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You’ve thought of a hilarious joke, wrapped it in precisely casual internet slang, and slapped it in blocky white font over a poignant picture. You post it and sit back to watch the likes roll in, but they never come. Meanwhile, other memes are taking off. They’re launching careers in comedy and becoming the not-so-secret weapon of presidential campaigns. Billionaires are investing in meme farms and someone calling themself “Roaring Kitty” has become a millionaire on the back of meme stocks.
Internet memes are undeniably a cultural and political force to be reckoned with and as their influence has grown a burgeoning field of research has sprung up to understand them. For this Giz Asks, we asked several experts: Why do some memes go viral and is it possible to predict that virality?
Cici Ling
Professor at Indiana University studying online abusive behavior and co-author of the paper “Dissecting the Meme Magic: Understanding Indicators of Virality in Image Memes.”
The short answer is: It is complicated.
The first question we should ask is: how do you define a meme? A “cut-and-paste” catchphrase? An image? Or a video clip? As a meme scholar, I take a closer look at what really goes into creating the perfect meme moment. Focusing on image memes, I examine everything from the images themselves to the emotions they stir up, giving us a roadmap to the mysterious art and science behind memes.
First of all, let’s talk visuals. Memes that zoom in on a subject—whether it’s a close-up of a face or an absurd object—tend to get more engagement. People scrolling through feeds are drawn in by the immediacy of a close-up. It’s like a visual shortcut to grabbing attention. That said, a meme that is visually tidy and well-composed (yes, memes have aesthetics too) has the bonus of catching eyes and holding attention long enough to get a share.
Then there is the subject. Familiar faces, characters, or situations attract more views. My study found that memes featuring people or characters expressing clear emotions—whether positive or negative—are much more likely to spread. The internet loves a good reaction, and memes capture those reactions in ways that are relatable, weirdly intimate, and instantly shareable. It’s like the meme equivalent of a good punchline: everyone can laugh along because they get it.
Now, here is where things get a little tricky. A meme’s relatability plays a big part in its viral potential. Some memes are basically inside jokes for the internet—if you don’t get the reference, it might just pass you by. But when a meme taps into something nearly everyone can recognize, like a universal annoyance or simple truth, it’s much more likely to explode. The more relatable the meme, the broader its appeal, and the greater its chances of going viral.
However, in my research on viral videos posted on TikTok, we found that in addition to the indicators above, timing also influences virality. It is almost like memes have a “viral window,” and hitting it just right can make all the difference. Influencers also play a major role, often determining the life or death of virality.
As for predicting virality, it’s possible but still challenging. I trained machine learning models to analyze meme indicators, and the model could predict which memes were more likely to go viral with relatively high accuracy. The models cannot be perfect, but it almost feels like having a digital crystal ball for spotting what’s going to trend online. These indicators can provide valuable clues for creators, marketers, and even internet platforms looking to anticipate the next viral hit.
At the end of the day, while we are a long way from fully dissecting the magic behind viral memes, I hope my studies provide a good starting point. The perfect meme recipe is still a mystery, but certain ingredients like composition, subject, and relatability are essential. With short videos, however, timing and influencer presence play an even bigger role in virality. So, the next time you see a meme blowing up your feed, remember there’s more to it than luck—there’s some serious meme science at play.
Sulafa Zidani
Professor of communications studies at Northwestern University and author of the upcoming book All Your Meme Are Belong To Us: Internet Cultures in the Global South.
A successful meme has an element of surprise while being fully aligned with the current moment. These might sound contradictory. But the humor of popular memes often relies on the unexpected, on combining cultural elements that feel incongruous. Yet, somehow, mixing these elements communicates their commentary or jokes in a very clear manner. In addition, memes tend to circulate more when they are relevant to current debates or events in the public sphere.
Research on popular memes has shown that they often contain content that is funny, simple, surprising, and highly relatable. This is why content that includes ordinary people (or celebrities in ordinary situations) and/or universal situations (like “that moment when” memes) tends to circulate widely.
