May 24, 2023 13:05:00

Meta has no choice but to let go of the GIF library GIPHY with a sale price of less than 1/7 at the time of acquisition, forced to sell to Shutterstock

Stock photo service Shutterstock has announced that it will acquire GIF library GIPHY from Meta for $ 53 million (about 7.34 billion yen). Meta was reported to have

acquired GIPHY for $400 million (about 43 billion yen at that time) in 2020, but the UK Competition and Market Authority (CMA) decided that it would lead to a GIF monopoly. , was ordering Meta to let go of GIPHY.

Shutterstock to Acquire GIPHY, the World's Largest GIF Library and Search Engine
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/shutterstock-to-acquire-giphy-the-worlds-largest-gif-library-and-search-engine-301831611.html

Meta sells Giphy for $53M to Shutterstock after UK blocked GIF platform purchase - ABC News

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/meta-sells-giphy-53m-shutterstock-after-uk-blocked-99543243

Meta forced to sell Giphy to Shutterstock, takes 87% loss • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/23/meta_giphy_sale/

Immediately after Meta acquired GIPHY, the CMA began investigating due to concerns that GIPHY's absorption into Meta would concentrate the traffic of users seeking GIFs to Meta. In addition to being used by various companies through APIs, etc., GIPHY has also established itself as a display advertising market for promoting products with GIFs, so if the existing market for GIFs is monopolized by Meta, CMA will was insisting.

Why is Facebook's parent company Meta being asked to sell the GIF service 'GIPHY'? -GIGAZINE

Meta (at that time Facebook) argued that ``CMA's judgment was wrong'', but then CMA fined Facebook for not cooperating with the investigation, and ordered to withdraw the acquisition in 2021. Meta appealed but lost, reaching the general conclusion that `` GIPHY needs to be sold '' in 2022. Meta has agreed to the CMA's decision in October 2022 and will sell the company as ordered. Seven months later, the sale has finally happened.

Meta, which provided predictive conversion using GIPHY in the chat service on the platform owned by Meta, plans to conclude an API agreement with Shutterstock after the sale of GIPHY and continue to use GIPHY's service. As a position, it will be the same as TikTok and Twitter that use GIPHY's API.

Shutterstock plans to further expand its API ecosystem with GIPHY's 14,000+ APIs/SDKs. The company also claims to have 1.7 billion daily users, including GIPHY's website and apps, who conduct more than 1.3 billion daily searches and generate 15 billion media impressions daily. He said he plans to expand GIPHY's marketing to include 'casual conversations' as well as professionals looking for stock photos using GIPHY.

Shutterstock shares rose nearly 2% on May 23, 2023, the day the acquisition was announced.