Quickmeme

Confirmed 91,179

About

Quickmeme is an image captioning website that hosts galleries of advice animals and other user-submitted image macros. In June of 2013, the site was banned from the social news community Reddit for alleged vote manipulation.

History

In 2007, the website company Miltz Media was founded by brothers Stephen and Wayne Miltz, with their first site NCGolfers^[2] catered to golfing enthusiasts in North Carolina.Quickmeme was launched by Sprklab founder Shah Pavel Jamal in 2011 and later that same year, it was sold to Miltz Media^[3], a website company founded by brothers Stephen and Wayne Miltz. On June 24th, 2011, a Facebook^[4] page for the site was created, garnering more than 59,000 likes in the next two years. On April 25th, 2012, US News^[5] published an article about the Ridiculous Photogenic Guy advice animal series, which included an interview with Wayne Miltz who revealed that the site received much of its traffic from Facebook, Reddit and Stumbleupon.

Features

The site allows users to upload template images that can be customized with superimposed captions in Impact font. Specific advice animals have their own gallery pages which can be sorted by creation date or popularity.

Controversies

Webtoid

In 2009, Miltz Media launched the social news site Webtoid, which functioned much like Reddit with a similar user interface (shown below). On February 12th, Redditor pizzatime submitted a post to the /r/WTF^[15] subreddit, accusing Webtoid of copying Reddit. Prior to being archived, the post gained over 1,700 up votes and 670 comments. As of June 2013, the site is no longer running.

Reddit Ban

On June 22nd, 2013, /r/AdviceAnimals subreddit moderator jokes_on_you announced^[7] that Quickmeme had been banned from Reddit with a Scumbag Steve image macro (shown below). In the comments section, jokes_on_you revealed that the owner of Quickmeme had become an /r/AdviceAnimals mod with the handle gtw08^[8] in June of 2011^[14] and had since begun using bots to down vote submissions from other websites. Additional evidence was provided in the comment section by former moderator ManWithoutModem, who shared screenshots arguing that someone had been using a vote bot to downvote any submissions that did not come from Quickmeme.

In his comment, ManWithoutModem noted that he had removed gtw08's mod powers in March^[9] after suspecting that he had a connection to Quickmeme. When other moderators learned ManWithoutModem had continued to investigate the situation in the days leading up to the ban, they removed his moderator powers as well.^[10] As of June 24th, 2013, his powers have not been restored. The following day, Reddit bot qkme_transcriber issued a statement^[11] via its personal subreddit making it clear that the creator of the bot had no affiliation with Quickmeme and does not condone gaming Reddit. The same day, the Daily Dot^[12] reported on the story, noting that Quickmeme had removed all links to Reddit across their site. Quickmeme briefly addressed the situation on their Tumblr blog^[13], but the post has since been taken down. Though many fans have been commenting on the ban on Quickmeme's Facebook fan page^[4], the site has not responded or posted since June 21st.

Traffic

According to Sprklab founder Shah Pavel Jamal, Quickmeme was receiving five million visits per month within three months of launch. In April of 2012, Wayne Miltz revealed that the site was bringing in almost 70 million unique visitors per month.^[5] As of June 2013, Quickmeme has an Alexa^[6] global rank of 836 and a rank of 270 in the United States.