Rap Genius Raises $40M, Changes Name To Genius

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/11/just-genius/

by yurisagalov • 12 years ago

177 107 12 years ago

keehun2• 12 years ago

I wonder how much it cost them to get the domain name.

outericky• 12 years ago

Probably under $100k... Location location location, am I right? Even if it was more, that's your brand. As we've seen that search engines can make or break you, this is one of the few things you can control.

nicklovescode• 12 years ago

I'd be very surprised if 100k did the job. I would bet under $500k though. Still worth it.

sergiotapia3• 12 years ago

I thought there were three founders? Did they really just write off the third that got kicked off and no longer even mention him as a founder? Ice cold baby! Ice cold!

bcohen5055• 12 years ago

"It’s taken a few stumbles and one less founder to get here, but Genius tells me “we’re psyched to pursue our mission of global annotation with newfound vigor.”"

Mentioned but hidden...

sergiotapia3• 12 years ago

Curious, feel kind of sorry for him.

beachstartup• 12 years ago

he probably still has vested privileged shares of some sort. they'll definitely get diluted with further rounds but he'll still own part of the company.

nightpool5• 12 years ago

The original Business Insider article, with verified annotations from the Genius co-founders: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-inside-story-of-how-rap-g...

(and the HN comments page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8022076)

Also, we've been doing embeddable pages for a long time now! For example, see our embed with the Alantic on Google's self-driving cars back in May: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/google...

ghayes• 12 years ago

When looking at the article on BI, I feel the annotations take away from the flow of the article, rather than adding to it. I find myself constantly re-reading entire paragraphs to get back to the story.

nightpool5• 12 years ago

Hm, interesting! I think this might be a function of the annotation size—we try to keep single annotations short to maximize readability, but the author of the article seems to be breaking this rule, and having 3 page+ annotations definitely ends up detracting from the original text. (The one that stands out to me is the one that explains the background of the founders, and then just keeps going... And going... And going...) Its important to remember that this was probably the BI author's first time using the platform though, and I found the annotations from Tom, Ilan and Marc much more readable and concise.

tempestn• 12 years ago

I find the annotations interesting, but agree that they break up the flow. I think I prefer the style you see on some blogs where users can comment on specific paragraphs, and it will then show a little comment icon in the margin. However, that does restrict the specificity of the annotations.

NickWarner775• 12 years ago

I think it's a great idea to consolidate annotations for all kids of genres in one site, but it will surely make their lives much harder trying to keep track of all that. It's just so much more content than a company their size can sustain.

nightpool5• 12 years ago

Actually, there hasn't been any changes to the amount of content on Genius, we (the community) are just presenting it better! And while Genius has, off the top of my head, about 20 employees (including 9 engineers), they have 150+ community moderators that oversee the site's community and hundreds of community editors that are trusted with accepting and editing the site's annotations. Genius isn't a small project!

incision• 12 years ago

'...they have 150+ community moderators that oversee the site's community and hundreds of community editors that are trusted with accepting and editing the site's annotations...'

Are these people paid anything?

Also, isn't 'project' generally suggestive of something a bit more open than a VC-funded startup?

snide• 12 years ago

Can't help but be reminded of Entertainment 720 from the photos in this article. Congrats on the funding!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGSIf1KXGHs

For those that miss the reference.

diminoten• 12 years ago

It also helps that one of the founders has a passing resemblance to Jean Ralphio.

ErikRogneby• 12 years ago

When I saw this, I asked myself, "Is this the Onion?"

warrenmiller• 12 years ago

"embeddable annotations so any website can hover over text and see explanations and background info on what that text means." Doesn't this exist already, and for a while?

huffman• 12 years ago

Don't lots of websites have links and comments? It's not about the capabilities (which are a little more nuanced than "hover over text and see explanations") it's about the quality and community which creates the content.

pduszak• 12 years ago

So basically this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sidewiki

Slackwise• 12 years ago

Almost. The concept was great, the implementation, not so much. Sad that Google didn't improve upon it. (Then again, they're no longer an innovation house, as I see it.)

smegmalife• 12 years ago

Taking a queue from Diddy?

onewaystreet3• 12 years ago

Anyone else not like the black design? White would be more welcoming since they are going for a more universal appeal.

anExcitedBeast• 12 years ago

I wish more sites would adopt dark designs. Easier on the eyes and saves energy. When you spend 8-16 hours in from of a monitor every day those become important factors to consider.

sosborn• 12 years ago

saves energy

As far I understand this is not true. Can anyone smarter than me comment?

rootedbox• 12 years ago

They only save energy if you are using a CRT.

oblique632• 12 years ago

Not to mention it's just a breath of fresh air design-wise (when executed well), unlike the massive sea of indistinguishably homogenous 'light-themed' sites...

