Alex Taub, a longtime founder with a number of exits below his belt, believes it’s time to disrupt the meme trade.
“I have this big thesis that meme tech is going to be the next big category,” Taub advised TechCrunch. “Like, there’s health tech, there’s proptech, there’s adtech, there’s fintech… I think meme tech is about to have a big moment.”
Taub would possibly sound like he’s spent a bit an excessive amount of time within the trenches of the content material mines. However he has a degree. If you wish to ship your buddy the right SpongeBob meme, what are you speculated to do? Google “mr krabs confused meme”? Memes are a key element of our on-line communications — from boomers posting minions to gen alpha posting about bathrooms — and but few corporations have tried to do something new.
To be clear, tech innovation isn’t at all times good or obligatory. Nobody must personal a good fridge, or for that matter, a Humane Ai pin. However there’s been nearly no innovation in how we set up and share memes for greater than a decade: On Tumblr in 2009, it was frequent follow to have a response gif folder in your laptop desktop; now, essentially the most organized amongst us have meme folders on our telephones. It’s principally the identical factor. Equally, although your iPhone can rapidly catalog your entire photos of a cat named Plover, iPhones don’t know who Mr. Krabs is, leaving a bit to be desired by way of meme effectivity.
“If you think of what meme tech really is right now, it’s essentially Giphy, but it got acquired by Facebook, and then got sort of shuttered off to Shutterstock. There’s some OG companies like Know Your Meme and Cheezburger, but those companies are actually media companies,” Taub stated. “I ended up realizing there’s an opportunity here for meme management.”
On Wednesday, Taub launched Meme Depot, which he aspires to construct right into a complete archive of any meme conceivable.
“You have collections, which are like subreddits, visually,” he explains. In case you’re searching for a Kim Kardashian meme, for instance, there can be a Kim Kardashian assortment which you could navigate to. “And visually, they’re very easy to look through, like Pinterest.”
That’s all nicely and good, however corporations have to become profitable. Right here’s the place Taub would possibly lose folks: The enterprise mannequin revolves round crypto.
“I’ve been in crypto in one way or another the last 12 years, and I think it’s very misunderstood in terms of the speculation and the bad actors, but it’s also just a new way to reimagine the internet,” he stated.
Impressed by Buddy.tech, Meme Depot has a function known as meme celebration, which turns particular meme classes into communities. Utilizing cryptocurrency, customers should buy depot passes to affix the meme celebration, which is principally simply an ephemeral, cursor-based chat. However for individuals who don’t need something to do with crypto, it’s not essential to pay cash or open a crypto pockets to interact with Meme Depot in any means. It permits early move holders of a meme assortment to earn a bit of cash as extra folks be part of it.
Taub is nicely conscious that this tactic might spark debate.
“There’s a lot of controversy about like, who is allowed to monetize memes? Is it the creator of the meme, is it the person in the meme?” he stated. “If this takes off the way I think it will, we might add a new wrinkle to this, which is a good thing. You want people to talk about it.”
These identical questions had been raised throughout the NFT increase of 2021, when the themes of viral memes like Scumbag Steve, Catastrophe Woman and Overly Hooked up Girlfriend bought their iconic photos as NFTs. This was usually the primary time that these folks earned any cash for being the topic of viral memes — Catastrophe Woman, now in her twenties, earned the equal of $500,000 in ETH on the time, although that would have depreciated considerably relying on what she did with the cryptocurrency.
Then there are memes like Pepe the Frog, which advanced from an harmless cartoon to an alt-right image, and again once more to a Twitch emote and crypto meme. When a picture is so divorced from its origin, it might belong extra so to the general public than its unique creator.
“People can monetize the community around the meme without monetizing the meme itself,” Taub stated.
Meme Depot is a part of Reality Arts, which operates with a mix of enterprise funding, royalties from the Goblintown NFT assortment and cash from promoting previous ventures like SocialRank, a social media analytics firm. For some business-minded folks, the query might persist: why memes?
Taub’s reply is straightforward: “Memes are culture, and culture is entertainment.”
Up to date, 5/29/24, 1:20 p.m. ET with clarification on the character of Meme Depot’s funding.
