What the thing is
Rickrolling is a bait-and-switch prank. It delivers Rick Astley’s 1987 ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ music video via a disguised hyperlink.
Where it came from
It began on 4chan on 15 May 2007. Shawn Cotter uploaded the video to YouTube and linked it in place of the Grand Theft Auto IV trailer.
It grew out of “duckrolling”, a similar bait-and-switch on 4chan in 2006. Cotter was a nineteen-year-old US Air Force airman in South Korea. In a 2022 interview he said he chose the song because he had found an online list of songs popular in 1987, the year he was born. The song was an Astley single from that year that reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles Chart, and its video, his first, was made in a single week. Know Your Meme’s Don Caldwell called rickrolling the first bait-and-switch meme to gain mainstream popularity.
It reached the mainstream in 2008. Anonymous rickrolled the Church of Scientology in February. On April Fools’ Day YouTube sent every video link on its home page to the song, and that day the video drew 6.6 million views. The next week “Never Gonna Give You Up” received five million write-in votes in a poll for the New York Mets’ rally song, and the team replaced the vote. A SurveyUSA poll that month estimated at least 18 million US adults had been rickrolled. Astley himself rickrolled the 2008 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with a surprise lip-sync on a Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends float.
What it gets right
It exposes the fragility of hyperlink trust. A disguised link is a promise broken. Rickrolling makes that violation legible, repeatable and shareable.
What it gets wrong
It treats attention as neutral terrain. It does not interrogate who benefits from the redirection—YouTube’s view counts, Astley’s revived royalties, or the platforms hosting the bait.
The money barely moved. Pete Waterman, one of the song’s writers, said in April 2009 that he had received only £11, and The Register reported that as of 2010 Astley had directly received US$12 in performance royalties from YouTube, since he did not write the song and holds only a performer’s share of the sound recording copyright. His gains came elsewhere. He said the meme helped re-establish his career, and his 2016 album 50, his first in over a decade, reached number one on the UK Album Chart. He was at first hesitant to use the meme to promote himself, and declined to attend the 2008 MTV Europe Music Awards after an online vote named him “Best Act Ever”.
Why it matters now
It prefigures every modern attention hack: fake news headlines, clickbait thumbnails, algorithmic bait, and platform-native deception. Its mechanics are now ambient.
Is it worth your time
Yes—if you need to understand how internet attention is hijacked, weaponised and monetised. It is not funny in isolation. It only works as infrastructure.
