Brainrot isn’t just a meme; it’s a business model

The first time you see “Italian brainrot,” it looks like the internet broke: an AI-smeared creature, a fake-Italian name, a voiceover that sounds like it was generated by a microwave. The second time, you start recognizing the “characters.” The third time, you realize this isn’t random at all. It’s a format. And formats are how the internet prints money.

Oxford picked “brain rot” as its Word of the Year in 2024, describing it as both the content and the effect: the supposed mental deterioration linked to over-consuming trivial online media.

That definition matters because it names what users already felt: the feed is full of low-effort output engineered to keep you watching. By 2025, even dictionaries were reframing “slop” around the idea of mass, low-quality, AI-made digital content.

Italian brainrot thrives precisely because it’s cheap, fast, and endlessly repeatable. You don’t need a punchline. You need a recognizable template: a grotesque hybrid image, a catchy nonsense name, and a sound that can be reused. The “meaning” is optional; the shareability is the point. Each variation becomes a collectible unit of attention.

Then the format jumped from social feeds into the most profitable machine for turning youth culture into revenue: Roblox.

The breakout example is Steal a Brainrot, a viral Roblox experience built around collecting these meme characters and (as the title promises) stealing them from other players. The numbers are wild. Reuters reported Roblox credited viral games like Steal a Brainrot while lifting its 2025 bookings forecast again, with daily active users passing 150 million. Industry outlets reported Steal a Brainrot hitting a record 25.4 million concurrent users. Even if you ignore the spectacle of that peak, the underlying lesson is straightforward: the meme didn’t just go viral. It became an economy.

Here’s why brainrot fits Roblox so well:

1) Brainrot is “content” that behaves like inventory.On a platform where value is driven by in-game items, upgrades, and scarcity, meme-characters work like trading cards. You can keep adding new ones forever. That’s not creativity as a one-time hit; it’s creativity as a live service.

2) Roblox pays for engagement, not just purchases.Roblox has been explicit about building creator incentives that reward time spent and returning players. The Verge reported new Creator Rewards programs designed to pay creators for daily engagement and audience expansion, on top of the usual in-experience spending. A brainrot game is basically optimized for this: constant novelty, constant social pressure, constant “one more run.”

3) The “real money” endpoint is built in.Roblox creators earn Robux through multiple methods and can convert eligible earnings to cash via the Developer Exchange (DevEx). Roblox’s own documentation spells out the pathways to earn and the DevEx mechanism. So the business model isn’t mysterious: attention → Robux → cash, scaled by virality.

When a meme becomes a revenue engine, it also becomes something worth fighting over. PC Gamer reported Steal a Brainrot taking a brainrot-themed Fortnite experience to court over alleged copying. That’s a very 2025 sentence, but it’s also the clearest proof that we’ve moved beyond “kids being weird online.”

We’re in “kids’ weirdness is a monetizable IP-adjacent asset” territory.

None of this means people are wrong to enjoy it. But it does mean brainrot is no longer just a symptom of the feed. It’s a product strategy: make content that is fast to generate, easy to remix, and perfectly suited to platform incentives. The uncomfortable question is what happens when the most rewarded creativity is the kind that proudly calls itself rot.