Digital Design Blog

You’ve Been Rickrolled!: When Geek Chic Internet Phenomena Goes Mainstream

This past week getting “Rickrolled” went mainstream. That’s when a number of political blogs, including Wonkette and Andrew Sullivan linked to a YouTube video claiming to show Michelle Obama going on a less than savory rant. The result: a mass mainstream audience getting “Rickrolled.”

Here’s the best definition, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Rickrolling is a prank and Internet meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up“. The meme is a classic bait and switch: a person provides a Web link they claim 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 (and thus satisfying their curiosity). By extension, it can also mean playing the song loudly in public in order to be disruptive.^[1] A person who falls for the prank is said to have been “Rickrolled”.

An estimated 18 million adults have been Rickrolled, according to Survey USA and the video on YouTube has been viewed nearly 30 million times. With those kinds of numbers — outside of the sheer humor and geek factor — the Rickroll prank offers an interesting lesson on the evolving nature of the Internet. At its core, the Web is still a very quirky medium with memes and traits that change at a rapid pace. Wikipedia’s List of Internet Phenomena is a testament to that.

I’m sure marketers could draw an array of lessons around viral video distribution from the Rickroll phenomena, but at the end of the day what intrigues me most is the offbeat nature of the thing — the way a clever concept (or ironic joke, really) — can spread and touch millions in such a surprising manner. The whole thing makes me realize that we are still in the early days of this thing called the Internet and we are never quite sure where everything is headed.