2010s Pop Culture Trivia
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130 free 2010s Pop Culture trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
71 free 2010s pop culture trivia questions with answers. These 2010s pop culture trivia questions and answers cover the whole decade, from the first iPad and the royal wedding of 2011 through Gangnam Style, the Harlem Shake, the Ice Bucket Challenge and the great dress debate, to Fyre Festival, Old Town Road and the final season of Game of Thrones. You will find memes and viral challenges alongside the biggest movies, albums, TV finales, apps and celebrity moments of the 2010s. The early questions are easy enough for anyone who spent the decade online; the later ones dig into the details that only true pop culture obsessives remember, like the real name of Grumpy Cat, what Snapchat was first called, and how much Rebecca Black's mother paid for the "Friday" video. It works as a solo warm-up, a party round or a themed pub quiz. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedia entries and primary reporting before publishing, so the facts hold up when the arguments start.
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Q 01Which music video became the first on YouTube to reach one billion views, in December 2012?
"Gangnam Style"
"Gangnam Style" later passed 2,147,483,647 views, the most a 32-bit counter can hold, so YouTube upgraded its view counter to 64 bits.
Q 02The Ice Bucket Challenge that flooded social media in summer 2014 raised money to fight which disease?
ALS
ALS research in the US gained $115 million in about two months, money that helped fund the 2016 discovery of NEK1, a gene linked to the disease.
Q 03The Harlem Shake videos of February 2013 were all set to a track by which producer?
Baauer
Baauer's track debuted at number one in the very week Billboard began counting US YouTube views in the Hot 100, so thousands of meme uploads counted as plays.
Q 04What were the real colours of "the dress" that split the internet in February 2015?
Black and blue
Black and blue was the real one, and no white and gold version was on sale, so its maker, Roman Originals, produced a single white and gold dress and auctioned it for Comic Relief.
Q 05Nintendo's market value doubled over Pokémon Go in July 2016, but which company actually developed it?
Niantic
Niantic built it on the map of its earlier game Ingress, and Nintendo's shares fell 18 percent in a day once it reminded investors that it didn't make the game.
Q 06Which toy craze took over school playgrounds in 2017?
Fidget spinners
Fidget spinners were sold as aids to focus and calm, yet some schools banned them for disrupting lessons.
Q 07Frozen (2013) was the top-grossing animated film until which fully computer-generated 2019 remake out-earned it?
The Lion King
The Lion King took about $1.65 billion, but Disney billed it as live action, so Frozen II was later reported as the highest-grossing animated film instead.
Q 08Avengers: Endgame became the highest-grossing film of all time in July 2019 by overtaking which movie?
Avatar
Avatar took the crown back in 2021 thanks to a re-release in China.
Q 09Who was chosen as king in the Game of Thrones finale?
Bran Stark
Bran Stark was elected by a council of lords and ladies, capping a final season so divisive that more than a million fans signed a petition asking HBO to remake it.
Q 10Which photo-sharing app did Mark Zuckerberg's company buy for roughly $1 billion in April 2012?
Instagram had only 13 employees at the time, a price of about $77 million a head, yet it went on to pass a billion monthly users by June 2018.
Q 11Vine, the six-second looping video app, was shut down in January 2017 by which parent company?
Twitter bought Vine in October 2012, months before the app had even launched, then closed it four years after its debut, leaving only a camera tool.
Q 12Which word did Oxford Dictionaries name its Word of the Year for 2013?
Selfie
Selfie was traced to a 2002 Australian online forum, where a man posted a photo of his injured face after tripping on some steps and apologised for the focus.
Q 13Prince William and Catherine Middleton married on 29 April 2011 at which London venue?
Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey was only the first act: William later drove his bride out of Buckingham Palace in his father's Aston Martin, dressed up newlywed-style by friends.
Q 21Tardar Sauce, an Arizona pet who died in 2019, was better known online by which name?
Grumpy Cat
Grumpy Cat's scowl came from an underbite and feline dwarfism, and her owner's daughter named the kitten after tartar sauce, which her colouring recalled.
