Rapgenius.com Traffic and Demographic Statistics

https://www.quantcast.com/rapgenius.com?country=GLOBAL

by themichael • 13 years ago

120 127 13 years ago

This is comparing pre-Christmas-day traffic to Christmas-day traffic. Many people spend December 25th doing very different things than they do other days of the year.

rlt3• 13 years ago

I'd say it probably has something to do with Google penalizing them.

A lot of people get new albums from the holidays and would want to look up lyrics.

jjaredsimpson• 13 years ago

either way, 1 data point isn't a trend. wait and see is the best course of action.

thehodge• 13 years ago

If you compare last years Quantcast traffic on christmas day to this years.. it wasn't that much of a drop compared to the few days surrounding it.

ZitchDog• 13 years ago

A good way to account for this is to look at year-over-year change. It looks like on Dec 25 last year, they took a 13% hit[1]. So it appears that their 60% hit today should be tempered a bit, to account for this. Even still, I think we can say that this is a very bad day for Rap Genius - especially when you consider that they have a lot of artificial publicity due to the currently unfolding scandal.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/lidlugtdycdrrnx/Screenshot%202013-...

Goopplesoft• 13 years ago

The next top result for lyrics thats 'Quantified' on that site: https://www.quantcast.com/lyricsfreak.com?qcLocale=en_US shows a slight drop.

Edit: Google Trends for 'lyrics' the past month http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=lyrics&date=today%201...

freebs• 13 years ago

They're on page 7 for their brand name. Christmas probably had little to do with that drop.

https://www.google.com/search?q=rap+genius&oq=rap+genius&aqs...

officemonkey• 13 years ago

Like nobody posting to Facebook in the morning, combined with completely crashing Steam in the afternoon.

ecaron2• 13 years ago

Can someone explain why this is a topic worthy of discussion? I get that they had a SEO tactic, Google penalized them, they offered an empty apology for it, and now we're up to the present.

Stating the obvious of "traffic drops when Google penalizes you" seems like a "sun rose again today"-type story.

fat0wl2• 13 years ago

eh i think this falls into the category of "if you don't care don't click the link". some people are interested in stats...

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

I think folks are interested to see how much the penalty hurts.

bushido• 13 years ago

I personally know of a number of legitimate sites that were invariably affected due to content and blog farms harvesting their content when Google's panda algorithm rolled out.

Those penalties hurt a lot of good people!

Anyways, this one is a bit more complex than how much the penalty hurts, rather it's because, a well known and well funded start-up adopted shoddy traffic building practices that were unacceptable years ago, got caught and then had swift and targeted judgement bestowed upon them.

However much people understand that sometimes business needs to be conducted in a grey area, there is a certain amount of satisfaction when the system catches up and behaves fairly.

wozniacki• 13 years ago

I think people - foreigners and valley outsiders for the most part - are often genuinely clueless about the workings of the valley.

They are quite apprehensive of the degree of even-handedness that is at play in the valley. They suspect an air of nuanced in-group favoritism, within startups here, that help propel some and sink others.[1]

Hopefully these kind of actions (on behalf of Google) help dispel such notions.

[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/09/13/silicon_v...

adamnemecek4• 13 years ago

Part of it might be Schadenfreude since HN does not seem to think much of RG.

fat0wl2• 13 years ago

why is that? i assumed HN would like then since i remember a bunch of articles about RG being big RoR proponents

AndrewKemendo3• 13 years ago

I think this is exactly it.

Their affect is another example of cultural appropriation of "urban" culture by three very affluent guys (Stanford & Yale grads), which I think turns a lot of people off, including myself. As someone who genuinely grew up in that culture, it is painfully cringe worthy and just sad to see people who have no background in it adopt it. Their Disrupt interview was a genuine display of the generally awkward douchebaggery that comes from that appropriation.

So when I see folks like this do poorly because of arrogance, it is indeed schadenfreude.

gojomo5• 13 years ago

Beware trying to assess "what HN thinks" about a topic from informal, personal scans of items. Neither the top stories, nor the longest/loudest threads, are necessarily representative of 'most readers' or even 'most commenters' – just those that show up at those times/places.

Where the especially peeved choose to spend their attention (and comments and upvotes) can make lots of people or companies seem like community bete noires – even if most of the HN audience thinks the targets are fine or even admirable, but just has less energy for anti-carping.

mikeevans• 13 years ago

Not sure, but I'm sure it doesn't hurt that RG is a YC company.

orenbarzilai• 13 years ago

Google just proved all that when someone breaks their laws they punish him, even if it's a YC company.

