[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