GIFs in the Wild
A decade of animated GIFs and stickers on GIPHY — original characters, brand work, and commissioned collections, with 13.5 billion views.
346 GIFs, 13.5 Billion Views
GIFs have somehow survived every platform that was supposed to replace them. They’ve become part of how people talk online — reactions, jokes, punchlines, and little bits of animation dropped into everyday conversations. GIPHY built the library behind a lot of that and put it everywhere, from messaging apps and social platforms to the keyboard on your phone.
I started uploading my animation work there in 2015 — brand GIFs, original characters, Garbage Pail Kids, and sticker collections commissioned by GIPHY itself. What started as another place to post my work turned into one of the biggest distribution channels I have. Ten years and 346 uploads later, those GIFs have been viewed more than 13.5 billion times.
CHANNEL
GIPHY – @justingammon
STUDIO
Weirdo Works
YEARS
2015–present
ROLE
Artwork, animation, and channel strategy
Justin Gammon
RESULTS
13.5B views across 346 GIFs (as of Sept 2026)
Brand GIFs, original characters, and GIPHY-commissioned sticker collections
GIPHY feed
Top Term: “BACON”
3.1B Views
Top Term: “EGG”
344M Views
Top Term: “POPSICLE”
254.3M Views
How GIFs Actually Get Found
Search, Not Feed
Most people aren’t browsing GIPHY looking for something interesting. They’re already in a conversation, hit the GIF button, and type something like “hungry,” “friday,” or “cheers.” Whatever shows up becomes the entire field of choices. That makes tagging surprisingly important. A great GIF attached to a phrase nobody searches for might as well not exist.
Brands naturally want to tag everything with their own name, but that’s usually not what people are typing. The better question is what someone might actually be trying to say when your GIF would be useful.
The Tag Gets You In, the GIF Gets You Picked
Two Things Have to Happen
The tag gets the GIF into the results. The animation gets someone to choose it. You need both. Good tagging can put even a simple GIF in front of a huge audience, but if nobody wants to use it, it stops there.
That’s probably the biggest thing I’ve learned from watching these things travel. The best-performing GIFs aren’t necessarily the most complicated ones. They’re the ones that communicate something quickly enough that someone sees it and thinks, “Yep. That’s the one.”
Top Term: “QUESO”
10.7M Views
Top Term: “CAFE”
134M Views
Top Term: “VOXI”
106M Views
Top Term: “MOUTH”
1.1B Views
33.1M Views
Stickers In-Use
Stickers Work Differently
No Frame to Hide In
Stickers have a different problem. There’s no background, no built-in contrast, and no control over what someone puts behind them. They might end up tiny in the corner of a photo or stretched across the whole screen.
So the silhouette has to do a lot of the work. A sticker needs to read as a shape before anyone notices the animation inside it. If it disappears the second someone drops it onto a busy photo, it isn’t doing much good.
What It’s Led To
Found, Not Pitched
Some of my favorite projects came from people finding this work on their own. Topps discovered a set of Mars Attacks GIFs I had made for fun and later hired me to animate official pieces for the property’s 60th anniversary. Mishka NYC found me through my Garbage Pail Kids work.
That might be the strangest thing about the channel. I originally treated it like another place to put my work, but over time it became a place where the work could go out and find people for me.
