Gfycat, which was one of the earliest sites to allow for gif creation with video encoding, is stopping operation after September 1.
The Gyfcat site has a notice that reads, “The Gfycat service is being discontinued. Please save or delete your Gfycat content by visiting https://www.gfycat.com and logging in to your account. After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com.”
A spokesperson for its parent company, Snap, confirmed to Mashable that Gyfcat would soon be no more. “Snap is winding down support of Gfycat through gfycat.com. Anyone is able to save their content and content from the community for the next 60 days. Snapchatters are still able to search for and use GIFs in their conversations with friends.”
The site’s security certificate expired in May. According to VICE, the certificate helps establish an encrypted connection between websites and browsers or servers.
The platform was once one of the most popular in the U.S. and raised $10 million in funding in 2015—the year that it was founded—and was incorporated with popular platforms including Reddit and WordPress. Its popularity was partly due to the fact that HD clips used to make the animated images wouldn’t degrade in quality after compression.
As with other apps like Twitter and Google, which are set to remove old or inactive users and content, Gfycat announced in 2019 that it would start removing a large number of content that included content that was older than a year or created without an account. Redditors dedicated to the site managed to save over 19 million clips from being lost. The same year, they also announced a separate platform, Redgifs, that would allow for adult content.
After the server went down in May, people in a subreddit dedicated to the site decided to again save as much content as they could by saving pages to the Internet Archive. At the present moment, their TLS certificate has been renewed after it had been expired for nearly a week. A spokesperson told VICE it had been a “temporary error.”
In 2016, TechCrunch reported that Gyfcat had over 25 million gifts on its platform and 75 million monthly users at the time. There are still multiple gif resources like Giphy and Tenor, but it’s sad to see one of the original and biggest cease operation.
(featured image: BBC)
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