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For Mobile Messaging, GIFs Prove to Be Worth at Least a Thousand Words

Lucy Dikeou, a 21-year-old senior at Stanford University, has long used English and the pictorial images known as emoji to text on her iPhone. A few months ago, she started messaging in a third language: GIFs.

When Ms. Dikeou recently wanted a friend to stop sending her pictures of food, she responded with a GIF — an animated image known as a graphics interchange format — of Christina Aguilera rolling her eyes, waving her hand and soundlessly mouthing “PLEASE STOP.” Ms. Dikeou’s mobile messages are now often textless, replaced by clips of Harry Potter applauding, or excited toddlers opening birthday presents. Her favorite one features the ensemble cast of “Seinfeld” elatedly dancing, which she sent upon hearing that a friend was coming into town.

“I’m able to express these really complex emotions in the span of two seconds,” said Ms. Dikeou, who had never sent any clips with her phone before October, when she downloaded Riffsy, a mobile keyboard app designed to transmit the animated images.

Just as smartphones drove the rise of emoji, mobile devices are propelling GIFs into a more widespread form of instant visual-messaging. Tumblr, the blogging site, said it had 23 million GIFs posted to its site every day. In March, Facebook began supporting GIFs, with more than five million of the animations sent daily through its messaging app. Slack, the workplace collaboration start-up, says it counts more than two million GIF integrations each month.

In total, online searches for GIFs have risen by a factor of nine since mid-2012, according to Experian Marketing Services, an industry research firm.

While the brief animations are not new — GIFs were created in 1987 by Steve Wilhite, a programmer at CompuServe, and have been omnipresent on desktops — major improvements in mobile technology and a surge of messaging applications are pushing GIFs to break out beyond the web forums of old. They have become a mainstream form of digital expression, a way to relay complex feelings and thoughts in ways beyond words and even photographs, making them hugely popular with young audiences who never leave home without their smartphones.

The animated snippets are being spread on mobile devices by a new generation of GIF start-ups, which are backed by venture capital. Riffsy, which makes the GIF keyboard for smartphones, just raised $10 million. Giphy, which provides a search engine for a vast library of GIFs, has raised more than $23 million. And there are numerous other companies, like Imgur, PopKey and Kanvas, all eager to snip and remix video clips into short, ready-to-share packages.

For now, few of these companies are profiting from GIFs as they focus on propagating the use of the clips. But the start-ups see potential for profit, especially as brands increasingly integrate the animations into advertising and other marketing.

“Typing is an antiquated input method and you can’t express emotional dimension adequately with just a handful of emoji,” said Adam Leibsohn, the chief operating officer of Giphy, which is based in Manhattan. “GIFs have trumped all of it.”

GIFs are marked by certain characteristics. They are typically a few seconds long, soundless and play in a loop. They are often culled from movie and TV clips and can include text on top of the animated image.

Their use has seeped into professional venues, frequently replacing text. Google recently sent a reporter a GIF of a toddler throwing her hands up in response to a question. Digital publications like BuzzFeed regularly use GIFs as a storytelling method. And office workers like Jerrod Howlett, an employee at Google, regularly respond to email with GIFs.

“I’m not that great with words,” Mr. Howlett said. “But if I find the perfect GIF, it nails it.”

The trend echoes the rise of text-based emoticons, which eventually gave way to emoji, the pictographic language created in the late 1990s by NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese telecommunications giant. Use of emoji, filled with cartoony images, exploded in Asian countries and are now built into many smartphone keyboards. Instagram, which hosts more than 300 million users, said roughly 40 percent of all images posted now include at least one emoji in the accompanying text.

GIFs, too, are benefiting from the adoption of mobile devices and faster cellular networks that enable the seamless transmission of visual animations. Last summer, Apple also opened its iOS mobile software to let developers install new keyboards that made it easier to insert GIFs into messages, leading to an explosion of new GIF companies.

“We’re increasingly writing shorter and shorter amounts of text to be read on screens, be it your computer, smartphones, tablets or an Apple Watch,” said Naomi S. Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University and the author of “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World.”

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From left, Erick Hachenburg, David McIntosh and Frank Nawabi, the co-founders of Riffsy, a mobile keyboard app focused on GIFs.Credit...Vivian Johnson for The New York Times

A GIF, in many ways, can be an even more effective form of visual communication than emoji because of the movement in an animation that provides a greater range of expression.

“A GIF packages your message for you, so you don’t have to figure out how to express yourself,” Ms. Baron said.

While Riffsy, which reports more than four billion views of its GIFs every month, and Giphy, which says it has more than 50 million monthly unique users, said they were not currently focused on making money from the animations, they are working with brands on using the clips to promote products.

Riffsy recently collaborated with 20th Century Fox during the release of “Taken 3,” an action movie starring Liam Neeson, and spliced its own GIFs for people to use as messages. One popular clip showed Mr. Neeson jumping out a window, on repeat, with the subtitle “YOLO” — shorthand for “you only live once” — in blocky white lettering.

“People are sharing these brand GIFs like any other pieces of content,” said David McIntosh, the chief executive of Riffsy. “The ambition of our company is really to build a visible language open to everyone.”

Some in the advertising and entertainment industry are embracing the snippets, too. Pamela Reed and Matthew Rader, a Brooklyn couple who direct video shoots, have incorporated the clips into ad campaigns in recent years with some of their most prominent fashion clients, including Adidas, Diesel and Ray-Ban. While they were initially met with resistance, the two said GIFs were no longer a silly afterthought and were considered part of a full ad campaign.

“People don’t always want to watch a video that’s four minutes long,” Ms. Reed said, adding that GIF-based branded content can quickly go viral because the format is suited to being small and easily shareable.

“It’s really the native, inherent art form of the Internet,” Mr. Rader added.

Social networks also see opportunity in the clips. Tumblr has introduced its own search engine to help people find animations across the site. Imgur, an image-hosting site and social message board, has made a GIF creator after seeing how frequently its users post the snippets. Both companies are experimenting with advertising models that include the promotion of GIFs.

But Alan Schaaf, Imgur’s chief executive, said none of this would work as a business if the paid content were not as delightful as the millions of GIFs people send one another every day.

“It’s like the best part of a joke, told over and over again,” said Mr. Schaaf, who has built a team to use GIFs inside the ads that Imgur’s 150 million regular users will see. “It’s just an instant emotional connection.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Tiny Moving Message. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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