Bored Panda got in touch with Elias Bishop who helps manage mine.ig and he was kind enough to share more about their story. “In August 2013, our founder Brent Rose started growing his Instagram empire at 16. Meme.ig was originally called "timed.perfection" which focused heavily on satisfying and slow-motion videos.”

Eventually, the page reached its plateaux in terms of growth and Brent made the executive decision to completely rebrand the network to focus on memes, as "Meme Culture" became incredibly popular around 2018 on Instagram.” Frequent readers have no doubt noticed the explosion of meme pages around this era. 

“In 2020, meme.ig was hit with just under a dozen copyright violations from various third-party licensing companies, which completely halted operations for nearly half a year. During this time, the page not only lost hundreds of thousands of followers but was also completely inactive in terms of uploads. It was at this time that the meme mogul Jerry Media invested into our company, assisting us on the legal side in exchange for equity in our company.”

Naturally, we also wanted to hear what they thought made the meme.ig formula a winning one, as there is a whole host of meme pages out there, but few are as big. “At the end of the day, short-form content such as Instagram and TikTok will always be a great way to unwind. In a world where essentially everything on the news is negative, it's a breath of fresh air to sit down and look at stuff (like memes) that are light-hearted and completely unserious.”

“Additionally, on meme.ig specifically, we post daily news alongside memes, but strictly fun news, or wholesome news. We never post anything political, controversial, or biased in terms of news content, and I know this resonates incredibly with our audience,” he shared with Bored Panda. 

Seeing as meme.ig has millions of followers, we wanted to hear a bit more about how they select content. “As mentioned above, we have a basic criteria of no politics, no controversial subjects, (wars, elections, activism), and no bias. Besides these basic fundamentals, our team dedicates a lot of time searching the internet to curate our daily content.”

“Key things to look for are Videos that performed exceptionally on TikTok, offbeat stories in the news, or even trends, "fads" happening on other platforms. At the end of the day, each meme page is different in terms of audience. The senior people on our team like myself and Brent can essentially look at a piece of content and tell you with a high level of certainty whether or not it will do well in the Instagram algorithm, and that simply comes with experience.”

“I think it's important for people to realize whether or not they like memes, they are changing how business works worldwide. In a study from 2023, over 60% of people said they would be more likely to buy from a company that uses memes in their marketing campaign, and the CTR (Click Through Rate) of a meme campaign is 14% higher than your typical email marketing campaign,” he shared. 

Elias left us with some parting thoughts. “I think growing a cult following and making memes around your product or service is the key to having a successful company in 2024,” he shared. After all, in this day and age, you can find memes covering any topic, from the law to generational humor.