About

Ballpit Challenge is a video fad in which participants climb up and fall into inflatable ball cages found in supermarkets. Footage of the challenge is typically uploaded to Vine and Instagram with the hashtag #ballpit.

Origin

On March 31st, 2013, YouTuber BakkGround Records uploaded a video of a teenage girl climbing to the top of a ballpit at Walmart and intentionally dropping herself into the balls below (shown below). In the first two years, the video gained over 330,000 views and 700 comments.

Spread

On the same day, Redditor LBJ19 submitted the video to the /r/cringe^[2] subreddit, where it received a total of 2,300 votes (73% upvoted) prior to being archived. On August 4th, 2013, the "Ballpit Challenge" Tumblr^[1] blog was launched, which highlights notable videos of people performing the challenge. The first post contained an Instagram video by user catlynsadie17 crawling inside of a supermarket ballpit (shown below).

On August 6th, BuzzFeed^[3] highlighted several ballpit challenge videos posted on Vine under the tag "#ballpit." On the following day, Business Insider^[5] reported on the Vine trend, noting that the "dare looks somewhat dangerous." On August 8th, UpRoxx^[4] published an article about the video fad, referring to it as "infuriating."

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Not available.

External References