![]() ![]() A brand, for instance, could work with the startups to offer their own GIFs to promote products. Riffsy, which reports more than 4 billion views of its GIFs every month, and Giphy, which said it sees more than 50 million monthly unique users, said they were not currently focused on making money from the animations.īoth companies see potential for profit. “A GIF packages your message for you, so you don’t have to figure out how to express yourself,” Baron said.įor now, few companies are profiting from GIFs. Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University and author of “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World.”Ī GIF, in many ways, can be an even more effective form of visual communication than emoji because of the movement in an animation that provides a greater range of expression. “We’re increasingly writing shorter and shorter amounts of text to be read on screens, be it your computer, smartphones, tablets or an Apple Watch,” said Naomi S. Last summer, Apple also opened up its iOS mobile software to let developers install new keyboards that made it easier to insert GIFs into messages, leading to an explosion of new GIF companies. GIFs, too, are benefiting from the adoption of mobile devices and faster cellular networks that enable the seamless transmission of visual animations. Instagram, which hosts more than 300 million users, said roughly 40 per cent of all images posted now include at least one emoji in the accompanying text. Use of emoji, filled with cartoony images, exploded in Asian countries and are now built into many smartphone keyboards. The trend echoes the rise of text-based emoticons, which eventually gave way to emoji, the pictographic language created in the 1990s by NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese telecommunications giant. “Typing is an antiquated input method and you can’t express emotional dimension adequately with just a handful of emoji,” said Adam Leibsohn, the chief operating officer of Giphy, which is based in Manhattan. Giphy, which provides a search engine for a vast library of GIFs, has raised more than US$23 million.Īnd there are a slew of other companies, such as Imgur, PopKey and Kanvas, all eager to snip and remix video clips into short, ready-to-share packages. Riffsy, which makes the GIF keyboard for smartphones, just raised US$10 million (RM38.567 million). The animated snippets are being spread on mobile devices by a new generation of GIF startups, which are backed by venture capital. “But if I find the perfect GIF, it nails it.” “I’m not that great with words,” Howlett said. And office workers like Jerrod Howlett, an employee at Google, regularly responds to email with GIFs. Digital publications like BuzzFeed regularly use GIFs as a storytelling method. Google recently sent a reporter a GIF of a toddler throwing her hands up in response to a question. Their usage has seeped into professional venues, frequently replacing text. They are often culled from movie and TV clips and can include text on top of the animated image. They are typically a few seconds long, soundless and play in a loop. GIFs are marked by certain characteristics. And online searches for GIFs have risen by a factor of nine since mid-2012, according to Experian Marketing Services, an industry research firm. Slack, the workplace collaboration startup, said it sees more than 2 million GIF integrations each month. In March, Facebook began supporting GIFs, with more than 5 million of the animations sent daily through its messaging app. Tumblr said 23 million GIFs are posted to its site every day. They have become a mainstream form of digital expression, hugely popular with young audiences who never leave home without their smartphones. While the brief animations are not new - GIFs were created in 1987 by Steve Wilhite, a programmer at CompuServe, and have been omnipresent on desktops - major improvements in mobile technology and a surge of messaging applications are pushing GIFs to break out beyond the Web forums of old. That surge - tens of millions of the clips are sent every day on blogging site Tumblr alone - represents the next wave of mobile and visual communication, following the rise of photo-sharing services like Instagram and Snapchat, and the widening use of emoji. ![]() Dikeou is among the millions of people now turning to the animation snippets on phones to relay complex feelings and thoughts in ways beyond words and even photographs.
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