5 ms·

Do you think the search problems are the barrier to their monetisation because surely that's a problem money can easily fix

by boyce 9y ago

cwkoss 9y ago
I think they could only solve their search problem by hiring an army of minimum wage gif classifiers to curate the attachment tags and labels to each gif. That would make their search usable, but still not sure what the market for gifs is. I don't see any good way to compel their end users to pay for the service, and ads will fundamentally degrade the utility of the service even further. They've essentially built a poorly-functioning toy and are getting investors as if they are a B2B SaaS service. What is their value-add? Is there any economic utility in being able to quickly find a gif?
- sbarre 9y ago
  > Is there any economic utility in being able to quickly find a gif? Giphy gets used all the time in my company's Slack channels.. It's a morale thing I think (at least a bit).. People enjoy putting a bit of fun into the work chat, in a way that's acceptable (in our office culture - don't want to speak for everyone) and low-effort.. If Giphy was suddenly 5-10$/month (like RightGif is for example), I think my company would gladly pay that to continue to let our employees use it during their work conversations.
  - cwkoss 9y ago
    Fair enough. In my company's experience giphy only attaches a relevant gif around 25% of the time, the rest of the time the gif is an odd non-sequitur. Relevant and amusing gifs are probably closer to 5-10%. We used it a bunch when we first moved to slack, but now we probably use it less than once per day across the whole team. We'd turn it off without hesitation if we had to pay for it.
    - sbarre 9y ago
      Yeah I guess it depends on your viewpoint. I definitely don't always get the most relevant GIF but that tends to add to the joke in most cases.. ;-)

5 ms·

Do you think the search problems are the barrier to their monetisation because surely that's a problem money can easily fix

by boyce 9y ago

Do you think the search problems are the barrier to their monetisation because surely that's a problem money can easily fix

cwkoss 9y ago
I think they could only solve their search problem by hiring an army of minimum wage gif classifiers to curate the attachment tags and labels to each gif. That would make their search usable, but still not sure what the market for gifs is. I don't see any good way to compel their end users to pay for the service, and ads will fundamentally degrade the utility of the service even further. They've essentially built a poorly-functioning toy and are getting investors as if they are a B2B SaaS service. What is their value-add? Is there any economic utility in being able to quickly find a gif?
- sbarre 9y ago
  > Is there any economic utility in being able to quickly find a gif? Giphy gets used all the time in my company's Slack channels.. It's a morale thing I think (at least a bit).. People enjoy putting a bit of fun into the work chat, in a way that's acceptable (in our office culture - don't want to speak for everyone) and low-effort.. If Giphy was suddenly 5-10$/month (like RightGif is for example), I think my company would gladly pay that to continue to let our employees use it during their work conversations.
  - cwkoss 9y ago
    Fair enough. In my company's experience giphy only attaches a relevant gif around 25% of the time, the rest of the time the gif is an odd non-sequitur. Relevant and amusing gifs are probably closer to 5-10%. We used it a bunch when we first moved to slack, but now we probably use it less than once per day across the whole team. We'd turn it off without hesitation if we had to pay for it.
    - sbarre 9y ago
      Yeah I guess it depends on your viewpoint. I definitely don't always get the most relevant GIF but that tends to add to the joke in most cases.. ;-)