Gfycat to Shut Down on September 1: The End of GIF-Hosting Sites Era?

As the internet becomes more fragmented and less accessible each week, with platforms like Twitter requiring accounts to view tweets, Gfycat is shutting down on September 1.

Gfycat is a website where users upload, create, and distribute GIFs. So when this date comes, users can no longer upload, create, and distribute GIFs on the platform.

Gfycat to Shut Down Its Content, Making GIFs Inaccessible by September 1

According to ARS Technica, users of the platform, which Snap reportedly owned, were asked to start saving or deleting their Gfycat content. It comes as the platform is preparing to shut down ultimately.

The announcement to users also gave a final date for the platform, saying that on September 1, all of the content on Gfycat's platform would be deleted. Specifically, it noted that all data uploaded to gfycat.com would be deleted.

By September 1, GIFs Will No Longer be Supported by the Platform and Will Officially be Deleted

Users were urged to go on the official Gfycat website, log in, download, save, and delete content, and get ready for the platform to stop hosting the GIFs by September 1. That means that if users have special GIFs on the website, they should download them before the given date or risk losing them forever.

ARS Technica reported how Gfycat rose to fame along with other services like Imgur, which made it easy for users to utilize on sites like Facebook or Reddit.

Gfycat Provided a Unique Way to Share GIFs that was Even More Efficient than the GIF Format

In 2016, Richard Rabbat, Gfycat's CEO and co-founder, issued a statement after they had successfully raised $10 million from investors, TechCrunch reported.

At that time, the CEO told investors about the state of GIFs, saying they were hard to make, slow to upload, and the quality would be compromised when users shared them. That resulted in Gfycat providing its own solution, which involved using Webm videos.

Basically, the platform decided to create looped and linked Webm videos that were able to retain their HD quality despite being compressed. They also became easier to share compared to actual GIF-format files.

In 2016, It Was Believed That Gfycat Was to be the Ultimate Platform for Short-Form Content

Gfycat even offered API for other sites to utilize the tool. Ernestine Fu, a Venture Partner at Alsop Louie Partners, said in 2016 that they saw Gfycat as what they described as an "ultimate platform for all short-form content," TechCrunch reported.

Fu said it way before TikTok and other apps and features came to light. They then compared it to how YouTube was for longer videos while Twitter was for text-based news and media discussions during that time.

ARS Technica reported the trouble at Gfycat, which started in May when an expired certificate popped up, making its tool inaccessible for five days. So far, Gfycat has not made much news since its launch, aside from its outage.