Giphy’s Gifs Can Now Serve As Thumbnails For Vimeo’s Videos

Giphy, known as a top purveyor of animated gifs to suit all occasions, is adding more bells and whistles to its operation. The four-year-old company has partnered with video site Vimeo to link gifs to their respective source videos.

The Giphy Embed Player, as the new development has been termed, can be used to provide attribution for existing gifs, but it is being pitched as a way to make video thumbnails more dynamic. Using Giphy, Vimeo users can create gifs out of eye-catching moments in their videos and share those clips across the internet. Clicking on one of the gifs in the wild will take the viewer to the corresponding source video.

via GIPHY

The launch of the Embed Player is a step forward for Giphy, which surpassed 100 million daily users last October. Around the same time, it announced a $72 million funding round that valued the company at $600 million.

“At Giphy we’re always looking for ways to push the gif format,” said Giphy Director of Product Caroline Huber in a press release. “With the Giphy Embed Player we’re turning gifs into the “headlines” for video. The animated gif gives you a taste or a teaser, driving you to watch the full video. We think publishers and content owners can increase engagement by using gif previews instead of text links or still images, and we’ll continue to build tools to help them.”

For Vimeo, this is the second announcement this week that encourages viewers to do more clicking on the clips they encounter. On Wednesday, the site also announced the launch of in-video cards for its Business-level subscribers.