By 2008, the meme had developed enough cultural mass that references to it could be made in mainstream media, in political contexts, and in live performance without requiring explanation. The Macy’s parade appearance was only possible because the audience for a live television broadcast — people who might not have been on 4chan in 2007 — already understood the reference. The meme had completed the journey from internet subculture to mainstream cultural vocabulary in roughly a year.
## 1 Billion Views and What That Number Means
The official “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video was uploaded to the official Rick Astley YouTube channel on October 25, 2009. This date is significant: it came more than two years after the meme began, which means the enormous early view counts that the rickrolling meme generated were on unauthorized uploads rather than the official video.
The official video passed one billion views on July 28, 2021. As of the research conducted for this article, the video has accumulated over 1.7 billion views and approximately 18 million likes. It was the fourth song from the 1980s to reach a billion views on YouTube, a milestone that places it in the same statistical tier as some of the most-viewed content in the history of the platform.
What does one billion views mean? It means one billion instances of the video being played, at minimum to the point where a view is registered — which on YouTube is typically defined as thirty seconds of watch time. One billion views does not mean one billion people were deceived — many of those views were from people actively choosing to watch the video, whether because they were rickrolling themselves, revisiting it ironically, listening to the song intentionally, or any number of other reasons. The meme generated a specific mode of engagement with the video that was separate from the traditional passive-listener relationship between a music video and its audience.