Rickrolling Origin Explained: 4chan, 2007 and Beyond

Short answer: Rickrolling started on 4chan’s video game board on May 15, 2007, when a user posted a link billed as the new Grand Theft Auto IV trailer that actually opened Rick Astley’s 1987 music video for “Never Gonna Give You Up.” It was a remix of an older 4chan prank called duckrolling. The joke broke into the mainstream in 2008, and it has never fully stopped: the official video passed one billion YouTube views in July 2021, partly on the strength of people still being tricked into watching it.

That is the whole story in one paragraph. The rest of this piece walks through it in order, explains why that particular song got picked, and untangles a question most retellings skip: which YouTube video actually collected all those prank views.

Rickrolling origin explained in one timeline

Before the detail, here is the sequence as the published record gives it. Where sources disagree, the table says so.

Before the rickroll: duckrolling on 4chan

Rickrolling was a sequel. In 2006, 4chan’s founder, Christopher Poole (known on the site as “moot”), added a word filter that swapped the word “egg” for “duck.” Type “eggroll” and the site displayed “duckroll.” Someone then made an image of a duck on wheels, and a prank formed around it: a link promising a news story or a picture would instead land on the wheeled duck.

That is the mechanism rickrolling inherited. It is a bait-and-switch link. The payoff is not the thing you land on, it is the moment you realize you clicked. The name “rickroll” is simply “duckroll” with Astley’s first name dropped in.

May 15, 2007: the fake Grand Theft Auto IV trailer

The first rickroll most sources agree on went up on May 15, 2007. A YouTube user posting as cotter548 uploaded Astley’s music video under the title “RickRoll’D” and shared it on 4chan’s /v/ video game board as if it were a trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV.

The timing mattered. Grand Theft Auto IV was one of the most anticipated games of the period, and a real trailer link would have been clicked instantly by exactly the audience on that board. The fake one was clicked for the same reason. Within days, according to Wikipedia’s account, rickrolling had replaced duckrolling as the board’s bait of choice.

There is one competing origin claim worth knowing. Know Your Meme has documented a recording of a man calling a radio station in 2006 and pulling a similar prank with the song. The site treated it as a plausible earlier claim, but nobody has shown a link between that call and the 4chan version. The 4chan date is the one with a traceable chain from first post to global spread, which is why it is the date most references use.

Why “Never Gonna Give You Up,” of all songs

This is the question readers actually ask, and the honest answer has two parts.

The first is the uploader’s own account. In a 2022 interview with Vice, as summarized in Wikipedia’s rickrolling article, the person behind the first upload said he picked the song from a list of 1987 hits and wanted it to become a meme. So the choice was partly arbitrary. There was no hidden meaning in the lyrics.

The second part is why it stuck, and that is not arbitrary at all:

• It was instantly recognizable. The song had been a genuine number one. It topped the UK chart for five weeks and was the country’s best-selling single of 1987, reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 in the week ending March 12, 1988, and topped charts in 25 countries, per the chart history collected on Wikipedia.
• It had gone out of fashion. By 2007 it read as a sincere, slightly dated late-1980s pop record. Landing on it felt absurd rather than annoying.
• The first second gives it away. The drum intro and the opening shot are unmistakable, so the victim knows they have been had almost immediately. A prank that takes a minute to reveal itself is not a good prank.
• The singer was not in on it. Astley had stepped back from music in the 1990s. The joke was about the song and the link, not about mocking a current celebrity, which made it easy to share without feeling cruel.

2008: the year it left 4chan

Rickrolling spent less than a year as an in-joke. In 2008 it went everywhere.

Protests, a homepage and a baseball poll

In February 2008, members of Anonymous played the song on boomboxes at Project Chanology protests against the Church of Scientology. On April 1, 2008, YouTube itself joined in: every featured video on its homepage that day led to “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Wikipedia records that the video logged about 6.6 million views that day.

The same month, the song drew a reported five million write-in votes in a New York Mets online poll to pick a rally song. The Mets treated the vote as compromised and put it to fans in the stadium instead, where the song was booed. A SurveyUSA poll from that spring estimated that at least 18 million American adults had been rickrolled.

The Macy’s parade

The high point came in November 2008. Astley won MTV Europe’s “Best Act Ever” award after an organized online voting campaign, then made a surprise appearance at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on a Cartoon Network float and lip-synced the song to a live national television audience. NPR covered it on December 3, 2008 (we read it on 2026-09-23) under the headline “The Cartoon Network Rickrolls The Macy’s Parade.” The Daily Telegraph later called it the pinnacle of rickrolling.

That parade is the point where the joke stopped being something the internet did to Astley and became something he did with the internet.

Which YouTube video actually got the prank views?

Most histories skip this, and it explains why the view counts people quote rarely match.

