Profiting From Stolen Memes: Investigating The Strange World Of Meme-Browsing Apps

Have you ever typed “memes” into your phone's app store in a moment of boredom? If so, you’re not alone. A simple search for the term “memes” on Apple's App Store or Google Play shows thousands of results, with apps spanning multiple categories. We have meme games, meme-makers and tons of apps made specifically for browsing memes.

It’s these meme-browsing apps that piqued our curiosity — and the curiosity of many others based on the number of downloads some of them have. The most successful of these apps have hundreds of thousands of downloads and generally positive reviews (surprisingly). Clearly, something about these apps must be engaging, but what exactly makes them so appealing? What do they possibly have to offer that traditional social media doesn't?

In order to find out, we downloaded 10 of these free meme-browsing apps in search of answers, and what we found was more than a little concerning, to say the least.

What Are Meme-Browsing Apps?

If you're unfamiliar with such meme-oriented applications, you might be asking yourself, “So, these apps are like Instagram or something?” Well, as it turns out, not really.

These meme-browsing apps are free from any outside social media platforms. Instead, they serve as collections of specifically uploaded memes with promises of fresh, daily uploads. The interface is often similar to that of a social media feed – some of the apps even include lite social features such as commenting and liking – just without followable accounts, friends or any of the other stuff that makes social media social. Oftentimes, you can’t even upload your own memes to the apps, meaning you’re stuck browsing whatever the devs deem the “cream of the crop” from their external sources.

These apps are advertised to do one thing and one thing only — give you memes to laugh at. There’s nothing fancy going on here, and that’s reflected outright in the names of the apps. Some of the top meme-browsing apps have names like “Sarcasm Memes,” “Funny Quotes and Memes,” “iLaugh” and “Daily Memes Dose.” Who needs creativity, right?

The app tiles themselves often feature recognizable (or dead) memes, such as Pepe the Frog, Troll Face and the Trololo Guy hastily cut-and-pasted onto an array of colored backgrounds. When you open the apps up, you’re immediately greeted with a scrolling page full of memes. Some apps split these into categories, most have a “random” section, and others feature “trending” pages.

The idea is simple. Scroll through memes, favorite or save the ones you like and go on with your day. You get exactly what you'd expect when dealing with these apps, and that’s all well and good, but it’s everything else about them that raises a red flag.

The Problem With Meme-Browsing Apps

The first thing you’ll notice about meme-browsing apps is the ads. There are banner ads, random pop-ups while browsing, ads every time you expand or save a meme — you’ll probably spend more time looking at ads than you will actually looking at memes with most of these apps.

It becomes clear, very fast, that the developers’ intentions are to make money, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. The only problem is that they’re making money off stolen content with hardly an ounce of care put into the applications themselves. Every one of these apps allows you to pay a fee to remove the ads, but the fees can be downright outrageous. iLaugh, for example, charges $2.69 per month to remove the ads and lets you save infinite memes.

A hard crash is never far off, and most of the apps have buttons or features that simply don't work. The interfaces are bare-bones and clunky, they ask for a suspicious amount of device permissions, and from our experience, they’re simply not a fun time to browse. It may seem unfair to lump all of these meme-browsing apps together like this, but every single one tested suffered from the same general issues: too many ads, lots of stolen, low-quality memes with no credit and sub-par browsing experiences. There may be some technically "good" versions out there, but we certainly didn’t find any.

How Are The Memes?

The memes featured on these apps offer a mixture of cringe and dank, as you’d expect from a stolen meme repository. There are frequent hits and misses, but it would be unfair to say there aren’t some gems here and there. Again, though, it’s all stolen content riddled with ads.

You can easily find these same memes on just about any social media site, only there, you can give the memer some credit with a follow or like. The most curious of these apps are the ones without any upload options. It begs the question, "Where are these memes even coming from?"

I emailed the developer of iLaugh, a meme-browsing app boasting over 50,000 installs with a completely broken upload button, asking where the memes come from. They informed me that the memes used to be uploaded by one person, but a few months ago, they switched over to a meme scraping application.

Programmer Asjad Anis wrote an in-depth article about how such meme scraping works over at Medium, so you can check that out for a more technical explanation. Essentially, though, you can code a program that takes memes from any given webpage (r/ProgrammerHumor is used in Asjad’s example) and save them to your computer. This frees up a human from having to save tons of memes and upload them to their meme-browsing app. For private or archival use, this makes sense, but when it’s all about uploading the memes for profit, it becomes more questionable.

Should I Download Meme-Browsing Apps?

If you’re looking for a quick laugh, avoid social media like the plague, don’t care about meme thievery, don’t mind a constant barrage of ads and feel safe giving mysterious app developers a ton of phone permissions, then these meme-browsing apps might just be for you. For everyone else, though, it’s hard to recommend a single one of them.

At the end of the day, stealing memes is a part of the culture — just refer to the Instagram vs. /r/dankmemes War. It’s the whole reason original meme creators often watermark their creations in the first place. But seeing memes stolen so flagrantly for profit is hard to support. Even if you can get past that, the lack of care put into the user experience and the number of ads is a complete turn-off.

Check them out if you’re curious, but be warned — these apps are truly the bottom of the meme barrel.