EDIT: I can't believe people seriously downvoted you for that simple comment. The pedantic negativity this community is filled with is ridiculous sometimes.

keehun2• 12 years ago

I would disagree that it's not easier on the eyes. At least 98% of dark-background designs. Perhaps this is just preference/different eye thing.

oftenwrong4• 12 years ago

I prefer black. White is harsh to me. I use an extension to turn white backgrounds grey in my browser.

bhauer• 12 years ago

Black is a bit stark, but I prefer it to white by a long margin. It's easier on the eyes.

Thanks to the advent of high-DPI displays on mobile devices, dark backgrounds with light fonts are more acceptable than they have been in the past. Unfortunately, desktop computing remains largely stuck in a low-DPI purgatory (only recently seeing disruption with the arrival of low-cost 4K displays). As long that purgatory remains, desktop computing is more amenable to light backgrounds with dark text. The reason for this is that generally, with low-DPI displays, small fonts (< 20px or so) will be rendered with a single-pixel stroke weight. A single-pixel stroke on a dark background is harder to visually resolve than a single-pixel dark stroke on a light background.

To-date, designs that use dark backgrounds have typically used bold or semi-bold fonts to compensate, but this is generally over-compensating, making all text look too heavy. (Browsers only recently started offering semi-bold.) High-DPI displays allow for normal-weight fonts to look clear when rendered light on dark.

I hope the trend toward darker backgrounds continues as more displays become high-DPI. When that happens, I want more user interface elements beyond the browser to use a light-on-dark motif as well.

mitchell2093• 12 years ago

Netflix recently redesigned to an mostly-white interface and I can't stand it. Harder on the eyes, boring, and less-recognizable as the Netflix brand. Their old color palette was perfect for their product.

oftenwrong4• 12 years ago

Hopefully the quality of the annotations will be better than on rap genius. It's mostly bad attempts at humor and unnecessary slang translations. I don't see the value in it.

flatline• 12 years ago

In all fairness, most pop music is pretty vacuous. The Wall annotations are pretty good, a nice mix of references from the movie and personal anecdotes of the band members, e.g. http://rock.genius.com/Pink-floyd-nobody-home-lyrics

lmg643• 12 years ago

i agree with both this and OP - while the format and function of the site is great for reading, i am usually underwhelmed by the annotations. in fairness to the annotators, the content they are annotating is often pretty inane - "he's bragging about his sexual prowess" etc etc.

perhaps we should rename is "genious". let's at least have a sense of humor about what we're doing here.

oftenwrong4• 12 years ago

You are right, the annotations on that are quite good.

sparkzilla• 12 years ago

The annotations for "Nobody Home" are weak, pseudo-intellectual warblings with very little added value.

"So far, the majority of the discussion of the song has focused on the discord created by the alternating ideas of artistic yearning and mundane if not altogether oppressive reality. But what of the chorus and its reiterations of nobody home? Just who is Pink trying to reach when I pick up the phone?"

Who indeed. There may be other sectors where the annotations work better, but that kind of "insight" doesn't make me want to go back.

nightpool5• 12 years ago

When was the last time you visited? Ignoring our other channels (many of which, including News and Lit (née Poetry), have been in place for a long time), we've been working very hard to decrease the "geekspeak" and unfunny humor annotations. Guidelines have been in place against these types of annotations since I've joined over 12 months ago, and we're still trying to work through the 3 year backlog of bad annotations, while keeping up with the new stuff. Try looking at some of our more popular pages, or some of the stuff on other channels, such as news.genius.com. There's a lot of value possible in annotating, analyzing and contextualizing primary sources!

oftenwrong4• 12 years ago

I had not visited for a long time, so I took a look. It does seem like the quality has improved for well-traveled song pages.

I think the last time I looked at Illmatic lyrics, and those are much, much better now than they used to be.

orbifold• 12 years ago

One thing that would be a very natural extension and really useful, would be annotations to scientific papers and books. I can't count the times I had to laborously fill in the arguments deemed trivial or obvious by the author, but were not terribly obvious at all. arxiv.org hosts a lot of them in source form, so modulo licensing issues and a good latex to html compiler, one could easily make them available for annotation. Other than that there are probably lots of interesting works that are in the public domain.

