They gather every year at ROFLCon:
Laura June, who attended the conference, catches up with the everyday people responsible for our biggest memes:
Many of the attendees whom I spoke to, once I talked to them long enough, mentioned that they weren’t really better off financially than they had been before creating whatever they created, or becoming a meme, or finding their little corner of celebrity. The problem with this model is not that the subjects of our internet culture aren’t profiting enough off of them: it’s that literally everyone else is.
The companies who make ads to sell their phones, the massive websites which post them and sell highly profitable ads against them, the makers who create Nyan Cat scarves. These are often highly successful ventures with massive corporate structures behind them. Entire websites find their bread and butter in posting endless variations of Chuck Testa images, and it’s not just highly criticized sites like I Can Has Cheezburger; even CNN routinely gets in on the game these days. Chuck himself, is in many ways, a cash cow for plenty of websites, but he’s still running his taxidermy business, and told me flat out that he is "broke."
Christine Erickson examines child stars in the meme world, including Sammy, aka Success Kid:
When asked what the best part of being famous was, he responded, “When I was a baby, I was putting sand in my mouth, and then I was famous — and that’s why I was born.”
(Video via Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg)
The Dish 