Q 22Kabosu, a pet photographed by her kindergarten-teacher owner in Japan, became the face of which meme?
Doge
Doge made a star of the rescue Shiba Inu, and in December 2013 her face was put on Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency launched as a joke.
Q 23The disastrous Fyre Festival of 2017 was supposed to take place on an island in which country?
The Bahamas
The Bahamas' Great Exuma greeted guests promised luxury villas and gourmet meals with relief-style tents and cheese sandwiches.
Q 14Which musical won 11 Tony Awards from a record 16 nominations?
Hamilton
Hamilton's 16 nominations came in only 13 categories because its castmates competed against one another, and one of them, Leslie Odom Jr., won Best Actor in a Musical.
Q 15E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey began life as fan fiction of which book series?
Twilight
Twilight's Edward and Bella were the original leads of her story, Master of the Universe, posted online as "Snowqueens Icedragon" before she renamed them Christian and Ana.
Q 16Which film was mistakenly announced as Best Picture at the 2017 Oscars?
La La Land
La La Land's producers were already giving their speeches when one of them, Jordan Horowitz, announced that Moonlight had won; the presenters had been handed the wrong envelope.
Q 17Which actor held the phone for the star-packed group photo Ellen DeGeneres tweeted from the 2014 Oscars?
Bradley Cooper
Bradley Cooper took the shot because the host couldn't fit everyone in; she captioned it "If only Bradley's arm was longer", and it beat Barack Obama's retweet record.
Q 18"Left Shark" became a meme after dancing out of sync behind which singer at the 2015 Super Bowl halftime show?
Katy Perry
Katy Perry's lawyers later tried to register Left Shark as a trademark, but a US trademark examiner rejected the design.
Q 19Which mobile game did Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen pull from app stores in February 2014?
Flappy Bird
Flappy Bird was reportedly earning $50,000 a day from ads when Dong Nguyen removed it, saying he felt guilty that the game had become so addictive.
Q 20Which company bought Minecraft developer Mojang for $2.5 billion in 2014?
Microsoft
Microsoft's deal began with a tweet: creator Markus "Notch" Persson asked if anyone wanted to buy his share of Mojang so he could move on with his life.
Q 24Which hybrid pastry had New Yorkers lining up outside Dominique Ansel's SoHo bakery within days of its 2013 launch?
Cronut
Cronut mania began within three days of launch, with queues down the block, and Ansel filed to trademark the name nine days after it went on sale.
Q 25The viral 2012 short film Kony 2012 was produced by which organisation?
Invisible Children
Invisible Children set out to make Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony famous enough to be arrested by the end of 2012, and its film drew more than 20 million views in three days.
Q 26Sharknado, the 2013 made-for-TV movie that took over social media, aired on which channel?
Syfy
Syfy drew just 1.4 million viewers for the premiere, but the online frenzy earned the film midnight cinema screenings and five sequels.
Q 27Serial, the 2014 podcast that turned true crime into a mainstream obsession, was hosted by whom?
Sarah Koenig
Sarah Koenig's series raised doubts about Adnan Syed's conviction for the murder of Hae Min Lee, and in 2022 he was released from prison.
Q 28Which emoji did Oxford Dictionaries choose as its Word of the Year for 2015?
Face with Tears of Joy
Face with Tears of Joy made up 20 percent of all emoji used in the UK in 2015, up from 4 percent a year earlier, which is why Oxford picked it.
Q 29The 2018 audio clip that divided the internet had listeners hearing either "Laurel" or which other name?
Yanny
Yanny was what nearly half of one online poll heard in an opera singer's recording of "laurel" for Vocabulary.com, because some ears favour the clip's higher frequencies.
Q 30Which rapper's 2019 hit spent a then-record 19 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100?
Lil Nas X
Lil Nas X saw Billboard pull "Old Town Road" from its country chart for not fitting the genre, then released a remix with country star Billy Ray Cyrus that stayed on top into August.