Should meme creation be considered part of the creator economy?
To answer this question, we need to understand the creator economy. Yuanling Yuan and Josh Constine at Signalfire.com defined the creator economy "as the class of businesses built by over 50 million independent content creators, curators, and community builders including social media influencers, bloggers, and videographers, plus the software and finance tools designed to help them with growth and monetization".
Memes are the language of the internet. If copywriters, bloggers, etc., are considered part of the creator economy, then meme creators are also. Social media would cease to exist and would not be as effective if it wasn't for memes. One could argue that memes should get moved to the top of the food chain in terms of importance on the internet. We do not speak in text. We speak in memes.
Max Kraynov of Forbes magazine published an article highlighting how brands have incorporated memes into their marketing business.
According to Max, "Memes help brands reach a younger audience, provide low-cost marketing, increase social media engagement, help brands stand out, build brand loyalty, encourage team building, assist with internal communications and break up monotonous tasks."
It's simple. If you want attention, memes must be part of your strategy.
As noted by Hanna Kahlert of midiaresearch.com, "the simplicity of memes makes them easy to make and easy to share"
The sharing of memes' simplicity also makes it hard for the original creator to get any notoriety or recognition. In 2022 memes are still the Rodney Dangerfield of the internet ecosystem.
The technological breakthrough of web3 has spawned NFTs and tokenomics. NFTs have provided a different way for meme creators to capitalize, as meme creators can sell their memes as NFTs. Platforms such as Opensea.io and the newly launched Underworldpics.io allow creators to list memes as an NFT. Underworldpics rewards meme creators with the platform native token(UWP) just for creating content. Create a meme, and receive some UWP tokens.
On Tech Twitter, there is a debate about whether HTML is a programming language, python or javascript, and framework debates between Vue or React. No one debates the build stack for meme creation. Memes are the dogecoin of the digital ecosystem. But as more brands and corporations understand the language of the internet, memes and meme creators, in particular, will get the last laugh.