Who knows maybe because they are a well funded YC company Google decided to make an example out of them and won't forgive them so quickly.

skizm4• 13 years ago

It is interesting to see just how much it hurts a site like RG.

belorn2• 13 years ago

In one of the other threads, some stated that Google do not have monopoly status. The claim they used was that google only has 25% of the search market.

This topic is interesting because it shows how much in a monopoly status google really is in in controlling where traffic goes on the net.

res0nat0r2• 13 years ago

I'd replace the word monopoly with popular.

angryasian5• 13 years ago

you are not using that word correctly. If Google was the only company doing search and prevented others from entering the market you would be correct. Being the best through a superior product and innovating is not a monopoly.

gojomo5• 13 years ago

Interesting point!

Google's search team has been famously resistant to any influence by Google's sales/marketing teams on ranking decisions. Search quality gave rise to the 'golden goose', after all, and the self-conception of the team, and its individual members, is based on independence from purely money-grubbing considerations.

But I wonder, what happens when Google's antitrust lawyers came to the ranking team, and say: "soften this penalty [or otherwise tweak these quality-rankings], because otherwise we'll be in more trouble with regulators or leave too much evidence of market-power."

Could the search team still say, "buzz off, we're sticking to what we know from the numbers is what's best for our users"? Or does keeping regulators happy, and avoiding smoking-gun fact-patterns, trump everything? I suspect it often will, because of the unique risks of state enforcement and appearing unlawful. It's also easier to rationalize "we're sacrificing our own idea of what's best because the law seems to require it" (even if the actual risk is fuzzy before losing in a formal legal process) than "we're doing this to make the guys over in ads/mobile/etc a bit more money this quarter".

dragonwriter3• 13 years ago

This topic is interesting because it shows how much in a monopoly status google really is in in controlling where traffic goes on the net.

Does it? I mean, is there any reason to believe that Rap Genius is typical in their degree of dependence on Google here?

NamTaf• 13 years ago

You call it a "SEO tactic" here but I'm sure you'd not bat an eyelid if it were referred to as "growth hacking" elsewhere.

The problem is how much power Google holds over most of the web. You game the results and they turn their attention on you? Congrats, you're wiped out.

Essentially, there's a very blurry line between 'growth hacking' and 'being annihilated by Google' and no-one's really sure where it is. That's what's interesting here.

obstacle12• 13 years ago

there's a very blurry line between 'growth hacking' and 'being annihilated by Google' and no-one's really sure where it is. That's what's interesting here.

Except in the cases where the line isn't blurry, i.e. the well-defined set of rules about which G has repeatedly said "we'll penalize you for ignoring these!" Unfortunately the tactic RG used wasn't a blurry-line grey-area tactic, it was one G clearly said don't use.

benihana• 13 years ago

Can someone explain why this is a topic worthy of discussion?

I find it incredibly interesting to know just how hard they got hit. I find it interesting that maybe someone from rap genius will be in these comments providing some extra context and insight.

Can you explain why you care if other people discuss a topic you don't think is "worthy" of discussion? You know you can ignore the story and look at the entire rest of the front page, right?

ecaron2• 13 years ago

Can you explain why you care if other people discuss a topic you don't think is "worthy" of discussion?

I thought there might be a piece to this story that I was missing. I gained a lot of value from the replies to my question (esp. the conversation spawned from @snowwrestler's comment.)

You know you can ignore the story and look at the entire rest of the front page, right?

You didn't really need this in your comment. It was a bit of snark that devalued your otherwise justified response.

logicallee• 13 years ago

For me, it's incredibly interesting because I did not find anything wrong with the tactic they used: in fact, it is far, far better than actual SPAM techniques they could have used instead. Or the bullshit tweaks to content that other sites use to improve SEO score, when those tweaks do not benefit the consumer in any way.

Think about the fact that there's a human in the loop, and that it's a plug or tit-for-tat. The ways that companies actually do SEO 'within the rules' is way, way worse than that.

Also as a consumer I have only been on their site < 10 times but I loved it each time. It is an actual benefit for them to gain ranking. They have a real service, and a good one.

It also seems quite genuine, from the tone of the email. Totally normal.

You might think I have some association with rapgenius, but I don't: my only association is that the handful of times I got to their site, I was absolutely thankful and totally surprised at the quality of the result.

