Genies has partnered with Giphy to bring its custom 3D avatars to the animated GIF search engine.
That’s a big deal for Genies‘ effort to reach the mass market. The Facebook-owned Giphy has more than 700 million users who go to the search engine daily to find animated GIFs, or those silly animated images associated with internet memes and recorded in graphics interchange format (GIF).
Giphy users can take their Genie avatars everywhere they already use Giphy. Genies plans to roll out hundreds of partnerships this year where users can use their Genie to allow for a “virtual portable identity.” Giphy is the first partnership of the rollout, and the communities are a good match because they both focus on self-expression.
To upload a Genie avatar into Giphy, Genies users create a Genie in the Genies app and then use the deep link to connect them to Giphy. Once in the Giphy app, users can upload their Genies to their channel and use it throughout Giphy. (Users must have accounts for both Genies and Giphy for this functionality to work.)
Up until now, Genies has been used exclusively by celebrities, tastemakers, and influencers as a way to memorialize moments in the digital world. The company has thousands of celebrities using its Genies for album releases, song announcements, and more. Celebrities using Genies include Shawn Mendes, J.Lo, Offset, Rihanna, DJ Khaled, Justin Bieber, Cardi B, and J Balvin.
Genies has made it possible for celebrities to be able to drop digital goods and merchandise directly to their fans within the Genies app. That has allowed them to make money during the pandemic even though they can’t go places to make commercial endorsements or appearances.
With the custom integration with Giphy, fans can then easily upload those already accessorized avatars to their Giphy channel.
CEO Akash Nigam believes Genies avatars will make the metaverse possible, but not as a single virtual world. Rather, people can take their avatars and move from place to place in a distributed metaverse. He said the partnership with Giphy will let users culturally accessories their digital selves and use Genies in digital communities where they already belong.
“The audience potential is significant as Giphy’s platform has a daily user reach of 700-plus million people,” Nigam said. “Our goal has been to build a metaverse where people can engage with their true identities, so bringing Genies to Giphy is a big first step for us.”
The integration took a while, but Nigam said the company did a lot of work to specifically customize Genies for Giphy. In the future, integrations will be easier to do as Genies finishes more of its technical documentation for partners.
“I’m so excited that consumers will get the first taste of creating a 3D Genie themselves and using it on already one of the most expressive platforms in the world,” Nigam said.