Rickrolling

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Screenshot of a Rickroll video window on YouTube

Rickrolling is an Internet meme typically involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up". The meme is a bait and switch: a person provides a Web link that he or she claims is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true source of the link without clicking. When a person clicks on the link and is led to the web page, he or she is said to have been "Rickrolled" (also spelled Rickroll'd).

As the practice has spread, two of the various Rickrolling videos available online have been viewed more than thirteen million times each.^[1][2] These figures track the total number of visits, not individual viewers. Rickrolling has extended beyond Web links to playing the video or song disruptively in other situations, including public places;^[3] this culminated when Astley and the song made a surprise appearance in the 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade,^[4] a televised event with tens of millions of viewers.

Rickrolling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia