Giphy Has Almost No Revenue But Is Worth 600 Million
Whether it's on Twitter, Facebook, or in your company's Slack inter-office chat threads, you've probably seen hundreds of themanimated GIFs of Donald Trump making faces, or of popular Internet "memes," like the little girl doing the rock salute while four-wheel drifting in her toy Corvette. These little mini-clips may be fun, but does that justify giving one of the companies that create them a market value of 600 million? By way of comparison, that's more than twice what Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos paid for the Washington Post. Giphy, which was created in 2013 as part of the New York-based venture fund/incubator Betaworks, got this valuation by raising a Series D funding round of 75 million from a series of venture capital investors. That doubled the amount the company has raised so far, and coincidentally also doubled its valuation to 600 million. If you're wondering what Giphy's valuation works out to as a multiple of revenue, the answer is that it's almost infinite  because the company doesn't really have any revenue to speak of. , So then why should this business be worth 600 million? Giphy and its investors argue that it is essentially a model for a new kind of media company. It creates bite-sized pieces of video that can go incredibly viral in a matter of minutes, whether it's about the election campaign or a popular TV show. The implication is that because Giphy understands how this works for micro-form content, it will also be able to distribute micro-versions of advertising messages as well. "Almost all the content flowing through Giphy, there's some branded element to it already," chief operating officer Adam Leibsohn told the Wall Street Journal. The implication is that because Giphy understands how this works for micro-form content, it will also be able to distribute micro-versions of advertising messages as well. "Almost all the content flowing through Giphy, there's some branded element to it already," chief operating officer Adam Leibsohn told the Wall Street Journal. So maybe you should spend some time figuring out how to turn your own content into animated GIFs, because it sounds like investors and advertisers might be willing to pay for it. But how much they will pay remains to be seen.