Gifs are cringe and for boomers, Giphy claims in Meta takeover filing

theguardian.com:

It’s rare for a multimillion-dollar company to explicitly state that its business is dying because it’s simply too uncool to live.

But that’s the bold strategy that gif search engine Giphy has adopted with the UK’s competition regulator, which is currently trying to block a $400m (£352m) takeover attempt from Facebook’s owner, Meta.

In a filing with the Competition and Markets Authority, Giphy argued that there is simply no company other than Meta that would buy it. Its valuation is already down by $200m from its peak in 2016, and more importantly, its core offering is showing signs of going out of fashion. “There are indications of an overall decline in gif use,” the company says in its filing, “due to a general waning of user and content partner interest in gifs.

“They have fallen out of fashion as a content form, with younger users in particular describing gifs as ‘for boomers’ and ‘cringe’.” To underline the point, Giphy’s filing included links to several articles and Twitter posts.

The generational divide is real, says internet culture writer Ryan Broderick. “Gifs feel extremely dated. They were never easy to make and didn’t work particularly well on mobile.

“So now they’re basically the cringe reaction image your millennial boss uses in Slack. Rather than what they used to be, which was a decentralised image type for communicating on blogs and message boards. It’s actually kind of sad how choked out the gif was by large corporations, copyright laws, and mobile browsers.”

The animated gif itself is also comfortably millennial: invented in 1989, it pre-dates not only smartphones and social media, but