There was never one rickroll video. There were at least three distinct things:

1. The original prank upload. The “RickRoll’d” video from 2007 was an unauthorized copy. NPR reported in July 2018 that it had been removed as a terms-of-use violation and later restored, and counted about 77 million views on it at that time.
2. The official video. An authorized upload did not appear on YouTube until October 25, 2009, more than two years after the prank began. Every rickroll in the 2007 to 2008 boom pointed somewhere else.
3. Temporary gaps. In February 2010, NPR reported that a heavily viewed copy had briefly disappeared after being flagged as spam, then returned.

This is why the famous milestone needs care. The official video passed one billion views on July 28, 2021, according to Variety and Hypebeast; Fox News gave July 29. NPR’s July 30, 2021 report (we read it on 2026-09-23) noted that many of those views were involuntary. That billion only counts the official 2009 upload. The views collected by unauthorized copies during the prank’s peak years sit in separate tallies, and nobody has published a reliable combined total. If you see a single “total rickroll views” figure, treat it as a guess.

For comparison, the first video to cross a billion views on YouTube did so in December 2012, a story we cover in why Gangnam Style was so popular. Astley’s official upload reached the same mark roughly twelve years after it went live, carried by a joke that was already two years old on the day it was posted.

Did Rick Astley earn anything from it?

Less than most people assume, at least directly. The Register reported that by August 2010 Astley had received about US$12 in YouTube performance royalties, and songwriter Pete Waterman was reported in April 2009 as saying he had been paid £11. Astley later clarified that he had been paid separately for commercial appearances, including by Virgin and for the Macy’s appearance.

The indirect effect was larger. In a March 2008 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Astley described the phenomenon as bizarre but said he was not bothered by it. His later career ran alongside the meme rather than against it: his 2016 album “50” reached number one on the UK Albums Chart, and he has credited rickrolling with helping lead to his 2023 Glastonbury Festival slot.

Is rickrolling still happening?

Yes. It has outlived most of the platforms it spread on, including several covered in our look at the social platforms that shaped the old web and then vanished. A partial record of later sightings:

• 2011: the White House’s official Twitter account posted a rickroll link during a chat session (July 27), and Oregon legislators hid the song’s lyrics in floor speeches, later compiled into a full version.
• 2015 to 2017: the Foo Fighters rickrolled protesters outside a Kansas City concert in 2015, then brought Astley on stage in 2017.
• 2019: the San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Chargers both pulled stadium rickrolls.
• June 2020: a Reddit post claiming to show a backstage photo with Astley was a rickroll; Astley replied with a clapping emoji, and the thread became one of Reddit’s most upvoted posts of 2020.
• April 1, 2021: YouTube said the official video drew more than 2.3 million views that day alone.
• 2022: Astley recreated the original video for a California State Automobile Association advertisement built around QR codes.

The format has moved from links to QR codes, text messages and live events, but the mechanism is the same one the duck on wheels used in 2006. Short-form video platforms such as Vine came and went in that time; the rickroll just changed containers.

Why this one meme lasted

Most viral jokes from 2007 and 2008 are gone. Rickrolling survived for reasons that are easier to state now than they were then.

It needs no explanation to work. The victim does not have to know the meme to be caught by it, so every new generation of internet users is a fresh audience. It is low stakes: the worst outcome is three and a half minutes of a pleasant pop song. And the person at the center of it chose to join in, which removed the sour edge that ended many other memes built around a real individual.

What the record cannot tell you is exactly how many people have been rickrolled. The SurveyUSA estimate from 2008 is the only published poll figure we found, and it is nearly two decades old. Everything since is inference from view counts that, as shown above, only measure part of the story.

Frequently asked questions

When was the first rickroll?

The first documented rickroll was posted on May 15, 2007, on 4chan’s /v/ video game board, disguised as a link to a Grand Theft Auto IV trailer. A 2006 radio prank has been proposed as an earlier case, but no connection to the 4chan version has been shown.

Where does the word “rickroll” come from?

It combines Rick Astley’s first name with “duckroll,” an earlier 4chan prank. Duckrolling began when a site word filter turned “eggroll” into “duckroll” and users started linking to an image of a duck on wheels.

Why was “Never Gonna Give You Up” chosen?

The first uploader told Vice in 2022 that he picked it from a list of 1987 hits. It worked because the song was a famous former number one that felt dated by 2007, and its opening seconds make the prank obvious immediately.

How many views does the rickroll video have?

The official video, uploaded on October 25, 2009, passed one billion YouTube views on July 28, 2021, according to Variety; Fox News reported July 29. That figure excludes views on earlier unauthorized uploads used during the prank’s peak.

Does Rick Astley mind being rickrolled?

He has repeatedly said he finds it funny. He called it bizarre but untroubling in 2008, rickrolled the Macy’s parade himself that November, and has since taken part in rickrolls, including a 2022 advertisement.