Once the flywheel is spinning really quickly you have so much data.вЂќ ItвЂ™s kind of like the chicken and egg problem itвЂ™s a slow grind until a spark happens - youвЂ™re guessing whatвЂ™s gonna work. You gotta have the right set of search data, share data, community uploads, itвЂ™s the combination of all of them. Sometimes the local content performs better. вЂњOften western content with a local caption will perform better. вЂњWestern content is so heavily exported all over the world that these things have almost become globally recognized objects,вЂќ McIntosh said. As it expands to more and more countries, Tenor is able to start picking off that low-hanging fruit, as making small tweaks in certain regions can lead to dramatic improvements in engagement and usage, McIntosh said. One of the appeals of GIFs is that it can compress a ton of information (McIntosh refers to it as вЂњemotionвЂќ) into a short semi-video object in a messenger screen rather than having to type out a bunch of text. That might even be more true as Tenor begins to expand internationally, planting people on the ground to figure out what localized versions of the service look like. Tenor works across a number of platforms, but now its sights have shifted abroad. Basically, you want to communicate what you want to tell a friend in as few words as possible - except with something silly from Friends. ItвЂ™s roughly the same principle in terms of using Tenor, which McIntosh says is more of a search engine than an actual hub or portal. Snap, for example, has stressed to investors that it is getting people to come back to the service more and more and spend more time on it. This more or less dovetails with an approach for some companies that are focusing on pitching engagement instead of a raw active user metric. вЂњThey succeed by grabbing more minutes, our success is getting you the right thing faster.В Can we take that 25-second session time and make it 20 seconds, or even 15 or 10.В ThereвЂ™s a viral loop in place where every time you make search a little better itвЂ™s faster.вЂќ вЂњIt comes down to search, fundamentally weвЂ™re a search product, unlike Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and Snap,вЂќ Tenor CEO David McIntosh said. And with that approach, Tenor says its users now search for GIFs on its keyboard more than 400 million times a day and 12 billion times a month. Instead of trying to get people to come to the service and browse around on the keyboard or a different website, TenorвЂ™s goal has been to figure out what you are trying to say in some kind of a GIF and get it out the door as quickly as possible. Instead, TenorвЂ™s aim has been to collapse the amount of time it takes you to find a GIF you like and send it to a friend.

David McIntoshвЂ™s startup Tenor builds a GIF keyboard - but he actually hopes youвЂ™ll spend as little time searching on it as possible.

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