By contrast, there is a good chance there are textual quotations I've searched for where I missed good commentary there that I would have appreciatied.

All of these aspects, especially above-all the fact that consumers are happy when they do get to the rapgenius site, that combine to make this story very interesting to me.

I see rapgenius as the good guys, and very honest, in their attempt to gain additional exposure on real content.

joelrunyon3• 13 years ago

The funny thing about this whole controversy is that they're getting more organic links to rapgenius.

When the penalty is taken care of - they may be sitting in a better position than they were previously.

d233• 13 years ago

I don't think organic links matter much at this point when you can't even Google their name and find them on the front page.

d0ugie• 13 years ago

If you're right, and were this actually intentional too, well, that would be genius.

But given that their traffic is maybe off two-thirds now and that it is unknown how long google will leave the lights on (weeks, maybe months), during which time this will be long-flushed out of the news cycle and it becomes harder and harder to recover, and harder to secure things like more capital when you look this stupid, that's a high-risk bet. I'd say sabotage is more likely.

ruswick• 13 years ago

Why? Because the sheer magnitude is crazy. Rap Genius's traffic fell by nearly two thirds! This is a very prominent, YC-affiliated startup that is being nuked by Google. It should come as no surprise that the news is seen as significant by the HN crowd.

Moreover, I think many people are upset with the scope of Google's punishment. De-weighting RG is one thing, nuking it into the ground is entirely different, and is in my opinion unwarranted. Even searching directly for the name of the site does not yield any Rap Genius results.

If I type "Rap Genius" into Google, I am justified in expecting Rap Genius to be the first result. Period. When Google goes out of its way to effectively expunge a site from existence (to the extent that Google can expunge a site), they are doing a massive disservice to their users and are degrading the quality of their search results.

There is no reason that a response of this magnitude by Google is justified, and by issuing such a draconian response, Google has lessened the usability of their product and done a disservice to their users.

GuiA• 13 years ago

De-weighting RG is one thing, nuking it into the ground is entirely different, and is in my opinion unwarranted. If I type "Rap Genius" into Google, I am justified in expecting Rap Genius to be the first result. Period. When Google goes out of its way to effectively expunge a site from existence (to the extent that Google can expunge a site), they are doing a massive disservice to their users and are degrading the quality of their search results.

Necessary reminder that Google does whatever the fuck they want with their service, and that no one is in a position to expect anything. Does it suck? Yes. Is it a predictable outcome of the free market on which Silicon Valley and the tech industry in General is built? You bet.

dragonwriter3• 13 years ago

Moreover, I think many people are upset with the scope of Google's punishment. De-weighting RG is one thing, nuking it into the ground is entirely different, and is in my opinion unwarranted.

If the impact wasn't significant, it wouldn't be a disincentive to engage in black hat SEO.

There is no reason that a response of this magnitude by Google is justified

Yes, there are reasons. The reasons are "specific deterrence" and "general deterrence".

zach• 13 years ago

Penalties are blunt instruments.

The whole point of this penalty is that Google cannot trust the signals that are in its index when it comes to Rap Genius's site. And it sure isn't Google's fault that they can't.

Can Google subtract out all the "naughty stuff" and decide if Rap Genius deserves to even be on the front page for "rap genius" anymore? I doubt it.

If Google's search had a category for "obvious searches" then yes, maybe they could apply a penalty as delicately as possible. But delicateness is not really the point. Dropping them down 50 spots is blunt and simple. I think everything about this approach makes sense.

joelrunyon3• 13 years ago

Cutts has said before their goal is to "break the black hatters spirit" (http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-search-spa...). I assume that's what they're trying to do here.

chris123• 13 years ago

The response was designed to send a message. And it seems to have accomplished that.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Fundamentally it is the magnitude. Web sites often manage themselves to a metric called "RPM" or revenue per thousand. It can be thousand 'views' or for people who are interested in accuracy per thousand 'visits'. Unique IPs often translate as a good metric for 'visits'.

So if your traffic is 1.5M uniques and drops to .5 uniques, then your revenue may also have just dropped 66%. If you were staffed to be cash flow positive at your previous traffic rate, you now find yourself burning cash at an alarming rate. Your response, dictated by your reserves, is either lay off a bunch of people to curb your burn rate, or delay your accounts payable, or both. If this happens at an 'inconvienient' time, it can sour acquisitions in process, or deals with initial outlays, to be blunt it can kill you.

