I liked a lot of what Giphy was doing with TV show parsing and captioning, I feel like that could be a huge vector for sponcon, but this announcement about sponsored GIFs and ad sales sounds go generalized on its face that I'm not sure it will be fruitful.

Is BMW going to buy sponsored GIFs? Is McDonald's? Are major CPG companies going to buy sponsored GIFs? I think TV shows and major studios have a good use case for this, but even if the sales are constrained to suitable markets, and healthy, will those sales support a $600mm valuation, or even keep the lights on?

Ad sales work well when you control a platform with a lot of eyeball-share, and when you have strong profiling. I don't think Giphy will have much of either, and if they do, I think the they won't have all of those attributes available (i.e., giphy.com is hard to build facebook-level profiling on, but is easy to control ad units on, GIF keyboards/facebook/various integrations are high-eyeball, but someone else controls the profiling and you can't control the ad units etc).