Alex Taub, a longtime founder with multiple exits behind him, believes it’s time to disrupt the meme industry.
“I have this big thesis that meme tech is going to be the next big category,” Taub told TechCrunch. “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 may sound like he’s spent too much time in the trenches of content mines. But he has a point. What should you do if you want to send your friend the perfect SpongeBob meme? Google “Mr. Krabs Confused Meme”? Memes are a key component of our online communications—from boomers posting minions to gen alphas posting about toilets—yet few companies have attempted to do anything new.
To be clear, technological innovation is not always good or necessary. No one should own a smart fridge or for that matter a Humane Ai pin. But there’s been little to no innovation in the way we’ve been organizing and sharing memes for more than a decade: On Tumblr in 2009, it was common practice to have a folder of gif reactions on your computer desktop; now the most organized among us have folders of memes on our phones. It’s basically the same thing. Likewise, while your iPhone can quickly catalog all of your pictures of a cat named Plover, iPhones don’t know who Mr. Krabs is, leaving a little to be desired in terms of meme effectiveness.
“If you think about what meme technology really is right now, it’s basically Giphy, but it was acquired by Facebook and then kind of closed off to Shutterstock. There are some OG companies like Know Your Meme and Cheezburger, but those companies are actually media companies,” Taub said. “Finally realized there’s a meme management option here.”
On Wednesday, Taub launched Meme Depot, which he aims to build into a comprehensive archive of every meme imaginable.
“You have collections that are like subreddits, visually,” he explains. If you’re looking for a Kim Kardashian meme, for example, there will be a Kim Kardashian collection that you can navigate to. “And visually, they’re very easy to browse, like Pinterest.”
That’s all well and good, but companies need to make money. Here’s where Taub could lose people: The business model revolves around crypto.
“I’ve been in crypto in one way or another for the last 12 years and I think it’s very misunderstood in terms of speculation and bad actors, but it’s also just a new way of reimagining the internet,” he said.
Inspired by Friend.tech, Meme Depot has a feature called meme party that turns certain categories of memes into communities. Using cryptocurrency, users can buy depot passes to join the meme party, which is actually just an ephemeral cursor-based chat. But for people who want nothing to do with crypto, there is no need to pay money or open a crypto wallet to engage with Meme Depot in any way. It allows early access meme collection owners to earn some money as more people join it.
Taub is aware that this tactic can spark debate.
“There’s a lot of debate about who has the right to monetize memes? Is it the creator of the meme, is it the person in the meme?” he said. “If it goes the way I think it will, we might add another wrinkle to what’s good. You want people to talk about it.
These same questions were raised during the NFT boom of 2021, when viral meme entities such as Scumbag Steve, Disaster Girl, and Overly Attached Girlfriend were selling their iconic images as NFTs. It was often the first time these people made money for being the subject of viral memes – Disaster Girl, now in her twenties, earned the equivalent of $500,000 in ETH at the time, although that could have depreciated significantly depending on what you were doing with the cryptocurrency.
Then there are memes like Pepe the Frog, which evolved from an innocent cartoon to an alt-right symbol and back to a Twitch emote and crypto meme. When an image is so detached from its origins, it can belong more to the audience than to its original creator.
“People can monetize the community around the meme without monetizing the meme itself,” Taub said.
Meme Depot is part of Truth Arts, which operates on a mix of venture funding, royalties from the Goblintown NFT collection, and money from the sale of past ventures like SocialRank, a social media analytics company. For some business-minded people, the question may remain: why memes?
Taub’s answer is simple: “Memes are culture, and culture is entertainment.”
Updated 5/29/24 1:20 PM ET with clarification on the nature of Meme Depot’s funding.
