In this piece, I will highlight the current landscape for viral organic content, map the key players and describes the financial side of meme creation. The slides pose a series of questions around the future of monetization on the Internet. These issues lead to a description of the dark reality for creators, meme maker success strategies based on building network effects, and ways to protect creatives who are under pressure from the content churn required by big social media platforms. These slides are for anyone with a social media account who enjoys sending memes to their friends.

The below materials are meant to be presented with voiceover and are from my keynote at Gather - Stockholm 2022. The slides have been reformatted with my notes. If you enjoy this piece, please like, comment, share and tag me @lizhagelthorn across social media.

Table of Contents

1. What are Memes?

2. Why are Memes Important?

3. Meme Industry & Market Size

4. Origin of Internet Memes

5. What Platforms Do Memes Come From?

6. How To Create a Great Meme

7. How Memes Make Money

8. The Current State of Monetization for Memes

9. What Happens Next…

Making and sharing memes is one of the most popular activities on social media. But what is a meme?

• In greek, meme translates to “to imitate” , in french the translation is “same”

• If you can understand the science of memes, you can understand the larger cultural phenomena, communities and issues for our world.

• Memes come in many different shapes and sizes but ultimately memes are reflections of cultural artifacts, stories, emotions and communities found across the internet.

• The official definition of a meme points to memes as central to communication across the internet. To make a meme means to transform and remix units of culture.

• Memes are the paradigm of a new, flourishing creativity. Not only are these captioned images one of the most pervasive and important forms of online creativity, but they also upend many of copyright law’s fundamental assumptions about creativity, commercialization, and distribution.

• There are two central attributes of Internet memes: creative reproduction of materials and intertextuality.

• If you can understand the science of memes, you can understand the larger cultural phenomena, communities and issues for our world.

• In the same way emojis can easily and quickly communicate our emotions in a way that words can’t, memes do the same for messages, ideas and allow us to provide subtext for the world around us in a way that regular speech cannot.

• The digital age (2000s+) has ushered in a new “attention economy” in which it is no longer speech that is scarce, but rather listeners’ attention. Communicating by meme is a hack that gives individual speakers a fighting chance to be heard in our attention-scarce world.

• Just like a song, memes provide the format for others to put their stories and messages within. How a songwriter writes a melody or a rapper writes a bar, people fit their stories in the format of trending internet memes.

• When we look at a meme on the internet, we resonate with different jokes, images or “in-groups” pictured in the memes, because we see those parts within ourselves.

• Representing a growth rate of 21.6% compared to a 13% growth rate across global digital content

• According to Instagram, this figure is up from 500k in 2018.

• With the global pandemic, people were experiencing the effects of a cultural phenomenon at a scale like never before.

• The American Psychological Association did a study and found funny memes helped people cope with the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic, making viewers feel calmer and more content just by looking at 3 memes.

• The researchers found that people who viewed memes compared with other types of media reported higher levels of humor and more positive emotions, which was indirectly related to a decrease in stress about the COVID-19 pandemic.

• When it comes to the average type of marketing assets across the internet (branded content, promotions, etc.), memes outperforms them all with 60% of consumers saying they are more likely to buy something from a brand that uses memes.

• The term “meme” first appeared in the 1976 book by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

• Dawkins defined “memes” as a unit of cultural transmission such as slang, fashion trends, behaviors, religion.

• The popularity of a meme is what ensured its survival.

• Memes battle for survival with attention, with the best memes suiting different contexts or becoming timeless.

• The more popular memes survive..Analogues to natural selection.

• Later in life, Dawkins clarified that instead of mutating by random change like a gene, internet memes mutate based on human creativity.

• The modern study of Memetics gained traction in the 90s but ultimately failed as most scientists saw it more as an obscure philosophy and not a renewed science.

• As the internet evolved, so did memes. One thing that remained the same from 2005–present day: all memes originate from two types of online platforms (one video and one text or forum-based with the ability to share photos).

• When YouTube was released in 2005, video memes became popular with “Rick Rolling” or the Harlem Shake.

• By 2010, almost 35% of memes came from YouTube and 30% came from 4chan.

• By, 2011 Reddit and Tumblr held 12-14% of memes respectively.

• 2010, Instagram was founded.

• In 2012, Vine was founded and generated about 7% of all internet memes.

• By 2014+, 25-50% of memes came from Twitter.

• By 2020, TikTok started gaining 30%+ of all meme content on the internet.

• In 2022, TikTok owns 45% of the meme conversation on the internet.

• In 2022, Twitter owns 30% of the meme conversation.

• There are 3 things that make a meme:

  • Format: what type of meme is it (3 soda slots pouring into one cup).

  • Content:  The actual image or video. Often owned by a record label, television network or movie studio and needs to be remixed. In this slide, it is the underlying picture of a soda machine.

  • Message: What is the meme saying, to who and what is the perspective of the meme. Here I am messaging to you what the contents of a great meme are.

• Here is my “Matrix for High Performing Memes”. This slide is much better with a voiceover, but at a high level the quadrants are labeled as follows:

  • Easy template to remix: does the underlying photo, image, video or song allow for easy remixing

  • Universal experience / emotion: can someone else relate to this experience? Is the experience timeless?

