Brandwatch Bulletin #119: Never Giving Up On Rickrolls

Some memes will never die.

20 May 2022

Online culture has produced endless quirks and memes. It can be easy to brush them off as inane, but it’s impossible to deny that they often have huge cultural influence on the world we live in. With that in mind, today we’re looking at a classic meme prank: the Rickroll.

Let’s get to it.

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Rock and Rickroll

Memes come and go, but a special few endure and become a fabric of our online society. As we’ll see today, Rickrolling is one of those memes. First, for the unaware, what is Rickrolling?

It’s a simple prank. You send someone a link implying it’s one thing, but in fact it’s a link to the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 track “Never Gonna Give You Up”. The prank being you end up watching a guy singing and dancing to a cheesy pop track.

As online pranks go, it’s fairly mundane and quaint. You may chuckle, or get a bit annoyed, but then you move on. Rickrolling, which first gained popularity on 4chan in 2006, continues to this day. You’ve probably been caught once or twice yourself, but how often is it still happening?

We used Brandwatch Consumer Research (thanks to Billiejoe Charlton, one of our senior data scientists for the idea) to find shares of the music video on Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and forums.

We removed any mentions that included the song title or the artist’s name too. And while the data will include some non-Rickrolling shares, the vast majority are prank shares.

Here’s how that looks charted over the last few years.

Rickrolling levels remained relatively stable through 2018 and into the first half of 2019. Numbers then began to rise as the prank came back into fashion. This continued into 2020, presumably as people bored with lockdowns tried to eke out some fun from their days.

Interest waned quickly at the end of 2020, recovered a bit in 2021 and then levelled out. As we go deeper into 2022, levels are above pre-2020 levels, but lower than they’ve been at their peak.

As of Q1 2022, how often are Rickrolls posted? We estimate it at one every 10 minutes and 7 seconds, with the longest gap between Rickrolls being about 2.5 hours. No wonder the video has 1.2bn views.

Speaking of peaks, what are those spikes in the data? They’re April Fool’s Day, and with Rickrolling having its origins as an April Fool’s prank, this is no surprise. What’s interesting is 2022’s April 1st spike is the biggest yet, with a Rickroll posted every 21 seconds.

There’s not just been a change in volume over time though.

From mid-2018 to mid-2020, most Rickrolls were posted to Reddit, but since then Twitter is the place for them. Why? We’re not sure. This could be an example of how memes move from one platform to the next over time.

Whatever the reason, Twitter is now the home of the Rickroll, especially on April Fool’s Day.

Bots vs humans

When we looked at the users who posted Rickrolls the most, we noticed something. Many of the top posters were bots (although their contribution to the whole conversation is tiny). This isn’t a nefarious thing, rather a prank in itself.

Let’s take the top Rickroll poster as an example. It’s the Reddit user Not_RepostSleuthBot, with 18k Rickrolls since 2019. This bot analyzes a Reddit post, determines whether it’s been posted before or not, and then replies with its results. But where does the Rickroll come in?

What looks like a link to a subreddit called r/repostsleuthbot is actually a link to Astley’s music video. And when we looked at the other top bot posters, they all used the same kind of prank.

It’s not all bots though. We found one, very dedicated, human who has posted over 400 Rickrolls to Reddit. Using the username ThomasTheTrolll, between Sep 2019 and Feb 2020, the account replied to any and all threads pretending to link to something of relevance.

We admire the dedication.

The top Rickrolls and the big name Rickrollers

To finish off, we dug up the most popular Rickrolls, and the biggest accounts attempting the prank themselves.

The 1st and 3rd most retweeted Rickrolls are from a now suspended account which parodied Variety magazine with a film-theme account. They posted a lot of Rickrolls while they were around, but here are the two most popular:

With both receiving thousands of retweets each, the author of these posts really had a strong understanding of internet culture and a knack for clickbait.

The 2nd most retweeted Rickroll is from Cravity, because no matter the topic, you can never escape K-pop.

And while they didn’t get the retweets others did, some big companies and names have engaged in the prank. Discord, Reddit, and Slack have all given it a go, as has Ted Cruz and Zach Braff. But there’s someone even more unexpected.

Even when you’re trying to save the world, there’s still time for levity.

What should we cover next?

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Thanks for reading

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Stay safe,

The Brandwatch Bulletin team

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