Facebook’s Giphy purchase will help keep track of competitors

Giphy provides the same search service to many of Facebook’s competitors, Apple Inc’s iMessage, Twitter, Signal, TikTok and others. The company has a view of the health of those platforms and how often people use them, which is exactly the kind of insight Facebook values most, and has sought in the past. After Giphy joins Facebook, the company will maintain those integrations, and will keep getting data from GIF searches and posts around the Internet. — Reuters

A few months ago, the team at the money-losing GIF search engine, Giphy, reached out to Facebook Inc. Might the social networking company be interested in an investment?

Already, about half of Giphy’s activity came through Facebook and its family of apps, which lets users accent their posts and messages with short, animated clips of crying Michael Jordans, popcorn-eating Jon Stewarts and tea-sipping Kermits. While looking at Giphy, Facebook executives realised that they shouldn’t just make an investment – by buying the company outright, they could get something else they value: data.