How Skibidi Toilet Rose and Faded

What was measured, and what was not

The attention data is Wikipedia page views from the Wikimedia Pageviews API: daily reads of each article by traffic classified as users (not spiders or automated agents), from the day each article’s series begins to 31 October 2026, pulled on 3 November 2026. The main series is the English article “Skibidi Toilet”, which begins on 10 August 2023. Twelve other language editions with enough readers are compared, and the English “Brain rot” article is used as a contrast. Japanese and Korean editions only begin in autumn 2025 and are left out of the comparisons.

This measures people reading an encyclopedia article about a series. It is not video views, not search interest and not the number of children watching, which is the audience the press describes. Reading a Wikipedia article about a trend tends to fall once most people already know what it is, so the fade shown here may overstate the fade of the series itself. Video view counts, Google Trends and social-post archives were not available for this study.

1. Propagation path: one creator, then the press, then brands

Unlike the first two studies, this path does not start with an anonymous joke. According to Wikipedia’s summary of press reports, the animator Alexey Gerasimov, who posts as DaFuq!?Boom!, uploaded the first episode, titled “skibidi toilet” and 11 seconds long, to YouTube on 7 February 2023. The audio uses the song “Dom Dom Yes Yes” by Biser King, which had spread through TikTok in 2022.

The press arrived in the summer: Cartoon Brew profiled the channel on 3 July 2023, Dazed and Newsweek followed in July, and In The Know called it “Gen Alpha’s Slenderman” on 21 July 2023, as cited on Wikipedia. By 10 December 2023 The Washington Post, per the same article, called it the biggest online phenomenon of the year.

In 2024 the story turned to adults reacting to it: Daily Beast reported in January that Russian police were looking at the series after a resident’s complaint; The Guardian called the harm claims a moral panic; Stephen Colbert ran a “Skibidi Biden” segment on 23 May. Then came commerce: Variety reported on 24 July 2024 that producer Adam Goodman and director Michael Bay were in talks with the creator about a film and TV adaptation, and Fortnite added Skibidi Toilet items on 18 December 2024. The order is documented. Whether the press attention drove the audience or followed it is not.

2. Velocity: five months to the top of YouTube, then a three-month ramp on Wikipedia

By late April 2023, less than three months after the first upload, the channel was 33rd among the most-viewed US YouTube channels, and in June 2023 it reached five billion views and was the most viewed US channel that month, according to Tubefilter as cited on Wikipedia. Reported totals differ in what they count: the same article mentions more than 65 billion views for associated videos by November 2023, while Variety’s July 2024 figure of 17 billion is for the channel itself.

Wikipedia reading is slower than YouTube. The English article averaged 7,395 views a day in its first (partial) month, August 2023, and 12,510 in November 2023, then held between about 10,000 and 14,700 a day for another year. Event spikes are short. The film-talks reports pushed the daily count from 10,689 on 23 July 2024 to 46,391 on 25 July, the largest day in the whole series, and it was back near 17,000 within two days and normal within about a week. The Fortnite release lifted 16 December’s 7,036 to 25,071 on 19 December.

3. Geographic diffusion: Turkish and Indonesian first, German and Polish last

Wikipedia has a Skibidi Toilet article in 42 language editions, and each edition’s series begins when its article exists under that title. In the editions measured, the order of those start dates is Turkish (7 June 2023), Indonesian (22 June), French (25 July), Spanish (4 August), English (10 August), Arabic (18 August), Portuguese (20 August), Chinese (2 September), German (8 September), Russian (15 September), Polish (5 October), Vietnamese (3 January 2024), Italian (11 May 2024), Korean (22 September 2025) and Japanese (22 October 2025). A start date marks when an article was created, not when readers first cared, so this order is suggestive only.

The peak months differ more. Indonesian peaked in July 2023, Turkish in June 2023, Spanish and Portuguese in November 2023, Russian in October 2023, English in May 2024, and French, German, Polish, Italian and Vietnamese in December 2024. The scale also differs widely. At their peak months the English article averaged 14,683 views a day, Spanish 2,920, Russian 1,831, Polish 631, German 580, Indonesian 505 and Turkish 111. Language is not country: readers of an edition live in many places. Wikipedia’s infobox lists Georgia as the country of origin for 2023 to 2025 and the United States from 2025.

4. Cross-language evolution: the name did not translate

The name “Skibidi Toilet” stayed in Latin script in almost every edition measured: the Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Italian, Indonesian, Turkish, Polish, Vietnamese and Korean articles all use it. Two editions adapted it: Japanese uses スキビディ・トイレ, a katakana rendering, and Arabic uses مرحاض سكيبيدي, which reads as “Skibidi toilet” with the noun translated. The series is wordless and its sound is the same everywhere, which is one reason it could cross languages without a local version.

Some days are shared across languages. The Fortnite items arrived on 18 December 2024, and 19 December 2024 is the single biggest day in the German, Russian and Portuguese series and the fifth-largest day in English, with Polish peaking two days later on 21 December. Another shared moment, in early November 2023, has no explanation in the sources checked: English jumped from 13,973 views on 31 October to 37,671 on 1 November, and Spanish reached its own peak day, 9,498, on 3 November. A Halloween effect is plausible, but it is a hypothesis.

5. Attention curve: a plateau, not a spike

Most of the Rickrolling article’s history is spikes on a floor. Skibidi Toilet’s is a shape: a three-month climb from 7,395 a day to above 12,000, a plateau from September 2023 to October 2024 that never fell under about 10,000 on a monthly mean, then a decline. From October 2024’s 12,139 a day the monthly mean was 6,075 in January 2025 (half in three months), 2,309 in July 2025 (19 percent of October 2024), 1,502 in March 2026 and 960 in October 2026.