Obviously using "genius" and "iq-points" are just marketing and the number of rap fans are probably greater than the number of academics. So I don't know, if that is a viable thing to add.

tedks• 12 years ago

Maybe I'm just too white but I use rap genius primarily for slang translations. I listen to a lot of UK grime and rap genius is like a translate.google.com for grime. There's no way I'd be able to decode most of the stuff Skepta says otherwise.

antr• 12 years ago

Question: is there any out-of-the-box product/technology that isn't Genius that allows me to annotate text on my site? ala Medium, with user login, etc.?

ramykhuffash• 12 years ago

LiveFyre Sidenotes let people add comments on a per-paragraph basis, which is similar I guess: http://web.livefyre.com/streamhub/#liveSidenotes

MichaelGG• 12 years ago

Funny how this keeps going around. Internet Explorer used to have a "discussions" feature to add comments to arbitrary web pages. That was around 1999 or so, I think.

nobodyCares99• 12 years ago

annotatorjs.org

techaddict009• 12 years ago

How much might have they spent on Domain?

joeblau• 12 years ago

$40 million

onewaystreet3• 12 years ago

It must have been a real good offer because the former owner, publicly traded CallidusCloud, just launched a major product using the domain last month: http://calliduscloud.com/about-us/press-releases/pr-feed/cal...

Isofarro• 12 years ago

Which it acquired itself in February 2014: http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/geniu...

Interesting timing. I would not be surprised if the May launch of genius.com was just something hacked together over a weekend and launched just to push the domain price up.

There isn't much talk about genius.com around the May launch (apart from a bit of press-release marketing). And the focus in acquisition in February leads with LeadRocket, tacking on the brand Genius as an afterthought.

The domain details of genius.com was only switched to CallidusCloud's details in June: http://www.thedomains.com/2014/07/11/rapgenius-com-upgrades-... -- 4 months after acquiring the domain.

Interesting set of coincidences. I wonder when Callidus software knew of RapGenius' interest in the genius.com domain. And their original intentions for it when they acquired it in February.

jgalt212• 12 years ago

Is this an April Fool's Day joke, or a case study in failing upwards?

aheilbut• 12 years ago

Anyone remember Third Voice?

hboon• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice. The idea was ahead of its time. I remember it as a Singaporean company, but the Wikipedia page is thin on details.

jqm2• 12 years ago

Whoever gave this band of clowns 40 million is extremely socially irresponsible in my view.

Either that, or else they have a vested interest in social degradation. I haven't made up my mind which I believe yet.

Yep I'm biased. I can't stand rap genius nor those nappy haired punks that run it.

Some people might think this comment is simply ugly hatred. But it's a small shadow of what I've seen spewing out of rap genius guys. Can't_Stand_Them!

boling11• 12 years ago

Woah I'm taken aback at how hateful this comment is. What did these guys ever do to you? At the bare minimum, Rap Genius is a huuuge step up from all the other lyrics websites out there.

beedogs2• 12 years ago

Wow, an incoherent rant with nothing to back it up.

Have I stumbled into a MRA subreddit without knowing it?

jqm2• 12 years ago

There is nothing incoherent about that post.

And.. I freely admit my bias. I don't like these guys nor what they do. This isn't a science debate. I don't need "something to back it up".

sehr• 12 years ago

Hate them all you want, but nappy headed is a really offensive slur.

joemaller1• 12 years ago

Has Apple sued yet?

HistoryInAction• 12 years ago

Sounds like a Vox-killer to me. Good riddance to those explainer cards!

beggi• 12 years ago

Busy day for Dan Gilbert: http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/cavaliers/2014/07/1...

daenz• 12 years ago

Great for Rap Genius, but every time I read something about them, I think of this interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo

bane• 12 years ago

Please tell me this was some kind of parody. A stage full of impossibly lame "bro-schtick" cartoon characters and a live-action anime-style interviewer complete with absurd hair. I wouldn't have trusted these clowns to heat up a can of beans let alone put them in charge of millions of dollars and then "value" their company at an amount of money that could build house and feed a medium sized city for a decade.

I guess that goes to show what I know since they've executed pretty well and can apparently evaluate literature.

