Video and captioned pictures
The Rickroll
2007
A rickroll is a prank link: it promises something else and opens the video of Rick Astley’s 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up instead. The first one is usually traced to 15 May 2007, when a YouTube upload of the video was posted on 4chan as the new Grand Theft Auto IV trailer.
- Year
- 15 May 2007
- Made by
- Shawn Cotter, the first to post the link, and Rick Astley’s 1987 song
- Where it started
- 4chan, as a link to a fake video game trailer
- What it was
- A bait-and-switch link
- Also called
- Rickrolling, Rick Roll
The story
It grew out of an earlier 4chan joke, duckrolling, in which exciting-sounding links led to a picture of a duck on wheels. Shawn Cotter, a 19-year-old US airman stationed in South Korea, swapped the duck for Rick Astley, and he remembers the first reaction as pure rage.
By March 2008 the joke had spread far beyond 4chan, and on April Fools’ Day 2008 YouTube rickrolled its own visitors: every featured video on its front page led to Astley. That November internet voters made him the winner of an MTV Europe award for the best act ever, and he rickrolled the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in person.
Astley has said he was a little embarrassed at first but came to enjoy it, and in 2023 he said that without the rickroll he would not have been invited to play Glastonbury.
Why it matters
It was the first bait-and-switch meme to become popular with everyone, not just heavy internet users, and it made pranking friendly: a harmless trick that anyone could play, and anyone could be let in on afterwards.
Where it is now
The official video passed one billion views on YouTube in July 2021 and is still climbing, and people still rickroll each other: in March 2026 a QR code on some copies of a national maths exam in India led students straight to the song.
Sources
- Rickrolling (Wikipedia)
- Meet Shawn Cotter, the man behind the rickroll (Observer, 2012)
- YouTube rickrolls its users (Wired, 2008)
- An oral history of rickrolling (MEL Magazine)
- Never Gonna Give You Up passes one billion views (Variety, 2021)
Checked against these sources on 25 October 2026.