Everyone Says GIFs Are a Young Person's Thing — Did You Know It's About to Turn 30? | QDaily Business History

Today's GIF is no longer the .gif of 29 years ago

"Free the internet! Burn all GIFs! Bay Area web developers march for software patent reform!"

"The time has come. Burn every GIF!"

At 5 p.m., in Brisbane, a town 30 kilometers outside downtown San Francisco, a group of developers assembled by the League for Programming Freedom gathered outside the offices of Unisys, raised homemade banners and chanted "Burn All GIFs".

Unisys held the patent on GIF. Nobody could literally burn a file format; what these Silicon Valley developers meant was anger — that an image format this widely used should carry a royalty struck them as utterly absurd.

But in early September this year, when Apple built full GIF support into the iMessage sticker store on the iPhone, it presumably spared no thought for how those protesters felt.

That protest was 17 years ago. Few people stop to think that the animated GIF — a thing so soaked in internet culture — is about to enter its 30th year.

What did the world look like when GIF was born?

In 1987, the year GIF was born, the internet did not exist and personal computers were far from common.

Mark Zuckerberg was 3 years old. Google's two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were still in middle school. Jack Ma was a junior in the foreign languages department at Hangzhou Teachers College. The only one already famous was Bill Gates: 32 years old, having put the Windows operating system on IBM's personal computers, he had taken Microsoft public a year earlier and become a billionaire himself.

At first, GIF didn't move at all.

GIF — short for Graphics Interchange Format — was built in 1987 by the American company CompuServe. Working from the LZW algorithm, it could compress two pixels of different colors together, shrinking an image to a smaller size with no loss of quality.

In 1989 CompuServe released a new version, GIF89, and only then could the pictures move. But the point of GIF in those years was still the compression algorithm. Motion was a byproduct.

As compression went, GIF was already the best and most universal option of its day, and the limits of networks and hardware only helped it along.

In 1990, the fastest upload speed on the internet was no more than 1kbps. Sending an image of about 1 MB across the network took nearly an hour back then, and moving a big video file over the internet was unthinkable.

Storage was precious too. In 1989 a Western Digital 20 MB hard drive already sold for $899 — a capacity that today would hold about four photos taken on an iPhone.

And GIF? Small files, lossless compression, no extra code or plug-ins needed to make it work, motion that could partly stand in for a short video — and free.

No wonder it was so popular in the internet's first years. By 1993 GIF had become the first internet product used at scale, the image format of choice in Netscape's Mosaic browser.

The first image ever posted on the internet was a GIF too:

The animated GIFs that defined that early era all spread for the same reason: they were maddeningly hard to stop watching.

The dancing baby above was the first GIF to go viral on the internet. In 1996 the web developer Woodell pulled a 3-D model of a baby dancing out of a popular video clip.

Once he'd finished it, he found he couldn't look away, so he emailed it to family and friends. It tore across the internet.

The dancing "banana / pickle / carrot" became one of the most popular GIFs of the 1990s for the same reason — a loop you couldn't stop watching.

As an image format alone, GIF was already obsolete by the late 1990s

Trouble arrived fast.

In 1994 CompuServe, the company that had built GIF, gave in. Another computing company, Unisys, claimed that it owned the "W" in LZW, the compression algorithm behind GIF — one third of it — and so deserved a share of what GIF earned.

On December 29 the two companies issued a joint statement: every company making software that created or edited GIFs would have to pay Unisys, the patent holder. Unisys also wanted a one-time fee from anyone using GIF images commercially.

Developers were furious. Hence the scene at the top of this article: on November 5, 1999, an online campaign against GIF's licensing terms grew into a street protest.

PNG was the new image format built expressly to replace it.

Technically — leaving aside JPEG, the standard for photographs — PNG, born in 1994, was much better than GIF. Both used lossless compression, but PNG files came out smaller. GIF handled only 256 colors; PNG handled 256 colors and 24-bit true color. GIF left white jagged edges on dark backgrounds; PNG supported semi-transparent pixels and left no jagged edges at all.

The one thing PNG did not do was animate. Its designers believed at the time that moving pictures of the kind GIF made were an outdated way to present anything.

Perhaps more important, internet speeds kept rising after 1997.

As users grew less sensitive to speed and data, and as demand rose for sharper, more colorful images and even video, GIF as an image format began to look like it had no reason to exist.

Even its one distinguishing trick, animation, got a replacement: Flash, born in 1996.

Flash was an animation tool and player from Adobe that could be embedded in a browser and played animation smoother, sharper and more colorful than GIF, in clips that could run as long as the maker wanted.

After several versions, making Flash animation became a job people could live on, and in China those Flash animators got a name of their own: shanke, "Flash people."

In the US, GIF moved instead to internet forums like 4chan and Reddit, a niche cultural product for adding a bit of fun to text posts.

