Alex Tauba long-time founder with many exits under his belt, he thinks it’s time to disrupt the meme industry.
“I have this big thesis that meme technology is going to be the next big category,” Taub told TechCrunch. “Like, there’s health tech, there’s proptech, there’s adtech, there’s fintech… I think meme tech is going to have a big moment.”
Taub may sound like he’s spent a lot of time in the content mining trenches. But he has a point. If you want to send your friend the perfect SpongeBob meme, what should you do? Google “Mr krabs confused meme”? Memes are a staple of our online communications — from boomers posting minions in gen alpha post about it Bathrooms — and yet few companies have attempted to do anything new.
To be clear, technological innovation is not always good or necessary. No one needs to own a smart fridge, or for that matter, a Humane Ai pin. But there’s been almost no innovation in how memes are organized and shared for more than a decade: On Tumblr in 2009, it was common practice to have a folder of reaction gifs on your computer desktop. Now, the more organized among us have meme folders on our phones. It’s basically the same thing. Likewise, even though your iPhone can quickly capture all of your photos of a cat named Plover, iPhones don’t know who Mr. Krabs is, leaving little to be desired in terms of meme effectiveness.
“If you think about what meme technology really is right now, it’s essentially Giphy, but it was acquired by Facebook and then kind of folded into Shutterstock. There are some OG companies like Know Your Meme and cheeseburger, but these companies are actually media companies,” Taub said. “I ended up realizing that there’s an opportunity here for meme management.”
On Wednesday, Taub launched Meme Depotwhich aspires to build into a comprehensive archive of any meme imaginable.
“You have collections, which are like subreddits, visually,” he explains. If you’re looking for a Kim Kardashian meme, for example, there will be a Kim Kardashian gallery that you can navigate through. “And visually, they’re very easy to see, like Pinterest.”
This is all well and good, but companies need to make money. Here’s where Taub might lose people: The business model revolves around crypto.
“I’ve been in crypto in one form 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 to rethink the internet,” he said.
Inspired by Friend.tech, Meme Depot has a feature called meme party, which turns specific categories of memes into communities. Using cryptocurrency, users can purchase warehouse cards to join the meme party, which is essentially just an ephemeral cursor-based chat. But for people who want nothing to do with crypto, it is not necessary to pay money or open a crypto wallet to engage with Meme Depot in any way. It allows early pass holders of a meme collection to earn a little money as more people join it.
Taub is well aware that this tactic could spark debate.
“There’s a lot of controversy about, who is allowed to monetize memes? Is it the creator of the meme, is it the person in the meme?’ he said. “If this takes off the way I think it will, we might add a new wrinkle to it, which is good. You want people to talk about it.”
These same questions were asked during the NFT boom of 2021, when the topics of viral memes like Scumbag Steve, Disaster girl and Overly attached girlfriend they sold their iconic images as NFTs. This 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, though it could have been significantly undervalued depending on what did he do 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 cryptomime. When an image is so divorced from its origins, it could belong more to the public 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, rights from Goblintown Collection of NFTs and money from the sale of previous ventures such as SocialRank, a social media analytics company. For some entrepreneurs, the question may remain: why memes?
Taub’s answer is simple: “Memes are culture and culture is entertainment.”
Updated, 5/29/24, 1:20 p.m. ET with clarification on the nature of Meme Depot’s funding.
