By early 2008 it had spread far enough to produce something that no one had predicted: a specific form of mass cultural synchronization, in which people across the world, on different platforms, in different countries, were all being surprised by the same face and the same voice.
## 2008: The Year the Meme Became a Cultural Fact
The period from early 2008 to late 2008 is when rickrolling moved from internet subculture to mainstream cultural reference, and a number of specific moments mark the transition.
In February 2008, members of the internet activist collective Anonymous were protesting outside the Church of Scientology at multiple locations. They played “Never Gonna Give You Up” from boomboxes. The protest videos spread online. It was the first major real-world manifestation of the meme — the prank leaving the browser window and entering physical space, documented and distributed.
On April 1, 2008, YouTube redirected all featured videos on its homepage to the “Never Gonna Give You Up” video as an April Fools’ Day joke. The prank received 6.6 million views in a single day. Google searches for both “Rick Astley” and “Rickrolling” peaked in that month, according to data from Know Your Meme. This was the moment when the meme reached the entire audience of one of the world’s largest websites simultaneously, a scale that no previous iteration of the joke had approached.
In the same period, the New York Mets opened a fan vote for their eighth-inning rally song. “Never Gonna Give You Up” received approximately five million write-in votes. The Mets organization declined to use it. The vote was evidence of how widely the meme had spread — millions of people who knew the joke well enough to apply it to a baseball team’s website.