Maybe I'm just getting old but man is it depressing.

dkarapetyan2• 12 years ago

Silicon Valley and general startup culture these days has very little actual substance. If you don't have actual substance you have to substitute something else for it. I can't really think of words to describe what the substitute is but that linked video does a pretty good job.

wavefunction• 12 years ago

I'm with you. I'd prefer to maintain my current lifestyle if "success" meant having to act as douchey as these ass-clowns.

This is the end-result of privilege meeting a lack of consequences.

goldenkey2• 12 years ago

It's not because you are an old man. Compare that talk with the one with the Google Founders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdnp_7atZ0M

Rap Genius needs so much humble pie, they'd choke to death on it.

harkyns_castle• 12 years ago

What sickening, repulsive little wankers. It feels a bit surreal seeing what people will invest in, or enjoy.

KaiserPro• 12 years ago

Thats what cocaine does to you kids....

kmfrk• 12 years ago

Yep. If these people didn't exist, we'd have to invent them.

Perceptes• 12 years ago

This makes me embarrassed to work in tech in SF. :(

zenbowman2• 12 years ago

The only problem here is that RG is classified as a "tech" company. Its a legitimate business, but they don't sell technology, and neither does technology make or break them.

They happen to use web technology, but how is that different from the bakery next door that happens to use a payroll program or allows you to order online and home deliver? Or a company like Walmart (where arguably technology is a part of what makes them successful)?

The standards for what companies are classified as tech companies right now are extremely inconsistent. In my view, Rap Genius is a for-profit fanclub, not a tech company. Similarly, AirBnB is a travel and accommodation agent, not a tech company.

I define a tech company as a company for whom advanced technology is what they develop and sell (either as a product or service) - Microsoft, Google, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, Dropbox - all qualify.

Merely using technology doesn't make it a tech company, every business in the modern world uses technology, it doesn't make them "tech" companies.

goldenkey2• 12 years ago

Not all tech is like this. Consider the most successful tech company that exists, Google.

Both founders are extremely humble, cogent, and respectful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdnp_7atZ0M

It goes to show that even the most extreme success and fame, can still be processed without destroying your ethics.

cdr• 12 years ago

I think of http://valleywag.gawker.com/rap-genius-cofounder-resigns-ove...

ianstallings• 12 years ago

I've talked to Rap Genius directly before about some work they needed done and they were all business; Completely professional. I wouldn't give this interview too much weight. Their idea, adding value to existing knowledge through meta-content, is pretty solid IMHO.

infoseckid• 12 years ago

Another useless service --- here comes the bubble.

mitchell2093• 12 years ago

Obviously useless to you, but it's by far the best lyric site for hip hop. And with all of the subtle references in lyrics, the annotations can be invaluable in helping casual listeners understand an artist's message.

samweinberg• 12 years ago

Why do you think this is useless?

beedogs2• 12 years ago

When do they get sued by Gracenote, like all of the other lyrics sites of the past decade?

dzink• 12 years ago

I've owned Genieous.com for a number of years and it's been an empty page. Now I know why the number of visits spiked recently :)

computerjunkie• 12 years ago

Great for them. Just a couple suggestions for the website is to change the black colour scheme, possibly a lighter colour scheme.Viewing content can get more challenging overtime because of the colour scheme. "Lit" could be changed to "Literature", it doesn't make sense to name all other titles in full and leave one out. But I guess they are still in beta for the genius.com domain.

chippy• 12 years ago

I think annotations is a powerful idea. Imagine seeing all the annotations of your favourite satirist, or politician. Instead of a thinker writing their own blog, they could just annotate others - attacking, critiquing and defending.

This awesome power has to work with verification and moderation. No one likes trolls, and no one likes those who do not contribute to the discussion - but no one likes sterile, conformist, one-sided annotations either.

What my ideal annotation service would provide free expansion of ideas rather than at best a kind of directors commentary.

ssanders82• 12 years ago

About 5 years ago I submitted a post here asking for comments on an online text discussion/annotation tool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=821559

Rap Genius looks very similar; glad someone made this work.

0xeeeeeeee• 12 years ago

I'm still very curious how they plan to make money. I guess we will have to see...

In my opinion urban dictionary actually solves the same problem that Rap Lyrics is solving except instead of explaining a whole sentence urban dictionary explains one-a few words.

notastartup• 12 years ago

Waiting for the bubble to burst.

unclesaamm• 12 years ago

"The company also launched an iPhone app earlier this year that also helps ween the startup off of Google’s teat."

Wow, really weird word choice.

Rap Genius Raises $40M, Changes Name To Genius

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