He built the format. Everyone else built on it.
“he's just a guy” has been filled in more than forty thousand times. Marcus Delgado on what a format is actually worth, and who he thinks should be credited when a remix outruns the original.
A format is a strange kind of artwork. It is finished and unfinished at once: complete enough to post, empty enough that a stranger can put their own week inside it. Marcus Delgado made one in an afternoon in February and has spent six months watching other people finish it.
Forty-one thousand versions, by our count, which is certainly low. The biggest of them — Yara Mansour's ferry edit in July — reached 6.3 million people on its own, which is to say that a remix of his work has now outrun most artists' entire careers.
He is, he says repeatedly and a little wearily, completely fine about this.
Start with what it is, for anyone who has somehow missed it.
It's a layout. A figure in the middle, small, doing nothing much. Space above for a claim and space below for the correction. That's all. The joke is always the gap between the two, and the gap is whatever you put in it.
I didn't invent that shape. Nobody invented that shape. I just made a clean one.
You call it a stage.
A template isn't a joke. It's a stage. I built the stage and left it out in the rain and forty thousand people have done a turn on it. Most of them better than mine.
Does it bother you that the ferry edit is bigger than the original?
Genuinely no, and I want to be careful here because “genuinely no” sounds like a man being brave.
Yara's edit is better. It's funnier, it's timed better, and she found something in the layout I hadn't found. If I built a stage and somebody put on a better show than me, the correct response is to go and watch it.
What does bother you, then?
That almost nobody names either of us. Not me and not her. The edits get reposted as if they fell out of the sky. Somebody made the format and somebody made the version you laughed at, and there's room in a caption for two handles.
“A template isn't a joke. It's a stage. I built the stage and left it out in the rain — and forty thousand people have done a turn on it, most of them better than me.”
Where it went
The five edits below account for roughly a third of the format's total reach. Only one of them credited Delgado at the time of posting; two have added it since we started asking.
- 7 Feb Marcus Delgado posts the format, blank, with an example fill 13.5M
- 19 Feb First mass wave — sports accounts, roughly 400 versions in a weekend ~2.1M
- 3 Mar Format is re-uploaded to a template site as “origin unknown” — Credit drops here — everything downstream inherits it
- 28 Apr Kwabena Mensah crosses it with his own reaction image 1.4M
- 14 Jul Yara Mansour posts the ferry edit — credits Delgado in-image 6.3M
The template site listing it as “origin unknown” — did you contact them?
Four times. The fourth time I sent the layered file with the timestamps, which felt insane, like bringing a birth certificate to a party.
They added it. Took five months. In those five months, every single person who pulled the blank from that site had no way of knowing there was anyone to credit. You can't blame them. The information wasn't there.
What's a format worth, in money?
Nothing, directly. Nobody licenses a layout. I got two paid jobs out of it — one from a drinks brand that wanted me to make them a “format that goes viral,” which is not a thing you can order, and one from a magazine that just wanted a drawing.
Total, maybe four thousand. For thirteen and a half million on the original and god knows how many on the edits.
You've started tagging the format-maker on other people's memes. Why?
Because it costs me nothing and it's true. If I'm going to complain about it I should do it myself first.
And it works, weirdly. Three times now, someone has replied to my tag saying “that's me, I made that in 2023,” and they'd never once been named. That's a person finding out in public that they made something everybody knows.
Last one. Do you want it to stop?
No. God, no. I made a thing that other people needed a version of. That's the whole job.
I'd just like the credit line to have two names on it. That's not a lot to ask for a stage.