Fast, Cheap, and Good: Why Animated GIFs Engage Us

Animated GIFs have been around since 1987 and recently gained more popularity on social networking sites. Tumblr, a large social networking and micro blogging platform, is a popular venue to share animated GIFs. Tumblr users follow blogs, generating a feed of posts, and choose to "like" or to "reblog" favored posts. In this paper, we use these actions as signals to analyze the engagement of over 3.9 million posts, and conclude that animated GIFs are significantly more engaging than other kinds of media. We follow this finding with deeper visual analysis of nearly 100k animated GIFs and pair our results with interviews with 13 Tumblr users to find out what makes animated GIFs engaging. We found that the animation, lack of sound, immediacy of consumption, low bandwidth and minimal time demands, the storytelling capabilities and utility for expressing emotions were significant factors in making GIFs the most engaging content on Tumblr. We also found that engaging GIFs contained faces and had higher motion energy, uniformity, resolution and frame rate. Our findings connect to media theories and have implications in design of effective content dashboards, video summarization tools and ranking algorithms to enhance engagement.