Do Giphy actually host Gifs anymore? I noticed how they make it very hard to actually access the image version, and even this image is in webp, so you can't embed it. It's all iframes.
This is not saying they're bad, I totally can relate with their need to cut costs because just hosting these gifs for free and letting anyone <img src> them is not a profitable decision, but then again, it's not really Gif anymore.
So even in this case the "sponsored gif" would probably be some sort of a video instead of an actual gif.
Nowadays whenever I want to search for a gif I want to use for a blog post or website, I have given up looking for gifs on giphy and just go to google search instead. The "gifs" on giphy are unusable for my purpose.
I see your point but don't think it's an adequate analogy. Xerox still means photocopy and Hoover still means vacuum cleaning. Gif is something that used to exist for decades, not something giphy invented.
Gif is far more useful as a media type rather than file format; and more than that, i don't think most people realize or care that they're actually watching some kind of video-sans-audio.
This is not saying they're bad, I totally can relate with their need to cut costs because just hosting these gifs for free and letting anyone <img src> them is not a profitable decision, but then again, it's not really Gif anymore.
So even in this case the "sponsored gif" would probably be some sort of a video instead of an actual gif.
Nowadays whenever I want to search for a gif I want to use for a blog post or website, I have given up looking for gifs on giphy and just go to google search instead. The "gifs" on giphy are unusable for my purpose.