So then here is the thing, Google has no good way of knowing how you got to your organic ranking. There is no 'what is the rank of this place without these links' sorts of computations. So there isn't a good way to judge. But judge they must, lest others abuse their algorithm, and so they do so.

Now lets speculate that they kill off Rap Genius. Overall what does that do? Who does it help? Is it justice?

Lots of thorny ethical questions, not many good answers. And no way to make restitution. A sad place to be.

joshmlewis• 13 years ago

It looks like this is because all the stats aren't in for December 25th yet. If you look at other sites, they also have a slant. It didn't look like last year Christmas traffic had much of an effect on numbers, so I will credit this to information not being complete yet.

Kiro• 13 years ago

OT but how do lyrics sites handle copyright issues?

k-mcgrady2• 13 years ago

I believe they are meant to license the lyrics although accordingly to this article many don't: http://consequenceofsound.net/2013/11/rap-genius-and-other-l...

random42• 13 years ago

It'd be interesting to see which website(s) benefited from the diversion of this traffic.

ivanbrussik3• 13 years ago

still way way too early to tell, lets take a look on the 28th before we all go making friends

sarreph• 13 years ago

What do you mean exactly by 'making friends'?

ivanbrussik3• 13 years ago

lol its too early...friends = threads :)

ivanbrussik3• 13 years ago

its way too early to be friends as well, lets wait a few days.

programminggeek• 13 years ago

This is not at all surprising, they did a dumb thing because they got desperate and greedy.

In the words of DMX, stop being greedy: http://rapgenius.com/Dmx-stop-being-greedy-lyrics

Also, as of right now they aren't showing up on google for "stop being greedy rap genius" https://www.google.com/search?q=stop+being+greedy+rap+genius

notastartup• 13 years ago

Another one of DMX's classics: X Gonna Give It To You http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jkeRpQKFDg

    Arf arf
    Yeah, yeah, yeah (Grrrr)
    Uh, Yeah don't get it twisted
    This rap shit, is mine

What if X is actually Google? Could DMX have predicted this whole ordeal? 63% drop in traffic is absolutely insane. It's not like Google is going to backtrack their decision so recovery seems impossible now when typing rap genius doesn't even show up their main site.

yalogin• 13 years ago

Why is Rap Genius afforded this coverage? There are a lot of SEO scammers out there and are punished as found. Reading through one of those TC articles it appears that they were interviewed on stage by TC during one of their events too. Why is a scammy link baity company given this importance?

trevelyan• 13 years ago

Presumably because they are playing and pushing the story to get more inbounds links and thus higher SEO.

The real story is that Google is incompetent and incapable of identifying these sorts of things unless a company is called out publicly on it. No wonder their search results are increasingly a disaster zone.

jeffmould• 13 years ago

Was about to write a similar response. In the end they will walk away with the penalty removed, and hundreds of links from bloggers talking about this story. While the links may not be the highest of quality in terms, they will still be links from sites like TechCrunch, The Verge, and many others with high PR scores. The story will die down over the next couple days and then I am sure we will see another influx of stories as their ranking increases again, providing more links to their domain again.

sanderjd• 13 years ago

Yeah, you're right, missing this makes them incompetent.

Does that word have any meaning at all anymore? It seems like everyone who isn't an amazing brilliant self-made billionaire is incompetent. Oh wait, I forgot, we were discussing the incompetence of a bunch of amazing brilliant self-made billionaires... So I guess it's everybody now.

skrebbel• 13 years ago

Three reasons:

1) The site itself isn't actually half bad, especially when compared to other lyrics sites.

2) They're a YC company, and took money from other big investors. This automatically makes them high-profile on places like HN.

3) The founders often publically act like douchebags, write emails with bad spelling, and generally seem to think that being cool is the most important part of running a startup. I suspect that this is just for show, but still, many people want to see them fail because of this. This article is about them failing, so it gets upvoted by those people.

greghinch• 13 years ago

#3 definitely is why there is so much enthusiasm running around regarding their punishment

AVTizzle• 13 years ago

Also, nobody seems to mention the fact that this story was created out of an HN thread... I imagine that has a lot to do with everyone's interest in it.

judk2• 13 years ago

On 3, I wonder if they think being cool is the most important part, or the reality is that they are executing on everything AND ALSO trying to be cool to differentiate themselves AMD get noticed, but the critics only see the PR front and ignore the rest.

