The forced sale of GIPHY has cost Facebook parent company Meta a lot of money. Stock photo service Shutterstock is buying the GIF platform for $53 million. Three years ago, Meta paid $400 million for it.
UK competition watchdog CMA ruled in October last year that Meta must permanently reverse its acquisition of GIPHY. This forced Meta to sell the gif platform.
According to the CMA, Meta’s acquisition of GIPHY mainly hampered competition in the online advertising market. It allowed Meta to remove gifs on competing platforms, the regulator said.
The CMA had already ruled in December 2021 that the acquisition of GIPHY should be reversed. Meta subsequently appealed this ruling to the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal. Meta had to comply with ruling
In July last year, the special court ruled that the CMA’s decision was correct. However, the regulator still had to provide Meta with explanatory documents.
The CMA therefore had to take another look at the case. So in October last year, the regulator finally ruled that Meta had to sell the gif platform.
The social media company could no longer appeal this and resigned itself to the ruling. Shutterstock was willing to take over GIPHY, but Meta had to take a loss of $347 million to do so.
