10 Million GIF Views and Counting

In May of 2018 I found out that you could get verified on GIPHY and as a result, have your personalized GIFs searchable on any platform that is supported by GIPHY! On May 30, 2018 I was approved for an official "Artist" channel (@JMattMke) and it wasn't long until my 8 GIFs (at the time) started to get flooded with views.

View Count

From essentially June 1 through August 31 (3 months), I uploaded a total of 93 custom GIFs that have received over 10 million views. But what is a "GIF view"? It's not about how many times someone watches your GIF loop (like how Vine operated their view count), rather it's when your GIF populates in the search results, no matter the platform (GIPHY, Twitter, Facebook comments...). Though, it doesn't track the actual uses/clicks of the GIF (unfortunately).

10 millions views seems like a lot at first, but when you think about how Facebook and Twitter alone are globally reaching platforms - both of which have their GIF search powered (in part) by GIPHY - the view count adds up pretty quickly.

Tags

The critical key towards your viewership success is assigning appropriate tags (or keywords) to your GIFs that someone would then be able to find in the search. Granted, you can search "@JMattMke" in the browser and you'll see all of my GIFs - but... unless you know me, the average person won't find my GIFs this way. For the best results, I try to attach at least 10 relevant tags to every GIF. The nice thing is that I can go back in to the GIF at any time and edit the tags if I think of more.

I do have a theory (unconfirmed) that based on how many times people click on your GIF in relation to the tag, it helps determine how high that GIF is served in the search results. According to my Top GIFs, I have one that is just shy of 1,000,000 views on its own and it's me "thinking" (it's also one of my original 8 uploads).

Dashboard + Analytics

I'm a statistics guy, so I love that official channels receive a dashboard filled with analytics, which includes a quick glance at your Top GIFs, as well as a more thorough outlook of all GIFs from a downloadable full CSV report.

As you can see, my top 5 GIFs make up nearly 3,000,000 of my total views. Which is helpful when trying to come up with more content ideas that are likely to receive higher views than others.

I'm also able to see Total GIF Views over a period of time (a week, month, or forever). In the past week (August 24-30, 2018), I have received over 1,100,000 views and I haven't added new GIFs to my channel in over a month.

Creating GIFs

First of all - no, you don't have to be "verified" to make GIFs with GIPHY! Before I knew I could have an artist channel, I wanted to create custom GIFs to use during Twitter Chats. I saw @WarwickABrown and @InfluencerTony using them and noticed how much their tweets stood out as a result. I picked both of their brains as to how to go about making some for myself.

Tony Christensen sent me this YouTube video he made explaining "How To Create GIFs For Twitter Using GIPHY" and it got me started!

But basically, you just need to create a video that you want to turn into a GIF. Once you have that, you can upload it to GIPHY either from their mobile app or directly on their website. I have found it's best to add your edits and captions to the original video before uploading it.

Once you start uploading your GIFs, you'll be able to see them on your own channel. You can also share the link to your channel with others (i.e. @MartinMoorejr) - they just won't be publicly searchable on GIPHY powered platforms until you get verified.

Generating Ideas

If you search through my feed of GIFs, you may think to yourself "where does he get all these ideas?" Yes, I literally have one of myself sneezing. The number one thing is that I have an ongoing list of ideas that I add to regularly. I try to think of "reaction GIFs" that I already search for and like - I can recreate those. OR I add ones that I've searched for and there weren't any worthwhile results (each disappointing result is an opportunity!).

I also learned that city-specific GIFs are pretty rare; I have a handful a Milwaukee-based GIFs that I've started to see pop up on Twitter, used by others (also fun to come across).

If you search "Milwaukee Flag" - my GIF is the first result and has over 60,000 views so far. Outside of that one, I have a GIF of the Hoan Bridge with 85,000+ views and I also merged a "reaction" with a Milwaukee "location" to get a GIF with over 425,000 views (there's beauty in a heartbreak).

I'm excited to see what my GIPHY future has in store for me. Do you have a GIPHY channel or use custom GIFs another way? Feel free to hit me up with any questions that you have around creating and using custom GIFs for your personal (or professional) brand. Happy GIFing!

Follow me @JMattMke on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and GIPHY.