As we enter the final weeks of the year, we’re now in the annual awards and recognition season, where the major platforms acknowledge the top creators, content trends, and more among their communities.
Today, it’s GIPHY’s turn to showcase its top trends, with a listing of the most popular new GIFs that have emerged among its many millions of users.
And while I can’t give you the full animated GIF experience here, these were the top new GIFs of 2023, according to GIPHY data:
The top GIF of the year was “Yay” by artist Mo Willems, which features characters from his popular book series.
As per GIPHY:
“This GIF has a perfect balance of expression and animation that clearly connects Gerald (Elephant) & Piggie — the stars of 25 New York Times best-selling books — with GIPHY users.”
Other top GIFs included “Happy Birthday” featuring singer Saweetie, “Annoyed Coach”, “My Existence Angers Him”, and, unsurprisingly, a GIF of Ryan Gosling as Ken from the Barbie movie.
Other popular GIF trends stemmed from TV shows “The Last of Us” and “Succession”, while GIFs of Taylor Swift put Travis increased by 497% after Swift started attending Chiefs games.
GIPHY has also highlighted its top channel partners, including the NFL, Peacock, and Hello All.
GIPHY has also announced that GIF creator Jinzhan took out top-billing as the most-viewed creator of the year.
Other GIF artists on the list were Adam J. Kurtz, DINOSALLY, Megan Lockhart, and Chippy the Dog.
It’s an interesting overview of evolving GIF trends, and how these animated images can help people express themselves online. And definitely, using the right GIF can help to boost your messaging, so it may well be worth taking note of the latest GIF trends to consider how they might also enhance your messaging.
It’s also been a big year for GIPHY itself, which was all but acquired by Meta, before a U.K. ruling overturned the purchase. So now it’s owned by Shutterstock instead, though it would have been interesting to see what Meta had planned for broader GIF integration and usage.
We’ll never know.
You can check out GIPHY’s full annual review post (including animated examples) here.
