Giphy, the world's largest collection of GIFs and stickers, has become a bad deal for Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. The American giant will have to sell this database for 53 million dollars (about 49 million euros) to Shutterstock, by order of the British competition regulator.
The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) halted the Giphy purchase operation in 2022, two years after its acquisition. Now, the British regulator forces to sell this service.
The problem for Meta is that it has sold it for much less than what it bought: in its day, it paid 315 million dollars for Giphy; now, he sells it to Shutterstock for 53 million. A considerable difference and that comes at a bad time for Zuckerberg's company, which has announced numerous cuts and layoffs in the last year.
Shutterstock, a licensed content provider in New York, is pleased with the deal. "This is an exciting next step in Shutterstock's journey as a comprehensive creative platform," company CEO Paul Hennessy said in a statement.
Hennessy intends 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 it rolls out this offering to clients."
In another statement, Giphy values its work, ensuring that its library of GIFs and stickers generates more than 1,300 million search queries daily and generates more than 15,000 million impressions daily in applications such as Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Microsoft, TikTok, Samsung, Twitter, Slack and Discord.
Meta has signed one of its worst investments with Giphy. And the sale does not exactly come at one of his best moments. This operation comes after the company led by Mark Zuckerberg has announced numerous cuts. The metaverse isn't working either, even if you keep spending millions of dollars on it. The businessman is convinced that it is a matter of time.
Poor economic results have resulted in numerous layoffs. In mid-March, the technology company announced that it would cut another 10,000 jobs in the coming months - which is in addition to the 11,000 layoffs announced in 2023 - and would abandon plans to fill some 5,000 vacancies that it had open.
