Popular animated gifs hosting service gfycat.com is shutting down on September 1, 2023 and all hosted content will no longer be accessible at that point.
Snap(chat) is Gfycat’s parent company. The short version is they’re hemorrhaging money and have been for years so they’re cutting this as part of cost saving measures.
Yea me too i am a bit wondering why. People kept saying this was the reason, but idk if they really mean that or if its just ‘saying what sounds possible as a half joke’ (like when people answer any question about any shady business or very expensive auctions as “its money laundering” even tho there may be other explanations. I think ppl say it half jokinly?) Idk what reason snap would do this tho? Maybe theyre planning to make a gif hosting thingy by theirself?
so do we also know why they’re shutting down?
Money. Always.
Gfycat had the excellent business model of hosting a load of high bandwidth content and not making any money from anyone
You forgot the excellent idea of being highly integratable to the point end users don’t even know the gifs they’re seeing are from gfycat
Really though. On Reddit at least, how often did you actually go to gfycat instead of just viewing on Reddit’s webpage or a third party app?
When I wanted to hear the audio, I would click through to get the video interface. Usually for pr0n.
how is shutting down a website profitable
The service is likely a money sink
They’ve never found a viable business model.
Extinguished by Snap(chat), as it’s a competitor
How is a gif hosters main competitior a app mainly used by teenagers for sexting?
I genuinely don’t understand this either. On a surface level I’d say they’re not even remotely related so I’d like an explanation here.
@ChrisFhey @L4s @stebo02 @dedido @Alexmitter
Snap(chat) is Gfycat’s parent company. The short version is they’re hemorrhaging money and have been for years so they’re cutting this as part of cost saving measures.
Yea me too i am a bit wondering why. People kept saying this was the reason, but idk if they really mean that or if its just ‘saying what sounds possible as a half joke’ (like when people answer any question about any shady business or very expensive auctions as “its money laundering” even tho there may be other explanations. I think ppl say it half jokinly?) Idk what reason snap would do this tho? Maybe theyre planning to make a gif hosting thingy by theirself?
Gfycat is owned by Snapchat.
I think the idea is that with things you could use snapchat for, people are using gfycat instead and users using snapchat are more profitable.