a screenshot or a short clip from a movie that is definitely fair use. On the other hand, what Giphy is doing is copying the entire meme.
What? That's absolutely not guaranteed to be fair use. AFAIK there's no precedent for such things. And even if random people making memes is fair use, Giphy would still be violating the copyright of the original media by hosting nearly unedited clips for commercial reasons. The vast, vast, vast majority of memes are not transformative.
What would be the infringement? I would say any animated GIF (or whatever) should be defined as fair use across the board, since it's impossible to use it for anything other than criticism or comment. It's not exactly like Beastie Boys vs. Chambers Bros, but it rhymes with it.
>GIPHY has agreements with pretty much all the major content studios, including ones historically protective of their content, such as HBO, the NFL and Disney.
Incredible. What a strange time we live in.
This makes me wonder, does Disney have any say if someone uploads a home-made Mickey gif that is controversial or otherwise damaging to their brand?
Facebook, Twitter and Google (YouTube) have used that strategy to ignore their obligations to filter their content by getting into some type of "too bug to fail" situation and throwing their hands up when they are asked to do their duty. Those products didn't fill a niche by innovating, they filled a niche by ignoring the obligations that were preventing others from filling the niche.
> Facebook, Twitter and Google (YouTube) have used that strategy to ignore their obligations to filter their content by getting into some type of "too bug to fail" situation and throwing their hands up when they are asked to do their duty
I don't think this is quite fair to YouTube. They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing ContentID. It's not perfect, but it's without a doubt the most sophisticated system to date. It's a difficult problem, but I don't see how you can say they've "thrown up their hands".
I thought the DMCA reporting system was basically made for Google (maybe by Google???) so they could have a middle-ground. They shift responsibility to content owners, through the law; then sell themselves as virtuous through ContentID and keep enough infringing content to not too deleteriously effect their platform -- collecting ad revenue even on content they allow that's infringing.
You can say what you like, but that's genius level politics-business IMO.
no their problem is that the DMCA system sucks as it wasn't even written this century (1998), so they created ContentID as a response. They do benefit from the way the system exists currently because of this since the cost of developing a competitor to ContentID is so seemingly prohibitively expensive that nobody else tries to do what YouTube does.
I wonder if it's similar to music, where you can play a short piece without compensating the artist? Since most gifs are <5 seconds, it's not content stealing.
fair use is an affirmative defense, where you say "yes i stole it, but the government should not protect the content owner from me," similar to "yes i injured them, but it was self defense and they do not deserve compensation."
[1]intellectual property violations are not theft in the strictest sense of the word, they don't remove the original. stealing in this context is colloquial.
Stealing is illegal, as is assault, and you are not convicted of assault in cases of self-defense. Similarly, calling fair use "government sanctioned stealing" is a bit of a stretch.
That's exactly what it is. Fair use is a government granted exception to intellectual protectionism. The government is the one determining what counts as intellectual property violations, and what counts as exempt from punishment.
Without intellectual property law, you would be free to copy anything. The barrier to copying is the government. The free pass to flaunt their rule, when qualified, is also the government.
assault and self defense were my analogy of something similar. im saying they are not different in kind. akin to self defense being government sanctioned murder.
Business models have been created upon flimsier foundations. Come on, capitalists: you've taught us for decades that if someone can make it work, it's above criticism. Are we now discovering moral constraints on profit?
They're integrated into a lot of apps and maybe even apple's OS. In addition to those integration and business relationships they probably have some sort of data sharing / ad tech thingy that's worth some money on its own.
I was surprised it it carried this kind of valuation too, but I think this is a matter of finding the right buyer. This isn't about revenue, it's another way for Facebook to harvest metrics, this time across competing products.
Disclaimer: I am the jaded creator of Twicsy, a Twitter picture engine with many millions of visitors over its lifetime, and I apparently missed the boat on this trends and had to shut it down.