“It’s not going to be small,” Vorhaus said of the business opportunity of mobile GIFs. However, in two to three years, Vorhaus says mobile shares of GIFs could grow by 1,000%, generating $1 billion or $2 billion in total annual advertising revenue. Magid’s President Michael Vorhaus says it’s hard to precisely estimate how rapidly GIF-sharing can grow. Now, about 70% of Americans ages 8 to 64 years old (about 200 million people) know how to send a GIF, and nearly half of those consumers send at least one GIF per week according to consumer research firm Magid Advisors. While GIFs were first invented three decades ago and popularized by websites like MySpace, Imgur, Tumblr and Giphy, they have only been readily available within mobile keyboards for about three years. “Beneath the surface, Tenor is really all about a new type of search engine - one that’s emotion-based, that more than 300 million times per day, is matching people’s thoughts and emotions with a digital object - the GIF.” McIntosh is pointing to a display of the company’s “Emotional Graph,” a digital map that links GIFs with keywords, topics, feelings, moods and brands to help people retrieve GIFs that best fit their mood or what’s top of mind, like “Friyay,” “hungry,” or “dance.” “A lot of people look at GIFs and see something fun and silly, but really what gets us up every day is that GIFs are a better way to convey thoughts, feelings and emotions at a time when attention has shrunk,” McIntosh said in an interview at Tenor’s San Francisco headquarters. Tenor, which launched on mobile, also says it powers more shares of the short, looping videos and animations than any other tool. However, Tenor now powers 300 million GIF searches daily (up from 200 million daily searches in February) through its mobile GIF keyboard and hundreds of integrations with communications apps like Apple’s iMessage, Google’s smart keyboard app Gboard, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord and Kik. Tenor isn’t as well known as some big-name GIF engine competitors like Giphy, which has raised about $150 million in venture funding to date, most recently at an estimated valuation of $600 million.
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