[GifsOfficial]

Koolba, thanks for the kind comment! For supporting the costs: we ended up raising $ from some awesome individuals. We've built out a team (we're hiring! [e-mail]), and the team has done a lot of work to ensure that gifs/webms/mp4s are transcoded insanely fast. We've had over 4,5000,000 gifs made, and over billions of .gifs delivered, which has started to run up some cost...which leads us to sustainability: we look at the gifs player almost like the youtube embedded player, but for, well, short media. Maybe one day ever gif/webm will be in the gifs player. As we continue to build tools for empowering people to augment videos, we hope to see more people make cool short clips within our ecosystem.

[koolba]

> For supporting the costs: we ended up raising $ from some awesome individuals.

Okay but that's capital, not revenue.

> We've built out a team (we're hiring! [e-mail]), and the team has done a lot of work to ensure that gifs/webms/mp4s are transcoded insanely fast.

A great dev team can arguably keep costs down with efficient systems but that's still not revenue. Also, dev teams cost money too so that's more expense.

> We've had over 4,5000,000 gifs made, and over billions of .gifs delivered, which has started to run up some cost

Okay sounds like some traction but I read that as about $11.5K/month of bandwidth spending[1] (just bandwidth, not counting transcoding costs).

> ...which leads us to sustainability: we look at the gifs player almost like the youtube embedded player, but for, well, short media. Maybe one day ever gif/webm will be in the gifs player. As we continue to build tools for empowering people to augment videos, we hope to see more people make cool short clips within our ecosystem.

So where's the revenue? Embedded player licensing? Intermingling ads? Changing the overlay icons for Brazzers to link straight there?

I love VC fueled fun as much as the next guy, but I'm genuinely curious what the end game is. Ride it out and hope the user base becomes worthy of an acquisition before the money burns?

[1]: 1 Billion Images x 100 KB/Image x $.12/GB[2]

[2]: Based on the IP I'm guessing they're running on GCE with rack rates for bandwidth at $.12/GB. Probably over estimating though.

[anonfunction]

I'm not Rory, our CEO who you're replying to, but he couldn't respond due to a HN "posting too fast" error so I thought I would chime in.

What we are truly passionate about is exposing the general public to a new means of expression through short form media. What we are seeing is publishers writing articles that are just lists of looping GIFs, sports fans browsing /r/nba and watching the 3 dunks and a block instead of the 3 hour game, etc... so we built our embeddable GIFs player that allows viewers to share, turn on sound, view source, and much more. It also has the benefit of using mp4 or webm format over the actual gif file which is not a good choice when compared to those modern formats. This has led to a lot of publishers using our product and the tremendous growth of people viewing media in our embedded player. Now we want to expand another segment of our user-base, the creator (who we see as the next-generation of publishers) by making a easy-to-use video editor in the cloud.

To finally answer your question, how could we generate revenue, we could show highly targeted ads during prime-time slots. Imagine the NBA finals game, people making GIFS and sharing them with captions. Nike wants to promote some new product and they use our ad platform to expose a viral campaign / advertisement on all of our media. That's just one idea but there are many other potential avenues for monetization that we are considering as well.

tl;dr we're not aiming to be an image hosting company