Stock photos repository Shutterstock (NYSE: SSTK) was up in pre-market trading at the time of publishing on Tuesday after it announced the acquisition of GIPHY, a large collection of GIFs and stickers that supplies casual conversational content. Shutterstock will acquire GIPHY from Meta Platforms (META) for $53 million in cash.
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As a part of this agreement, Meta has entered into an Application Programming Interface (API) agreement to “ensure continued access to GIPHY’s content across Meta’s platform” and the acquisition is expected to close in June this year.
Shutterstock CEO Paul Hennessy commented on the acquisition, “Through the GIPHY acquisition, we are extending our audience touch points beyond primarily professional marketing and advertising use cases and expanding into casual conversations. We plan to leverage Shutterstock’s unique capabilities in content and metadata monetization, generative AI, studio production and creative automation to enable the commercialization of our GIF library as we roll this offering out to customers.”
Analysts are cautiously optimistic about SSTK stock with a Moderate Buy consensus rating based on three Buys and two Holds.