Meme makers that I interviewed for my own research have told me that when they create a meme, they are usually trying to say something with it; to tell a joke, make a point, or express an opinion. To do this successfully, they always pay attention to current events (such as political, cultural, or other news related events), popular cultural production (like what music, TV shows, or movies are popular among which crowds), as well as their target audience (what they are interested in). A key priority for meme creators is to ensure that their content is relevant to their target audience. With a larger target audience, there is more potential for content to go viral. However, it can be more challenging to determine what is interesting and relevant to a broader audience. As such, meme makers must keep their finger on the pulse of their audience, meaning that they must constantly pay attention to the affective state of the people whose attention they are trying to attract. That helps them determine what to post and when to post it to achieve the desired level of engagement and potential viral circulation.
Can we predict memes going viral? Yes. The meme makers I spoke with could often predict which content of theirs was more likely to get more visibility and circulation. Although, given that the element of surprise is so important in meme culture, we cannot predict their vitality perfectly. Meme creators and audiences can sometimes be unpredictable in their innovation and humor.
Notably, we must keep in mind that going viral is not always meme makers’ goal. I spoke with many meme makers who did not want their content to go viral. Their goal was to communicate with a very specific target audience. Their measure of a meme being successful, then, was not according to the number of likes or shares. Rather, it was about who is it that is liking and sharing their content.
Ryan Milner
Chair of the Department of Communication at the College of Charleston, whose internet culture research examines everything from funny GIFS to large-scale propaganda campaigns.
Most simply, memes go viral when they resonate with a lot of people all at once. So those lots of people end up sharing with lots of other people who do their own sharing until the meme flairs and crackles like a fountain sparkler firework. Eventually, the interest fizzles; everybody’s seen it, and they move on to the next thing; the viral spark fades to embers.
A few factors help a meme burn brighter faster. First is some kind of emotional valence. Humor inspires us to share because we want to give others a laugh or put something funny in our feed. Outrage works just as well, maybe better, because we want to scream at the injustice or fact-check the problem (be wary of quoting something just to yell at it—you’re helping it go viral). Sentiment, sadness, and even lust, depending on the platform, can all drive clicks.
Timeliness also helps, connecting a meme to a moment people are already thinking about. Content can be timed to the calendar (hence all the pumpkin spice posts in October), a shared cultural moment (like an Olympic opening ceremony), or a current event (lots to say about presidential cabinet appointments right now).
Last, even in an age with a phone in every pocket, prominent figures with big audiences do a lot. Content can sit in obscurity until someone with millions of followers shares it. Spotlighting something on a morning talk show can push it to new people who are less chronically online. Thought leaders and influencers, for better or worse, can light a fuse.
These factors might be a playbook, but they’re not a blueprint. Even with everything we know, we can’t easily predict what will take off. Unless I’m unaware of some secret cabal seeding campaigns with certainty, I see more mixed results than surefire successes from media professionals. I see more post hoc analysis from academics than clear foresight. Audiences are fickle, and the zeitgeist is spry, so we can’t call a winner beforehand.
Our current media environment makes predicting virality even harder than a decade ago. We’re increasingly distributed, and our content depends more heavily on algorithmic recommendations. My students might tell me that “everybody” is talking about something on TikTok. Even if that “everybody” is tens of millions of people, I’m being served up an entirely different For You Page than my students. If I ever end up seeing their video of the day, it will likely be noticeably later, on another platform like Reddit. By then, I’ll be looking at embers instead of a viral fountain of sparks.
Nirvana Tanoukhi
Professor of literature and creative writing at Dartmouth University and creator of the first college course on the rise of meme culture.
If you take an unbiased look at memes as aesthetic objects, by which I mean artifacts put together to produce a response in those who consume them and share them with other consumers, then the virality of a meme is no more predictable than the virality of a song, poem, or novel. Because we are readier to think of the latter as “artworks” (than we think of memes) we think of their success (in the event that they do garner success) in terms of popularity (as opposed to virality) and think of that success as something that cannot really be predicted with certainty but as something that is discovered after the artwork have been put to the test of the consumers’ tastes.
The question is why we *don’t* think of memes in the same way, as artifacts whose success we can speculate about, and have fun doing so, but cannot really predict. The difference has to do, I think, with a number of things, including: the fact that the response to memes is clearly affective and not just interpretive; that the consumption and transmission of memes is fast; and that, in the social media that house memes, there are taste brokers who can influence the popularity of a meme or meme format. But all of that would apply to a song. In other words, the more interesting question is why the question of the predictability of a meme’s success is considered so different. I think it’s because, again since we don’t think of memes as “aesthetic objects,” we never ask: What is a good meme?
