Zendaya Was Giphy’s Top GIF of 2022

Will Zendaya move the two Emmy Awards she received for her work on HBO’s Euphoria to make room for her most recent accolade: Giphy’s top GIF of 2022?

SpongeBob SquarePants was honored, as well, as the Giphy Clip emphasizing the title character’s friendship with Patrick Star was the year’s top Clip on the GIF discovery platform.

Then-Facebook reached an agreement to acquire Giphy for roughly $315 million in May 2020, but the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority ordered Meta to sell Giphy in October, saying that the combination of the two companies “would limit choice for social media users and reduce innovation in the country’s display advertising.”

Giphy explained the methodology behind its lists in a blog post Tuesday: “Giphy has been chronicling the top content on our site for years now (Remember Blinking White Guy? Or “Okurrr”? Or “And I…Oop?”). And while cultural trends may shift and the celebrities change, this annual list always results in an emotional pulse of the world that year. In order to hone in on that pulse, we’re continuing the approach in our data calculations that we started last year. In the metrics used to evaluate the top content of 2022, extra emphasis was placed on outliers from daily evergreen searches. This curatorial focus allows for a more insightful overview of content that derived its popularity from cultural and emotional spikes, versus consistently trending search terms (i.e., it’s always someone’s birthday, and Giphy users are always searching for content to celebrate those birthdays). By doing this, we feel confident that we’re not only providing a more diverse array of 2022’s most popular content, but also a more accurate interpretation of Giphy’s use case this year.”