Thanks to QQ, GIF caught fire again in China

In 2004 Tencent shipped QQ2003 III Beta4, which added "custom emoticons": users could save animated GIF emoticons to their own machine and forward them to other people on QQ.

Tencent's move wasn't only a response to users wanting to express themselves. In 2004 the 20-year software copyright on GIF expired. GIF was free to use again.

And so an unremarkable little feature became the entrance to an entire emoticon industry.

The first to try it and get popular were the people who had been making Flash animation.

Wang Maomao was one of them. In 2006, when she drew Tuzki, she was an animation major in college.

"In November I felt QQ's existing emoticons weren't enough to express my feelings, so I made my first one … the 'smug' one, both hands shaking up and down and swaying side to side," Wang Maomao told QDaily.

She turned the rabbit into a QQ custom emoticon and sent it to classmates for fun.

A week later Wang Maomao's cousin forwarded her a Tuzki, saying it looked a lot like her style. She looked closely: it was the very emoticon she had made.

Only then did she realize Tuzki might be more popular than she'd imagined.

Within a year of its making, the rabbit had become QQ's most popular emoticon, moved onto Microsoft's chat tool MSN, and become the face of a new Motorola phone.

The success of QQ's custom emoticons pulled many former animators into the ranks of creators.

In 2010 a GIF called Xiao Yaoji ("Little Chick"), drawn by Mario Xiaohuang, spread through QQ groups. The brown chick wore a slightly impish look, but what mattered were its sultry moves.

Like Tuzki, Xiao Yaoji got popular on QQ purely by word of mouth.

"I had a few QQ accounts in different QQ groups, and when I saw a lot of people forwarding our emoticons, that's when I felt Xiao Yaoji had taken off."

In QQ's biggest years, how to recover your custom emoticons from the QQ folder after reinstalling your computer became one of the most asked questions about the software.

In the smartphone era, GIF's biggest rival, Flash, failed too

The other side of GIF's revival on social networks and messaging apps is that Flash, which might have been its serious rival, failed on phones.

The first iPhone, released in 2007, did not support Flash, which drew plenty of complaints at the time. There were several reasons behind that: Flash was built around the mouse, and mouse-style interaction did not suit a small phone screen; running it also ate battery and generated heat, unfriendly to early smartphones with short battery life and modest hardware.

Android's support for Flash ended in 2012.

Steve Jobs even wrote an open letter laying out why Apple would not use Flash in the mobile era:

Flash was a product of the PC era, created for the mouse and the personal computer. It has also been a very successful business for Adobe, and we understand their wish to push it beyond the PC. But the mobile era is an era of low-power devices, touchscreens and open web standards — and all of those are Flash's weak points.

For GIF, the mobile internet era felt like a return to the PC internet that made it in the first place: limited bandwidth, limited hardware, no common standard for animated images.

People's sensitivity to mobile speed and data has lasted to this day. On a mobile network plenty of people still won't casually tap open a video, and short video as a product is only a phenomenon of the past year or two — arriving alongside faster networks and cheaper data from the carriers.

So the ancient GIF found work again.

Weibo, WeChat and GIF pop culture

In 2010, the year Xiao Yaoji took off, Sina Weibo had just come into public view. The microblogging network was the newest, most fashionable thing in China.

Compared with QQ's half-closed way of moving information, everything a Weibo user posted was broadcast, which gave a funny animated image richer soil to spread in.

More important for Xiao Yaoji, in 2010 Weibo made it one of the official default emoticons, and gave it a good slot: the post box of every Weibo user.

Others that became default emoticons around the same time included the little bird Bi'erde and the little black cat Luo Xiaohei.

Emoticon artists like the ones behind Xiao Yaoji gradually found ways to make money. Some companies came to them through Weibo asking to license the characters — Xiao Yaoji, for instance, licensed its image to the mobile games Xiao Yaoji Assemble and Tower Defense Cutie.

But because Weibo was public, another, more feral kind of GIF content also began to spread. Unlike Tuzki or Xiao Yaoji, it wasn't built on a fixed character.

This new animated content was usually squeezed out of clips from TV dramas, films and variety shows.

The Weibo account "Hilarious GIFs" was one of them. Murong Jicheng, the person behind it, told QDaily that from 2011 he had been ripping funny GIFs off various videos and foreign websites and passing them around.

The account now has 3.82 million followers and posts more than a dozen GIFs a day, plus some funny videos from abroad.

"Cute, unexpected, goofy or dopey" is, in his view, the test of material that will make a GIF spread.

GIFs like Murong Jicheng's, captured and compressed from video, are also called "feral emoticons." They aren't hard to make, and film and TV stars, along with cat and dog videos, are the biggest source of material.

One is a GIF of Jacky Cheung taken from the film As Tears Go By, captioned "eat shit." The expression is a bit crude, but Cheung was happy enough with the GIF that made him famous all over again on the internet.

What Jacky Cheung is holding at that press conference is a pillow printed with his own GIF.

