Loading...Over the couple decades, the Internet has gotten to know and love a unique type of video: the gif. The gif, or arguably pronounces as jif, is a short animation or video that loops over and over again in a funny or expressive way. By now, the gif is a common sight on social media and the rest of the Internet, used to express a certain feeling, experience, or simply a funny reference to pop culture. The most popular use of the gif, known as the reaction gif, is when you use a gif in communication as an expression of your current feelings, usually a short video of some film or TV character reacting in the extreme way you currently are.
But it wasn’t always like that. Reaction gifs weren’t always the top dog in the gif world, the history of gifs spanning a whole decade and a half. In the video above, Vox tells you all about the history of the gif, and more specifically how people used the phenomenon to make money.