Snap-owned GIF hosting platform Gfycat, founded in 2013 and acquired by Snap in 2020, once a popular website with cross-platform integration, has announced today. is about to go down on September 1, resulting in the deletion of its entire GIF archive. from the foundation. Users have two months to save their content before it is permanently deleted. The future of Gfycat content remains uncertain as it is unclear whether Snap plans to integrate it into Snapchat or remove it altogether.
A notice on the Gfycat website says: “The Gfycat service is being discontinued. Please save or delete your Gfycat content by logging into your account at https://www.gfycat.com. All Gfycat information and data will be removed from gfycat .com after September 1, 2023.”
Uncertainty around content integration
The fate of Gfycat content remains uncertain as it is unclear if Snap plans to integrate it in Snapchat or permanently delete GIFs over the years. However, a Snapchat spokesperson mentioned to TechCrunch that users can still search for and use GIFs in their chats with friends on the platform.
This outage shows that Gfycat has struggled to compete with the likes of Tenor and Giphy. In May, when Gfycat’s temporary TLS security certificate expired in May and the majority of users could not access the website for 5 days, Gfycat was fired. Besides, reddit reports show that some Gfycat users have been having trouble uploading GIFs for months and the support team remains unresponsive.
User Frustration
The service’s disappearance will disappoint many users as Gfycat already supports short clips and high-definition animations. Founded in 2013 by Richard Rabbat, Dan McEleney, and Jeff Harris, the user-generated content platform secured a $10 million seed round in 2016 and was once one of the most popular websites. in the United States. The platform has integrations with major messaging platforms and services, including Reddit, Chat app, Microsoft Outlook and WordPress. Gfycat was also one of the first web services to allow GIF video encoding. Snap acquired the platform in 2020.
This news follows Meta’s recent sale of Giphy to Shutterstock for $53 million, three years after Meta purchased the GIF search engine for $400 million. In October 2022, the UK’s antitrust regulator ordered Meta to divest from Giphy, as that would “dramatically reduce competition in the two markets”, according to Stuart McIntosh, group president independent investigation, as stated in a press release.
