The Unstoppable Social Power of the GIF
Image: Max Woolf

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The Unstoppable Social Power of the GIF

On average, GIFs are far-and-away the most engaging visual content on the internet, and here's the data to prove it.

Many digital words have been spilled about the GIF, the photo file type that was once reserved for terrible GeoCities banners but has since become so much more than that. Well, here's a few more words to consider the importance of a lowly file type: The GIF has perhaps become the most common way internet denizens consume content.

And GIFs, on average, ​are the most engaging visual content on the internet (if not the most ubiquitous). And it's not even close.

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For proof, check out these series of graphs whipped up by Max Woolf, ​a data analyst in San Francisco. Earlier this week, Woolf analyzed every GIF, JPG, and PNG file that was linked to on reddit (​using a data set made available to researchers). He found that, on average, GIFs received more than twice the number of upvotes than those static image files did.

That means GIFs, which are largely animated, are outperforming all static images, including memes and other photo content that we consider to be stereotypically viral, and Woolf thinks that trend probably would play across the rest of the content-driven internet. (Static images are obviously more popular on Amazon, for example.)

"Since the core demographic of reddit users are internet-savvy, I think it would be fair to say that the results could be extrapolated to rest of the internet (even moreso since reddit is one of the primary sources for viral images around the internet)," Woolf told me in an email.

There is perhaps another explanation for his data, other than the idea that people simply like GIFs way more than they like static images. Many, many more JPGs and PNGs are posted to reddit (and the internet in general) than are GIFs. That means that, necessarily, there's more dreck to wade through, so you end up with a lower overall average score. That makes sense to me, but it's still quite impressive that, on average, each GIF is getting more than 100 upvotes.

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I asked Woolf if he wouldn't mind running a few more analyses for me, given how I usually consume content on reddit and the rest of the internet. I'm much more likely to click a link to a GIF, for example, than a link to a YouTube video (a popular critique of Woolf's findings on reddit was the idea that he's comparing apples and oranges—moving pictures to static ones).

Here's what that chart looks like:

Your average GIF destroys the average YouTube video.

"My theory is that there are a very large proportion of bad/spam YouTube videos submitted, which craters the average. GIFs at least require nontrivial effort to create," Woolf said.

reddit_gif_subreddit.png

That may be true, but I don't think that necessarily tells the whole story. When they're at work, people don't often have time to open up an entire YouTube video. I know that, when I do, I give it no more than a couple seconds before I decide whether or not to watch the whole thing. GIFs don't have that problem: They open up and play on webpages (and on reddit, with reddit Enhancement Suite). And, well, they don't have sound, meaning you don't have to stop whatever music you might be listening to or stop whatever else you're doing to watch them.

And for that, the GIF,  ​and its GIF-like offshoots like Gycat's MP4 GIF and WebM, are the perfect file formats to consume a couple seconds worth of video.