The trend carried on into the WeChat era, where GIF became part of the larger category of "stickers."

Early on, WeChat did not push custom stickers hard; it opened the feature only in November of the year the app launched. As on QQ, users had to pick an image out of the phone's photo album to add to the custom sticker bar, and WeChat put tight limits on how many of them there could be and how big.

So many animators went to WeChat official accounts instead. Creators who had come up in the Weibo years — "Hilarious GIFs," Xiao Yaoji — moved to official accounts in 2012.

Not until August 2013, in version 5.0, did WeChat launch a sticker store. But the early submission system and store gave individual artists little reason to bother.

"The way you submitted back then was too much trouble. A lot of people didn't even know the submission page existed, and uploading was a pain — once you'd sent it, you couldn't track what happened to it. It felt like sending out a resume: it goes out and sinks without a trace," Zang Xiaobai told QDaily.

He draws the "Little Brat" sticker pack and has been making stickers on WeChat since 2013. Most are still images, with a few GIFs.

WeChat's approach came from LINE.

Because LINE could make money from stickers, foreign tech companies joined in

The Japanese messaging app LINE added stickers back in October 2011, and paid stickers gradually became one of LINE's most important sources of revenue. The sticker business took in $268 million in 2015, 23.9% of that year's total revenue.

Beyond stickers, LINE has turned its sticker characters into intellectual property — animated shorts, offline themed stores. You may not use LINE in China, but LINE merchandise and T-shirts still sell well here.

Even foreign technology companies began making peace with GIF, a format that by rights should have died long ago.

When Facebook started supporting autoplay video in 2013, it also built in support for GIFs for a while, then pulled the feature, worried that GIFs would drag down the quality of news in the feed.

By 2014 Facebook was supporting GIFs again, and by May 2015 support was complete: paste a GIF link into the status box or a comment and the animation plays once posted. Twitter, likewise, opened up to GIFs in June 2014.

These networks earn nothing directly from GIFs, but supporting them keeps more users around.

Giphy, a site built for GIF search, raised $55 million in a Series C in 2015 at a $300 million valuation. It still isn't profitable, but with 65 million people using it every month, it has won over advertisers and film and television studios.

In their eyes GIFs became a decent way to market something. In August 2015, Universal Pictures worked with Giphy on six GIFs promoting its new film Straight Outta Compton.

Beyond websites supporting GIF, some keyboard apps now treat GIFs as a necessary part of talking to people. Gboard, the keyboard Google released this year, has a GIF section built straight in, so users can search for GIFs without leaving the keyboard; Microsoft's iOS keyboard, out in August, does the same.

In September this year Apple added the iMessage App Store to the latest iOS 10, and sticker packs are the most important part of that store.

Sticker artists can submit their work to Apple the way they do to LINE and WeChat. As with developers, Apple splits the money with them 3:7.

It is drawing in Chinese sticker artists too.

Jiayi, who draws the sticker character Luoluobu, is one of them. Since graduating she has worked full-time as an independent animator; alongside static comics she draws animated stickers, and her income comes mostly from commissions and licensing.

After the iMessage store opened, she began planning to publish her own stickers on Apple's platform as well.

Apple's 70% share is tempting, after all. "I hear Apple's review is a bit faster too." A friend told her the review takes only two days, though with more people submitting lately it may be slowing down. Against WeChat's official 15 days, that still counts as fast.

But the GIF you know stopped being a GIF long ago

In 2010 Google released WebM, a video file format offering free, high-quality compressed video to go with HTML5. The catch: plenty of websites used WebM to produce the effect of a GIF.

The image-sharing site Imgur was one of them. In 2014 it introduced GIFV, essentially a file extension: in any browser it behaves like a GIF — no play button, an endless loop, no sound.

Download that "image," though, and it saves as an MP4 or WebM video.

Imgur wasn't alone; social networks did something similar. From 2014 Twitter let users upload GIFs, but the file was converted to MP4 on the way up. It had become a video file, only a small one.

Skype added Mojis to its input bar in 2015; they look a lot like GIFs, but are video clips imitating GIF animation. Gfycat, a company built on sharing animated images, recently raised $10 million; on its platform users share animations they make themselves, which look very much like GIFs but are short, silent, looping animations and edited video.

Faking GIFs with video, or replacing GIFs with short video — both are technology companies giving in to what users choose.

By now almost no one cares about GIF as a file format. What people care about is a form that loops on a screen.

It is a bit like the way people choose to pronounce the word.

Most people say GIF like "gift," and the Oxford Dictionary marks it that way too.

GIF's original designer once tried to correct them, insisting the right pronunciation is "jif."

But the animated image outgrew the file format its inventors made long ago.

As Andy Baio, a founding member of the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, wrote in an essay: "The GIF we know got popular because of Netscape and the internet as a whole, so I'm saying GIFT … JIF is a file format. GIF is a culture."