GIFs – or, let's say, what it is: short form video – have always been very popular, but it always seems surprising that we incorporate them into the keyboards of our phone. But here we are in 2017, and there is a group of startups looking to bring the use, or in the case of Gfycat the creation, of GIFs getting closer and closer to a thing of every day .
So it's not surprising that Gfycat's CEO, Richard Rabbat, explains why the company claims to have reached 130 million active users a day, as many of these start-ups are starting to overtake the 100 million mark. This number counts how many users call a short video of the startup's back-end, which means that on the basis of tracking mechanisms, Rabbat says to be more conservative. Giphy, a keyboard and GIF network, said it had reached 200 million monthly active users in July, and all of that growth shows how GIFs have become a way of stuffing a lot of information into a small amount of space.
"We have focused a lot on creators over time," said Rabbat. "When we look at what the creators want, they want to tell a story and want to put it everywhere, they want to discuss it on Facebook, tweet about it, or put it anywhere else." We allow more people to publish the content on different platforms, we show on medium, I think that something social is happening where people said, I'm just on Facebook or Twitter, and now they are everywhere, now the content is just everywhere, and it's a much more diverse environment than in the past. "
Rabbat said the company had 56 million active users a month in September last year, which means that the size of the startup has more than doubled during the year elapsed. While Giphy and Tenor are developing ways to bring GIFs everywhere, Gfycat is focusing primarily on creators and building tools to help them build the types of short videos that can appear on other networks. After that, it 's about knowing what the idea of a short for video, or GIF, looks like in other platforms like iMessage and Facebook Messenger. Creating GIF on these platforms may require totally different behavior, Rabbat said.
"We think of GIFs as an example of short form content that people want to interact with," said Rabbat. "Our new experiences with Facebook Messenger are a new avenue that creates content that does not look like a GIF.This is a visual expression that people can share.In some cases it is about a GIF, but in other cases it would not be a GIF – it is a drawing or something interesting with another vertical that makes sense. "
After starting as a side project at Google, Gfycat raised $ 10 million in funding last September, led by Alsop Louis Partners in addition to Pear Ventures, You and Mr. Jones, and the Stanford StartX fund alongside from other individual investors. Rabbat said that over time, they continued to see Amazon bills grow while it was still a parallel project, and finally decided to pull the trigger to make it a full start.
Of course, there are other creative tools such as GIF Brewery that allow things like screen capture on desktops, thus facilitating the creation of GIFs with built-in tools at the same time. Office experience. Rabbat said that he considered such tools as GIF Brewery as a "photoshop for GIFs", which makes sense for energy creators, while Gfycat seeks to create tools for creating videos and content accessible on all platforms.
To return to the GIF keyboard issue, Giphy and Tenor have also gathered hundreds of millions of users. The argument of Rabbat is that short form video, or GIF experience, is different on different platforms. There are transcoding issues like those he faced at Google to ensure a seamless experience. Still, the startup is going to face a ton of competition as all these other companies like Giphy, Tenor, or Imgur are looking for new ways to allow creators to do short video experiments on different platforms before considering the GIF "concept altogether.