  • Point of view / intertextual analysis: are there multiple parties in the meme? Is it clear the perspective of the creator of the meme and are there other characters within the meme that others can relate to or are the intended audience?

  • Relevance to culture: is it quick to recognize? How big is the audience around the specific content? Will people get it?

• Shoutout to my friend Nick Kaufman who showed this to me: If you haven’t seen the video of the dancing man at Sasquatch Music Festival from 2009 (23m views on YouTube), it’s a great insight into how the algorithms work and how memes spread on the internet. The first few people who started dancing with the guy, made it OK for others to join in which had a snowballing network effect.

I go more into this topic in my piece “What Does Ownership on the Internet Mean?” but a few key points:

• Currently, the power of the internet is in the hands of the social media companies that write and control social media algorithms.

• They determine the spread of information and create the distribution channels.

• Along the way, they extract $134 billion in advertising revenue per year from content that users provide for them at no cost.

• the current Internet ownership structure allows a few central players to exploit our digital lives, content, and connections for profit while gatekeeping the type of content we make.

• The creators making a living online are at the mercy of these platforms; if the platforms change their rules or algorithms, creators are forced to course correct on the spot and follow new rules, which are more likely to serve the platform’s interests than the creators.

• Advertising-based business models do not help artists or creativity flourish; quite the opposite.

• Have you ever heard the saying “life imitates art”? What happens when most of the art we see is actually subtle advertising?

• The internet is about novelty - creating the new and seeking the new. Researchers argue that taste is an essentially human capacity; we know if we like something before we understand why.

• This effect is principally founded on surprise. Algorithms are designed to pleasantly surprise you through relevant and timely recommendations, yet we are never quite surprised because algorithmic-driven content speaks to the masses, leading to a lack of originality and the production of almost identical products.

• When you think of social media and the differences of opinion people could learn from, algorithms actually expose us to similar things that we’ve interacted with before. This creates echo chambers based on similar formatted content and messages across the internet and a lack of connection to each other.

• In addition to unoriginal products and services, the constant creative content churn required by dominant social media platforms is a fast-track to burnout and social media fatigue for content creators.

• After surveying 127 Instagram accounts totaling 300 million followers between 2019 and 2021, researchers learned that that an account with 1 million followers needs to post 7x times per day to continue growing a substantial following.

• Adobe, released a report that recommended creators and brands post 110x per week across social media platforms. This is unsustainable.

• It’s very hard to make money from commissioning memes directly. What meme makers and networks are selling are impressions and eyeballs of their hard-won audiences.

• Meme pages calculate an average impression per post by posting a consistent number of times per day so that they can calculate a total number of impressions per month. The average impressions per month needs to be maintained and grown in order to grow their followers. By posting consistently, they are also able to take the average expected impression per post and sell sponsored posts in between their organic posts.

• This is how meme creators like @FuckJerry are able to charge and justify $30,000 per post.

• All branded posts come at a cost to your audience. You have to be careful how many sponsored posts that you do and make sure you’re creating organic content to outweigh sponsorships.

• The Internet’s unwritten rules are changing. Because that’s what the Internet does, It’s constantly changing.

• The new rules, if implemented correctly, could mean expansive new ways to earn a living from it.

• Creators have more power than they realize.

• In their NYU Law Review article “Memes on Memes and the New Creativity," Emily Kempin Professor of Law Amy Adler and Professor Jeanne Fromer argue that the highly speculative market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) stems from an urge to privatize widely available meme images: “an attempt to cling to the concepts of uniqueness, originality, and authenticity in a world where those concepts no longer make sense.

• The reality of “Web3”, which has been filled with bad actors, scams, hacks and rug-pulls, has left a lot to be desired. Will it fulfill its promise of a better, creative world? Time will tell.

• One thing is clear: the new evolution of decentralized social media is among us. Interoperability of our data, content and audiences is a required first step. It’s time we have the ability to port our content, data and audiences (our power) from Big Tech platforms and advertising-based business models to a decentralized online ecosystem owned by each of us. We can talk about this during my next keynote.

If you’re interested to read more on how we can avoid big tech centralization, you can read my piece on the topic below:

Liz Hagelthorn is a social-first storyteller and meme-maker with a diverse background in meme culture, technology, and organic virality. Liz is best known for leading creative for the largest pseudonymous meme network on Instagram, overseeing creative strategy across 100+ accounts with 300M followers and reaching 1.2B people per month. Most notably, Liz was the face and creator behind the @girl account. She led the network’s acquisition in under two years.

*Liz has held positions at Google and Twitter, and works with high-profile startups and celebrities to develop viral organic growth strategies, In 2021, Liz led a web3 artist and developer collective to create the first Ethereum gas tool for NFT artists and collectors to better understand platform fees. She is also the creator and host of Girl Gone Viral, a podcast featuring interviews with creative entrepreneurs, online community builders, and academics about how storytelling on the internet really works. *

Liz graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Berkeley. Follow her on Twitter @lizhagelthorn.