Facebook buys Giphy for $400 million

Facebook has agreed to acquire Giphy, the immensely popular GIF repository, according to a new report.

The social media giant is snatching up one of the largest databases of GIFs on the internet for $400 million, Axios first reported.

Giphy will become part of Instagram, Facebook said in a blog post announcing the acquisition. The social media giant said approximately 50 percent of Giphy’s traffic already comes from Facebook’s apps, adding that the company’s API was already integrated into Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp.

“GIPHY makes everyday conversations more entertaining, and so we plan to further integrate their GIF library into Instagram and our other apps so that people can find just the right way to express themselves,” Vishal Shah, Facebook’s vice president of product, wrote in the blog post.

Giphy joins a number of companies the social media giant has acquired over the years, most notably WhatsApp and Instagram.

You can read all of the Axios report here.

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