The Rise, Fall & Then Resurrection of Gifs

Today Twitter announced its now supporting animated Gifs. This interesting because they are quite heavy in file size which means they require a lot more server space. I.e. $$$

It got me thinking; Gif’s have been around since 1985, but lately over the last few buzzfeed-fueled years they’ve rocket in  – its almost as if the kids thought they’d discovered something we hadn’t!

I’ve never seen a  Google Trends graph like this before. We can see that ‘Gif’ had an initially high search interest 7 years ago that gradually fell and recovered rapidly over the past 2 years. Furthermore, it now appears that they are the most searched/popular file format.

The main reason they didn’t take off in the first place was their size. Now that we’ve all got broadband it makes sense that animated Gifs would thrive.