Four Memes, Four Shapes

What was compared, and how

Each meme is represented by one English Wikipedia article: All I Want for Christmas Is You for Mariah Carey, Rickrolling, Skibidi Toilet and Italian brainrot. The measure is the Wikimedia Pageviews API, daily reads by traffic classified as users, pulled on 3 November 2026. The Mariah and Rickroll series run from July 2015 to December 2025; Skibidi Toilet runs from August 2023 to October 2026 and Italian brainrot from April 2025 to October 2026.

That is a proxy, and the same proxy for all four: people reading an encyclopedia article. It is not video views, search interest or posting volume. The series differ in length, in when their article began, and in how long after the meme began, so every comparison below is between shapes, not between sizes. Counts are also not comparable across memes, because an article’s readership depends on how much it is linked and searched.

The four shapes at a glance

Scaled to its own highest month, each article draws a different picture. Mariah Carey’s is a comb: a spike every winter, with the base level between spikes rising from 2015 to 2023. The Rickroll’s is a floor with occasional sharp spikes. Skibidi Toilet’s is a rise, a plateau of about a year and a decline. Italian brainrot’s is a peak at the start and a fall.

The four can be named by what drives the return: a date (Mariah Carey), events (the Rickroll), a creator’s release schedule and the commerce around it (Skibidi Toilet), and the discovery of shareable parts (Italian brainrot).

Test 1: does one season hold the views?

The simplest test is the share of a year’s views that fall in a three-month window. For an even spread it would be about 25 percent. For the Mariah Carey article, the share falling in November to January was between 74 and 87 percent in every year from 2015 to 2025. For the Rickroll article it was between 21 and 25 percent. The first is a calendar meme. The second is not tied to the calendar at all, apart from a smaller lift on April 1 that shows up in 94 percent of the language-years measured in that study.

The same test was not run on Skibidi Toilet or Italian brainrot because their series are too short and their shape has no yearly cycle to test.

Test 2: a floor, or a hill?

The second test is how much of a year’s views come from its five biggest days, together with whether the typical day stays steady. For the Rickroll, in the years without a dominant event, the top five days made up 4 to 8 percent of views and the median day stayed between about 1,200 and 4,000: a floor. In 2016 and 2024, when one event dominated, the share was 20 and 29 percent.

Skibidi Toilet’s top five days were 7 percent of 2023 and 4 percent of 2024 and 2025: broad attention, but not a floor, because the level itself moved. Italian brainrot’s were 9 percent of 2025. Mariah Carey’s were 13 to 24 percent, which fits a season more than an event. The share alone does not name a shape; read together with the level over time, it separates a floor from a hill.

Test 3: where is the peak, and how fast is the fall?

The timing of the peak separates the two newer memes. The Italian brainrot article reached its biggest day, 75,009 views, on 29 April 2025, three days after it began. The Skibidi Toilet article climbed for about three months, held a plateau of about 10,000 to 14,700 views a day for another year and had its biggest day, 46,391, in July 2024, almost a year after it began.

The fall differs as much. Measured by the four-week mean after each article’s own peak, Italian brainrot fell under half in 7 weeks and under a quarter in 11, while Skibidi Toilet took 33 and 44. Over 12-month windows, the Rickroll article’s latest year, 2025, was 33 percent of its best year, which ended in November 2021, and Mariah Carey’s 2025 was 62 percent of its best 12 months, which ended in May 2024. Skibidi Toilet’s latest 12 months, to October 2026, were 13 percent of its best.

The measures are not identical, because the shapes need different ones. A 12-month window suits a recurring meme. Weeks after peak suit a burst.

Who holds the next move

The shapes also differ in who can create the next spike. Mariah Carey’s artist posts the video each year on the date, and the date itself carries the rest. The Rickroll has no owner: anyone can trigger a spike, as a rock band did in 2015 (forty times the floor) or a political speech did in 2016 (sixty-five times), and the biggest day of the ten years, in October 2024, has no cause in the sources checked. Skibidi Toilet has a creator and, later, producers and brands, so its spikes follow releases and deals, such as the July 2024 film-talks reports, with a peak 4.3 times the days before.

Italian brainrot has no author, and its parts are free to copy, so no one holds a schedule. Its later life is run by companies and courts, not by the characters: cards, a game, Fortnite items, and a reported dispute over who owns one character.