The five biggest days made up only 7 percent of the 2023 total, and 4 percent in both 2024 and 2025, so the attention was broad rather than bursty. A weekday pattern is visible between October 2023 and October 2024: Tuesday to Friday averaged 12,300 to 12,900 views, while Sunday averaged 10,313 and Saturday 10,499. One reading is that people look things up during the school and work week, but this is a hypothesis; the data does not say who the readers are.

6. Revival waves: a handoff to “brain rot”, not a revival

Skibidi Toilet itself shows no revival in the monthly data. The nearest thing is a bump in October 2025, when the English monthly mean rose from 2,291 in September to 3,202, a 40 percent lift that faded the next month. Wikipedia reports that a controversy over the creator’s relationship with the series’ producer broke that October and November, and the Japanese and Korean articles also begin that autumn, but the data cannot say these are connected. The March 2026 channel rename and the June 2026 settlement reported by Wikipedia show no lift in the monthly means.

What the data does show is a handoff. The English “Brain rot” article begins in May 2024 at 48 views a day, passes 5,000 a day in December 2024, the month Oxford University Press named brain rot its word of the year for 2024, peaks at 8,802 in October 2025 and has stayed above Skibidi Toilet’s level from April 2025 to April 2026. Since May 2026 both are near 1,000 a day. The umbrella term outlasted the series that helped popularise it.

7. Remix and mutation: from a series to a word to a product

Three mutations are documented. The first is the series itself, reported on Wikipedia as 27 seasons and 82 episodes. The second is the word: “skibidi” detached from the toilets and became a general nonsense term used as an adjective, a change the dictionary of this site records under its own entry. The third is the product: a Colbert parody in May 2024, Skibidi Toilet toys in Walmart reported by Business Insider in November 2024, the Fortnite items, a Scholastic partnership announced in March 2025, and the film, which JoBlo reported in May 2025 had gone into production while Michael Bay denied directing it.

The pattern runs the other way from the Rickroll. The Rickroll moved from a trick on strangers to a shared joke. Skibidi Toilet moved from a creator’s serial to a brand that other companies licensed, and then to a single word.

8. Community and creator roles: who did what

A single creator made and published the series, working with Valve’s Source Filmmaker software, according to the sources. YouTube was the platform; the series’ own episodes were the content, not fan remakes. Music rights holders appear as a constraint: Music Business Worldwide reported on 14 March 2024 that Universal Music Group copyright takedowns hit the mashup, according to Wikipedia. The press played two roles, explainers in 2023 and moral-panic coverage in 2024, including the Russian police item and an April 2024 presentation of videos to the St. Petersburg legislative assembly.

Producers and brands arrived next. Wikipedia lists a legal dispute between the Invisible Narratives company and another firm in 2025, a settlement on 9 June 2026, and a controversy among fans in November 2025 that used the hashtag #BringBoomBack. These are reported in the article and were not independently checked here. Roles are defined by what each party did, not by follower counts or audience size, which were not measured.

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

A. Observed. The daily and monthly page views in the figures are direct data. The dated events come from named press reports collected on Wikipedia’s Skibidi Toilet article, which is a secondary source; the Michael Bay talks, the Fortnite date and the Oxford word of the year were each checked against at least one further news report.

B. Supported inference. Languages peaked at different times: the monthly strips show it directly, though start dates depend on when each article was created. The Fortnite release is the most likely cause of the shared 19 December 2024 peak, because it matches the release date and appears in several languages at once. The handoff to “brain rot” is shown by the two articles’ trajectories, though no control rules out a general rise in Wikipedia reading.

C. Hypotheses, not tested. That the early November 2023 spikes were Halloween effects. That the weekday pattern reflects school and work weeks. That the October 2025 bump is related to the creator controversy.

Unknown. The cause of the 1 November 2023, 30 January 2024 and French 19 October 2024 spikes; how video views and the audience of children changed, which the data does not measure; and whether the decline of the article matches a decline of the series.

What this shows about reading any meme

Putting the three studies together gives three shapes. A calendar meme (Mariah Carey) is a date with a step. An evergreen meme (the Rickroll) is a floor with event spikes. A serial (Skibidi Toilet) is a rise, a plateau and a decline, with commerce arriving at the top.

The practical question to ask of any meme is which shape it has, because the shape decides what to measure and what an ending looks like. A serial ends in a handoff: its audience, and its Wikipedia readers, moved on to the larger idea it had come to stand for.

Frequently asked questions

What is Skibidi Toilet? An animated web series in which heads sing from toilets and fight humanoids with camera and speaker heads. It began as an 11-second YouTube video on 7 February 2023, made with Source Filmmaker.

Is Skibidi Toilet dead? English Wikipedia reading of its article is about 7 percent of its peak month and still falling slowly as of October 2026. That measures curiosity about the series, not whether it is still being watched.

What took its place? Not another series. The English article on brain rot passed it in April 2025, and Oxford University Press had named brain rot its 2024 word of the year in December 2024.

Who made it? Alexey Gerasimov, as DaFuq!?Boom!. Wikipedia reports that a producer, Invisible Narratives, later became involved and that his role in the series was the subject of dispute and coverage in 2025 and 2026; check current reporting for the present position.

Final thought

Skibidi Toilet was the first meme in this series that could be followed from its first upload to its decline. The shape is clear in the data: a fast rise, a year on a plateau, and a long fade with no revival yet. The reasons are not. What readers took from it, and what replaced it, were not a sequel but a larger idea: that an endless stream of absurd content has a name, and that the name travelled further than the toilets did.