Giphy's GIF service has over 100 million users every day
Apparently, people like to share animated pictures.
It won't shock you to hear that GIF hosts like Giphy and Gfycat are thriving in an era where there's a new meme every minute. But just how well are they doing? Supremely well, according to Giphy. It just posted its first "State of the GIF" report, revealing that it has over 100 million active daily users. Yes, that's daily and not monthly. That amounts to over 1 billion GIFs served per day, and more than 2 million hours of viewing time. So what's the trick to getting that many viewers?
The company attributes at least some of its success to being proactive. It's not just waiting for you to upload a funny GIF yourself -- it has "thousands" of partners (including big names like Saturday Night Live and South Park Studios) that contribute their own animations. Event partners like MTV (for the VMAs) and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert have racked up hundreds of millions of views by themselves, and there's even a studio dedicated to producing original GIFs. Wide availability on phones helps, too.
Of course, it's important to note that Giphy and its peers are helped by the nature of many internet discussions: the meme-happy cultures of sites like Reddit, Tumblr and Twitter can revolve around GIFs at times. It's not certain that Giphy can ride that wave forever, but the stats suggest that it won't have to worry about a lack of users for a long time.
