I studied rage comics a lot, from their early inception to their eventual denouement. The interesting thing about rage comics is that they were an ideogrammatical protolanguage, capable of communicating a very limited amount of information to an audience that was already largely literate in the same mimetic stew. They evolved rapidly, with grammar and syntax, but eventually reached an audience devoid of the shared experience that made the grammar efficient. As such, they ballooned into ridiculous panel counts, a million and one ideograms, a billion different emotions and experiences to express and ended up diluting into basically bad comics. The argument made here is that if a picture is worth a thousand words, a short clip of video is worth several pictures. At the same time, the argument is also that several pictures and three dollars will buy you a cup of coffee and that the monetization potential of gifs is nil, despite crazy-stupid valuations. There were companies that made money off of rage comics, but they sure didn't light up the VCs. Look - Cheezburger has one and their valuation topped out at $35mil three years ago. Oh, holy fuck. No it didn't. There are fucking idiots in the world that think Cheezburger is worth $700m.
Are you saying they became a more efficient language when they spread beyond 4chan and adjacent communities? Because it seems to me it was the opposite. They were efficient because everyone reading them shared a lot of context, so the simplistic comics didn't have to provide much. When they spread and became bad comics it was because their readers didn't have that shared context, so the comics either needed to provide it or be incoherent.eventually reached an audience outside of the native population that made the grammar efficient