ryguytilidie• 13 years ago

I'll give you a hint: the other SEO scammers aren't YC companies...

metaobject• 13 years ago

What exactly did they do that google didn't like?

k-mcgrady2• 13 years ago

They recruited bloggers and offered to tweet links to their posts in exchange for putting code linking to RG pages on their blog. It was on here a few days ago and Google quickly removed them from 1st page search results as punishment.

skizm4• 13 years ago

As a total aside, how do sites like Quantcast and Alexa get traffic information from other websites that they don't have code on? (or do they?) I feel like getting accurate traffic statistics on one's own website is tough enough.

temuze• 13 years ago

Depends on the measurement company, but it's normally a mix between ISPs, browser toolbars and panels.

raldi2• 13 years ago

Many of them just make it up:

http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-...

jonknee• 13 years ago

Actually no, in this case it's directly measured. Quantcast only shows exact stats for sites that include their JS tracker. Sites normally do this for advertising purposes (advertisers don't have to wonder about your traffic).

jhonovich• 13 years ago

This is 'directedly measured data' from RapGenius (notice the icon / message in the upper right hand corner). RapGenius voluntarily added tracking code to their website to enable Quantcast to do this.

In this case, then, the numbers are likely to be quite accurate.

skizm4• 13 years ago

Ah, cool. I did not see that. That makes much more sense.

ateevchopra• 13 years ago

Thats well quite as expected. But I think out of those 493K, most is from the blogs posting their penalty news. This might go even lower !

wehadfun• 13 years ago

Could they simply pay Google $$$ to fix this issue?

omarchowdhury• 13 years ago

Haha!

dbg31415• 13 years ago

I'm sorry, do we really think that Christmas is an accurate sample day? L2Math.

jpatel33• 13 years ago

Its example where trick of growth hacking went wrong!

Mc_Big_G• 13 years ago

This is the best PR stunt ever.

jpatel33• 13 years ago

accidental one!

ddorian432• 13 years ago

Worse happened to Quickmeme when they were banned from reddit for bot-voting.

AlecSchueler• 13 years ago

Do you have any sources/further information on their numbers?

ddorian432• 13 years ago

http://www.reddit.com/r/JusticePorn/comments/1hgceg/quickmem...

jpatel33• 13 years ago

Funnily, that gives idea that how much traffic bing contribute.

tarheel12• 13 years ago

Thats a huge drop. How accurate is Quantcast?

johnpowell2• 13 years ago

From my experience. Fairly accurate.

Phil_Latio• 13 years ago

When even the main domain is on page 6 or whatever, it will drop more. Quantcast requires site owners to implement a tracker, so I guess it's pretty accurate.

Here is some drastic example I found recently (thin/spammy content penalty I guess):

http://extremetracking.com/free?login=fm3u91 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/freemp3us.com

From 14,000,000 uniques a month down to ~80 a day :D But obviously Google still has work to do, since that site made a lot of money within that 1-2 months period.

arn• 13 years ago

in this case, very accurate. Rapgenius has Quantcast analytics codes on their website.

lanbird• 13 years ago

hahaha hope its not after my suggestion to google on there facebook page

amirhirsch• 13 years ago

you're looking at christmas day. it'll be more interesting in a week.

exizt88• 13 years ago

Interesting thing to note: the severity of penalty may be hurting Google too. It was already mentioned that Rap Genius lyrics can't be found even when the words "Rap Genius" are included in the query. So when a user wants to find a Rap Genius lyrics page via Google (as is the custom for most of them), Google fails to provide them with a relevant result.

infruset• 13 years ago

What if the remaining traffic is mainly due to HN people reading this article? Then they're in real trouble..

nailer• 13 years ago

What does 'online' mean? How can there be more people mobile than the total online?

001sky• 13 years ago

Error! We are unable to retrieve traffic data for this property at the moment.

Well, thats intersting...

mrbuchuk• 13 years ago

Their site traffic growth over the past 6 months is impressive. And Google hit them where it hurts most given that 70% of their visits come via search. More details on Rapgenius.com analytics here http://www.similarweb.com/website/rapgenius.com

mvkel• 13 years ago

The more interesting point is how this illustrates how many businesses are almost completely reliant on Google to make their business viable.

We hear all the time that it's not good business practice to rely on someone else's service to drive one's business (building a Facebook app as a business, etc.), but how many of us include Google search results in the mix?

Rapgenius.com Traffic and Demographic Statistics

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