

The setting of the video is Ky is seen walking to a supermarket, picking up a bottle of Smirnoff vodka. The first video was uploaded on September 20, 2018, titled "1.

There are outlets expressing sympathy and support, while others were skeptical and claimed the videos were intended to be manipulative. In these videos, he explains his psychological suffering and visible mental breakdowns, due to excessive harassment and vitriol. Subsequently, he began to upload venting videos. After 4 days, he also made another video expressing his grief over the death of Stefan Karl. On May 18, 2018, Behind the Meme uploaded a video titled "What happened to Behind The Meme? Note To Self" after 4-month hiatus. In a video titled “My Take on CowbellyTV”, EmpLemon states that he thinks BTM’s channel collapsed because “People finally realized him for what he really was, a fraud.”, and “BTM lost something that would be hard to get back, which is credibility.” Many people largely credit videos by EmpLemon and Pyrocynical, although people also site the Fantano controversy. On August 19th, 2017, Pyrocynical uploaded the video titled “BEHIND THE MEME MUST BE STOPPED”, stating many of the similar criticism that EmpLemon has stated and criticizing BTM for using filler to stretch his videos to the 10-minute mark.Īs a result of this criticism, Behind The Meme’s channel growth has been virtually nullified, with many channel views falling from 800,000 to under 100,000, and subscriber rate to just under 100 per day, with many people also unsubscribing as of April 2018. The video was greeted with decent reception. In the video, EmpLemon criticizes Behind The Meme for having dull content, and for acting childish towards criticism in ways such as having his mother react to a critic.

On May 25, 2017, a video was uploaded titled “MEME Theory: Why Behind The Meme is Ruining the Memescape as we Know It” by EmpLemon. He is also criticized for the excessive usage of GIFs in every video.Īfter 2017, the spike of criticism of his channel increased in hate comments and dislikes relative to suggestions for topics and likes over the past year for the majority, but not all, of his videos. As a result, to critics, his content is perceived as very forced and manufactured. He is criticized for a perceived lack of effort into each video, and for keeping the repetitive formula for every single video. His steadily-increasing use of sources such as Know Your Meme and Wikipedia has caused people to criticize the point and say that "his channel is for lazy people who can't be bothered looking things up themselves" and similar criticism. He is also criticized for the way he produces his videos. They claim that this constant oversaturation of memes by his fans tends to result in the meme deteriorating in substance faster than it would normally without Behind the Meme. This, by critics, results in his viewers oversaturating the specific meme due to being misinformed by Behind the Meme. Many of his critics, predominantly large YouTubers, claim that the way he consistently puts misinformation in his videos and incorrectly explains internet memes results in Behind the Meme's viewers being "poorly informed" about memes. Eventually, in less than a year he gained about 700,000 subscribers.īehind the Meme has met with mixed to negative critical reception by critics, directly criticized for antiquating internet memes, and is usually called buzzwords like "cancer" or "normie" due this his poor documentation of the internet memes and the humor utilized within videos.

The reason for his rapid subscriber growth during the first year of his channel is because the videos were created at the right place and at the right time, as memes in 2016 were more popular than ever and the topic was too interesting to not show. Even to this day, he still uses the same formula for each video. Behind The Meme started uploading content the same day it was created and in less than a month, the channel already had about 50,000 subscribers.
