Giphy Adopts The Popular Stories Content Format With Curated Giphy Stories

Photo: Giphy

Giphy, the world's biggest GIF sharing service, is adding its name to the budding list of platforms that have adopted Stories. 

This past Monday, it launched a redesign of its website and unveiled Giphy Stories, its take on the popular storytelling content format. Curated by its editorial team, Giphy Stories are a collection of GIFs centered around a trending topic of the day from categories such as entertainment, sports, and reactions. On the desktop version of the website, Stories are listed subsequently while on the mobile version of the website, they are displayed as auto-advancing slideshows. Both versions include subtitles. 

GIF: Giphy

At the moment, Giphy Stories are only available on desktop, however, it plans to roll out the mobile version in the next few weeks. In addition, Giphy is scheduled to provide Stories creation tools to partners and artists to help them create Stories of their own later this year. 

Since the birth of Stories by Snapchat, a number of platforms like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Google, and even Netflix, have launched versions of the addictive content format. Due to the popularity and success of Snapchat and Instagram Stories especially with the younger generation, it's a no-brainer that Giphy enters the landscape and brings forth a version of its own. Giphy Stories gives users the ability to easily consume content in a way that has become quite familiar to them over the last few years. That alone, makes it a smart move for Giphy. And if Giphy Stories do catch on with users, it will certainly support the New York-based company of being more than a GIF database site. 

Expect a lot more platforms to launch Stories-type features in the near future. From music streaming services like Spotify to sports websites like ESPN, the Stories content format can easily be incorporated.