Memes Are Mainstream: Turning Lulz Into Dollars

Photo via Shervin Pishevar

Founders of Chatroulette, 4Chan, Dailybooth walked into a conference ...

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4chan founder moot's triumphant stroll down the hallways of New York's TechCrunch Disrupt conference flanked by a model-esque female is a sign of times. Since when do the /b/tards (the name refers to users of the popular 4chan message board /b/) get to bang the prom queen? 

Since they've started to get in bed with investors like Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen, basically. And it's a short matter of time before legitimate brands seeking to widen their audience and target the web savvy viewers of sites like Daily Booth, Chatroulette and 4Chan court these platforms as well.

Moot, a.k.a Christopher Poole, came out of the proverbial nerd basement as Time's Most Influential Person of 2009 and is now attempting to turn doing it for the lulz into doing it for the dollars. Both Poole, Chatroulette's Andrey Ternovskiy and Daily Booth's Brian Pokorny took the stage alongside General Electric's Judy Hu at Disrupt on Tuesday to discuss how advertising against what most people consider "crap" Internet content is possible, namely because user-generated sites appeal to the ever-desirable youth market.

"Brands have to loosen up because we can't guarantee that your content won't be up against something offensive," Poole explained. While the idea of an ad for laxatives running against "Goatse" or any ice cream purveyor wanting to be seen next to "Two Girls One Cup" is still jarring, it's easier to conceive of more safe-for-work fare like "David after the Dentist" brought to you by AquaFresh toothpaste, especially since David's Dad has already attempted to cash in on the virality of the YouTube hit himself.

GE's Hu agreed with Poole: "The successful companies of the future are the ones willing to open their boundaries." If you can advertise against journalistic reporting on memes, or even tweets about memes, then why not the memes themselves?

Andrey Ternovskiy, founder of the cult hit website Chatroulette, took the mainstreaming of Internet culture a step further and hypothesized a day where you could visit CNN.com and Chatroulette with a fellow reader. "More and more people are living on the Internet, basically."

So should GE advertise on Chatroulette, a site most notable for frequent crotch shots?

"If done properly, why not?" Ternovskiy said.

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