Meme Archive is an evolving archive of Internet culture.
Every meme here has a first appearance, a moment it spread, a peak and, usually, a decline. The archive records those moments and draws them as a curve, so you can see how a joke lived and how it compares with the ones before and after it.
Start with what is trending now, walk through the years, or compare two memes on one chart.
Attention index is a monthly value from 0 to 100 on a single scale shared by the whole archive. Trend score is the same index for the latest month, and change compares it with the previous 90 days.
Status is worked out from those numbers, not chosen by hand:
Each meme is recorded as a handful of key dates — when it appeared, when it went viral, when it peaked and when it faded — and each of those dates is given an estimated level of attention. Those points are then joined into a smooth monthly curve that passes exactly through them, so the dated moments are the fixed part and the months in between are interpolated.
The scale runs from 0 to 100 and is shared by the whole archive: no meme is rescaled to its own maximum, so a peak of 90 means more attention than a peak of 70 and any two curves can be read side by side. What it measures is relative attention as the record describes it, not searches, views or posts.
Dates and descriptions come from public records, news coverage and the creators’ own posts, and are shown only as precisely as they can be checked: a year, a month or a day.
The popularity curves and every trend score are estimates. They are derived from those documented dates, not measured from searches or views. The archive is built so live sources can replace them later without changing a page.
The covers are original plates made for the archive from type and pattern. They are not the memes themselves. Each meme has a slot for a properly licensed image with its source, licence and credit, shown alongside it when one is added.