Stock Photography Gone Viral, As Memes
The glorious failed attempts at looking relatable is exactly what makes a stock photo meme worthy. If you search hard enough depictions of certain stereotypes, like women laughing alone with salad, or situations that just don’t make any sense, can be commonly found on the top stock photo websites.
Thanks to remix culture (and /r/youdontsurf) we can caption, share or discover the stock photos that have the potential to go viral as a hilarious meme.
According to WhereOnThe.Net this image has appeared on 71 websites and 309 unique pages.
Here are some of the Internet’s most beloved and viral stock photographs… turned memes.
Hide The Pain Harold
He is a personal favorite. The eyes just say it all. In 2009 a series of this nameless model was posted to Facepunch.com and he has been known as Hide The Pain Harold ever since.
When Nyul posted the images to be used stock photography on major stock photo sites he probably didn’t realise that Harold, AKA Maurice, would take the Internet by storm.
It was only last July that this image of Harold at his computer got it’s jump in popularity. He seems to still be pretty niche and you’ll mostly find that painful grimace on the top meme websites, like Know Your Meme or Reddit.
Since first appearing in March 2013, this is how it has spread online:
What will 2016 have in store for Hide the Pain Harold? Will he finally be rid of that internalized angst through his Internet fame?
First Day On The Internet Kid
This kid’s enthusiasm is what got him loads of recognition from meme communities. The jovial Internet explorer gained his popularity around October 2012 and since then has accumulated over 5,200 occurrences on the net to date.
Distribution of First Day Of The Kid per website has looked a little like this:
This photo and variations were originally posted to several stock photo sites (like Shutterstock, Dreamstime and iStockphoto) by photographer, Piotr Rzeszutek. Oddly, this meme now has some traction on a handful of music related web forums.
Grandma Finds The Internet
It seems as if obliviousness when using the Internet is the right formula for a hilarious stock photo meme. This senior surfer has made over 13,000 appearances on the web since this image was originally uploaded to Corbis photography site in 2005.
Since then this is how it has spread online:
Like First Day On The Internet Kid, the innocent explorer appears on a variety of sites. WhereOnThe.Net showed that this meme was once used by a Stack Exchange user, Paulo Cereda, to advise a fellow user on what would be the best way to go about explaining latex to a grandmother.
Lazy College Senior
Not all stock photography is lame. Stock photos can even represent certain shared experiences. There’s no other meme that encapsulates the lack of motivation in that last year of college quite like Lazy College Senior. According to Know Your Meme the photo is originally from the stock photo site, Photos.com but has since been removed.
According to Know Your Meme, the earliest appearances of this meme online date back to 2008 on sites like Imgur and Quickmeme. Yet this high achiever didn’t go viral until four years later. Now he appears mostly on sites with massive college age audiences. Imgur’s Meme Generator has the most usage with around 600 out of 6,500 occurrences to date.
Unhelpful High School Teacher
Originally posted to Corbis, this friendly looking person has been used as the subject of a the popular Unhelpful High School Teacher meme.
Although some educational sites seem to use this image, it appears mostly on 9gag and Imgur. For the Internet she embodies the annoying teacher you once had in grade school who obviously hated kids. 9,000 plus copies circulated around the web which probably means a lot of other people had one too.
Got a favorite stock photo meme you’d like to learn more about? Find out where it is and where it’s been with WhereOnThe.Net.
WhereOnThe.Net traces how images spread online. Whether you want to find copies of your own work or track viral images, we crawl the Internet and show you all the sites it has appeared on and it’s growth over time.
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