Well, memes sometimes last longer than the era they starred in.
I remember finding this chart showing the various meme eras (I don’t remember where I found it, sadly):
And I definitely remember seeing old memes still being used after their debut “era” - I remember seeing some from the “experimental” era (1995-2004) like the Dancing Banana, All Your Base Are Belong to Us and less-commonly YTMND and Homestar Runner references in the Classic Era (2004-2009), and likewise I saw memes from that era (Pingas, demotivational posters, Leeroy Jenkins jokes/references, Chuck Norris, Over 9000, Keyboard Cat, etc) still being used well into 2012-2013 despite that already being a new “meme era”.
And as I mentioned in another comment, Rage Comics and Advice Animals still persisted into 2014 (mostly dying/fading into obscurity around 2015), by which point “dank” memes were already at full swing; and I definitely recall still seeing some Surreal Memes in use around the early 2020s, so I’d say the boundaries of meme popularity are fairly fuzzy.
Well, memes sometimes last longer than the era they starred in.
I remember finding this chart showing the various meme eras (I don’t remember where I found it, sadly):
And I definitely remember seeing old memes still being used after their debut “era” - I remember seeing some from the “experimental” era (1995-2004) like the Dancing Banana, All Your Base Are Belong to Us and less-commonly YTMND and Homestar Runner references in the Classic Era (2004-2009), and likewise I saw memes from that era (Pingas, demotivational posters, Leeroy Jenkins jokes/references, Chuck Norris, Over 9000, Keyboard Cat, etc) still being used well into 2012-2013 despite that already being a new “meme era”.
And as I mentioned in another comment, Rage Comics and Advice Animals still persisted into 2014 (mostly dying/fading into obscurity around 2015), by which point “dank” memes were already at full swing; and I definitely recall still seeing some Surreal Memes in use around the early 2020s, so I’d say the boundaries of meme popularity are fairly fuzzy.