“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. But the startups see potential for profit, especially as brands increasingly integrate the animations into advertising and other marketing. And there are other companies, such as Imgur, PopKey and Kanvas, eager to snip and remix video clips into ready-to-share packages.įor now, few of those companies are profiting from GIFs as they focus on propagating the use of the clips. Giphy, which provides a search engine for a vast library of GIFs, has raised more than $23 million. Riffsy, which makes the GIF keyboard for smartphones, just raised $10 million. The animated snippets are being spread on mobile devices by a new generation of GIF startups, which are backed by venture capital. GIFs are hugely popular with young audiences who never leave home without their smartphones. They have become a mainstream form of digital expression, a way to relay feelings and thoughts in ways beyond words and even photographs. 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.

Online searches for GIFs have risen by a factor of nine since mid-2012, according to Experian Marketing Services, an industry research firm.

Gif keyboard riffsy