Who’s the most GIF-ted? These brands are killing it on GIPHY

30 years. That’s how long GIFs have been around. But GIFs (pronounced GIF or JIF—if you like being wrong) have never been as popular as they have been in the last five years. On GIPHY, the world’s largest GIF portal, 200 million people search for the perfect video loop. With so much traffic, it’s no wonder that brands and companies run their own accounts. That got us to thinking: who’s the biggest brand on the platform? And how big is the biggest channel? To find out who’s the king GIF marketing, we created an algorithm to crawl GIPHY and then ranked the top-50.

Founded in early 2013, GIPHY is the first place most people to get their GIF. GIF creators (aka “Artists”), publishers and other content creators can upload their mini loops in the hopes of reaching the 200 million daily GIF’icionados on the GIPHY platform, on the GIPHY app or through one of the many GIPHY partner sites. Sites that have embedded a GIPHY search bar include Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Tinder and iMessage, among others. No less impressive is the amount of capital GIPHY generated in a short amount of time, USD 150 million, which helped spur it on to a USD 600 million valuation in October 2016.

With the seemingly unrelenting popularity of GIFs, as well as GIPHY’s massive reach, brands, marketers and the ilk have made it a priority to profit from the hype. GIPHY knows this and has a solution for partners, which lets them create and operate a “Branded Channel;” the service is free at the moment. Thousands of companies, artists, events and others are already on board. A few weeks ago, GIPHY started releasing the number of GIF views for partners, thus providing a first look at branded channel performance.

No surprise the top-50 is dominated by content-producing behemoths: production studios, viral sites, TV formats and the major US sports leagues. But there are still a couple of surprise entries in the top-50. One came in at number 22: “Geek & Sundry,” a publisher focusing on all things geekdom, including RPGs, nets nearly 1 billion views a month. Two “standard” brand names cracked the top-50 in “Hallmark eCards” (rank 25, 925 million views), Red Bull (rank 40, 733 million views) and Lego (Rank 45, 688 mil. views).

Although Giphy has incredible reach and is embedded on major social networks, the company has yet to monetize. That is about to change as COO Adam Leibsohn recently confirmed to Techcrunch, that the focus will no longer be on reach, but on developing ad formats. They will be experimenting with sponsored GIFs that will be showed in the direct search. According to co-Founder Alex Chung the company is contemplating a dozen of different business models. Giphy would be wise to not take too much time, as serious competition appears to be growing: Tenor, a competing GIF site, has a GIF keyboard that is available for nearly all relevant messenger programs  and is said to generate nearly 300 million search queries a day.