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 memetech is going to be the next big category,” Taub instructed TechCrunch. “Like, there’s healthtech, there’s proptech, there’s adtech, there’s fintech… I think memetech is about to have a big moment.”
Taub may sound like he’s spent a bit an excessive amount of time within the trenches of the content material mines. But he has some extent. If you need to ship your buddy the proper Spongebob meme, what are you purported 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 bogs – and but few corporations have tried to do something new.
To be clear, tech innovation isn’t at all times good or essential. No one must personal a wise fridge, or for that matter, a Humane AI pin. But there’s been virtually no innovation in how we arrange and share memes for greater than a decade: On Tumblr in 2009, it was frequent observe to have a response gif folder in your pc desktop; now, probably the most organized amongst us have meme folders on our telephones. It’s principally the identical factor. Similarly, though your iPhone can rapidly catalog your entire footage 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 memetech 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. If you’re in search of a Kim Kardashian meme, for instance, there could be a Kim Kardashian assortment you could navigate to. “And visually, they’re very easy to look through, like Pinterest.”
That’s all effectively and good, however corporations have to generate income. Here’s the place Taub may lose folks: the enterprise mannequin revolves round crypto.
“I’ve been in crypto in one way or another in 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.
Inspired by Friend.tech, meme depot has a function referred to as meme get together, which turns particular meme classes into communities. Using cryptocurrency, customers can purchase depot passes to hitch the meme get together, which is principally simply an ephemeral, cursor-based chat. But for individuals who don’t need something to do with crypto, it’s not essential to pay cash or open a crypto pockets to have interaction with Meme Depot in any approach. It permits early cross holders of a meme assortment to earn a bit of cash as extra folks be part of it.
Taub is effectively 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 through the NFT growth of 2021, when the themes of viral memes like Scumbag Steve, Disaster Girl and Overly Attached Girlfriend bought their iconic pictures as NFTs. This was usually the primary time that these folks earned any cash for being the topic of viral memes – Disaster Girl, now in her twenties, earned the equal of $500,000 in ETH on the time, although that might have depreciated considerably relying on what she did with the cryptocurrency.
