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All Your Memes Are Belong To Us

When Richard Dawkins first introduced the term “meme” in his 1976 thesis on Evolutionism, The Selfish Gene, he probably had no idea of the future development of his notion. Today, memes aren’t so much associated with Genetics, as they are with Pop Culture and, more specifically, Internet Culture.

Zero Wing: "All your base are belong to us!"

In our day and age, memes are used interchangeably with a derivation of the term, namely Internet meme. Thus, memes came to be associated with the propagation of certain content amongst various members of the online community. Notable examples of such phenomena are All Your Base, Rickrolling or the O RLY Owls. Needless to say, with such high visibility, people will try and cash in on the phenomenon. Unsurprisingly, however, the people who are sucking big bucks out of Internet memes are rarely the ones who actually create the files.

The most recent success story involving Internet crazes is that of the Lolcats. Starting as an inside joke on 4chan – the birthing grounds for Internet memes – the Lolcats soon gained World Wide Web recognition with the help of two Honolulu residents, Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, who created a website dedicated to the Lolcats, icanhascheezburger.com – Google PR 7, mind you - also as an inside joke. But the joke caught on and, before they knew it, the creators started receiving offers with double figures from several investors to sell the website.

In 2008, Nakagawa and Unebasami sold the icanhascheezburger Website for a staggering $2 Million deal. Now going a bit beyond the social tragedy of a Grammatical holocaust turning into a Million Dollar deal, as well as the bitter irony of moot, the actual creator of the Lolcats, who didn’t get a penny out of the deal, one can not help but acknowledge the importance of memes for today’s web community. And, in terms of profitability, I think there is a lot to be said about marketing memes.

Alternative Rock band Weezer pioneered meme hijacking as a source of income in 2008, posting the video for their single, Pork and Beans on YouTube. Although melodically and lyrically mediocre, the clip featured a flurry of famous Internet memes, which assured its online popularity. In only 10 months, the clip already recorded a total number of 17294741 views – that’s 9 times the viewer ratio scored by one of the most celebrated Internet memes in history, All Your Base. After this gigantic success, Weezer “pulled a Napster” and made the video unavailable to the general audience, so people would buy the record. Apparently it worked.

With high profile success stories like the ones previously mentioned, along with merchandising hits, such as Joecartoon and the Chuck Norrris Facts, maybe it is time for Internet Marketers to consider Meme Marketing as part of their online campaigns. If we can all agree that celebrity testimonials work wonders for traditional Marketing, why shouldn’t Web Marketers start putting Internet celebs to work for them?

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