Languages: what travelled, and when

All four crossed languages, in different ways. The Mariah Carey step on November 1 appeared in the English, Spanish and French editions in 2019 and hardly at all in Japanese. The Rickroll’s April 1 lift is shared by almost every edition. Skibidi Toilet peaked in Turkish and Indonesian in mid-2023, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian that autumn, English in May 2024, and in German, French, Polish, Italian and Vietnamese in December 2024. Italian brainrot’s Russian and Italian articles began before the English one, but English was far larger.

A common event can line the languages up. The Fortnite release on 18 December 2024 made 19 December the biggest day in the German, Russian and Portuguese Skibidi Toilet articles. Language is not country in any of these series, and article start dates reflect when an article was created, not when interest began.

Where the four touch

The memes are not separate worlds. Skibidi Toilet and Italian brainrot share a platform event: Fortnite items arrived for both, in December 2024 and April 2026. The Skibidi Toilet article’s peak day was 3.5 times its early-December median; Italian brainrot’s was 1.8 times its late-March median. The commercial lift was smaller the second time, though two cases are not a trend.

They also share an umbrella. The English “Brain rot” article, which Oxford University Press made its word of the year for 2024, passed Skibidi Toilet in April 2025 and led it until April 2026. In autumn 2025, three of these articles rose in the same weeks: Italian brainrot on 17 September and 21 October, Brain rot on 18 October and Skibidi Toilet on 21 October. No cause was found for that.

A field guide: four questions

1. Does one season hold the views? Compare the share of a year’s views in its busiest three months with 25 percent. Far above means a calendar meme, and the measure to use is the step on the date, against control articles.

2. Is there a floor? If the median day is steady across years and the five biggest days are a small share of the total, the meme is evergreen, and the measure is the spike multiple against the floor and how fast it returns.

3. Where is the peak in the meme’s life, and how long does the fall take? A peak at the start with a fall in weeks is a burst. A plateau of months with a fall over most of a year is a serial.

4. Who holds the next move? A named artist or creator means a schedule to check the data against. No owner means events and discovery, and a life that may run through products and courts rather than posts.

Whichever answer fits, the same cautions apply: use a control article, say what was measured, and do not read the article’s curve as the audience’s.

Evidence and confidence: what is observed, what is inferred, what is unknown

A. Observed. All figures are from the Wikimedia Pageviews API and were computed from the files in the four studies; the cross-meme shares and ratios here were computed again from the same files. The dated events come from the sources listed in the four studies.

B. Supported inference. The four shapes are visibly different when scaled to each meme’s own highest month. The calendar test separates Mariah Carey from the Rickroll by a wide margin.

C. Hypotheses, not tested. That the shapes reflect who holds the next move. That a smaller second Fortnite lift reflects a pattern rather than two unrelated cases. That the autumn 2025 rise had a common cause.

Unknown. Whether the four shapes generalise: four memes chosen by us are not a sample. Whether a general fall in Wikipedia reading, which no control here measures, lowered the latest-year figures for all four. And how much of each curve is the meme and how much is the article’s own history, since a page-view series starts when an article exists.

Frequently asked questions

Do all memes follow one life cycle? Not in these four. They differ in whether a calendar drives them, whether they have a floor, when they peak and how fast they fall.

Which shape lasts longest? In these data, the two that have a trigger that returns: the date for Mariah Carey and events for the Rickroll. Their latest years were 62 and 33 percent of their best, against 13 percent for Skibidi Toilet and 5 percent of the peak month for Italian brainrot, but the measures differ.

Can you tell a meme’s shape from its first weeks? These data do not show that; the Italian brainrot article’s first week was its peak, while Skibidi Toilet’s first months were a climb. Both would have looked like growth at first.

Is Wikipedia reading a good proxy? It is a consistent one for a comparison like this, and a limited one: it shows curiosity about a meme, not how many people used it.

Final thought

A meme’s life is not one curve. It is a trigger and a shape: a date, events, a creator’s schedule, or a stock of parts, and each leaves a different fingerprint. The useful question about any new meme is not how big it is but which of these it is, because the answer says what to measure, how to compare it, and what its ending would look like.