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Comment by yvoschaap2 | Hacker News Reader

Hi, OP here. Happy to answer any specific question...

Why does https://www.directlyrics.com have a TITLE of "Azlyrics" and an H1 of "Azlyrics" but http://www.azlyrics.com seems to be an entirely unrelated web site? The latter is typically what I end up at when I search for song lyrics if I click one of the first few links (though if I want to read some amusing analysis, usually there is a Genius.com link a few below).

Yes, good eye. A great example of continuious testing SEO opportunities.

What if Google would start ranking directlyrics on specific 'azlyrics' queries? I haven't seen it happen yet, but if it worked... expect it to be reverted next week.

Right, so you're using one of your competitors' names quite prominently on your own site? And, er, you think that's ok?

It's AZLyrics's responsibility to police their own trademarks, so it's okay, unless they say it is not in a C&D letter.

So it's legally okay, as far as we know.

Still a dick move, though. It's not okay in my opinion. But I'm not the one who may gain or lose thousands of dollars by deciding whether or not to do it, either. I can't say for certain whether it would be okay or not from outside my comfy judgment armchair.

It's blatant, intentional trademark infringement for direct commercial gain. IANAL, but I would think this might result in something quite a bit more expensive than a C&D -- like a lawsuit with punitive damages.

ETA: and now the site owner is on record here on HN stating that the intent was to steal search traffic. I'm sure this is a cutthroat business ... but this is an open invitation for one's own throat to be cut.

So many lawyers here on HN, I forgot...

Yeah man these people are crazy

It's not us you need to worry about. Good luck!

The USPTO trademark search system (TESS [0]) reveals that "azlyrics" is not a registered trademark [in the US].

If the company hasn't registered it, and doesn't enforce it, it is not a trademark.

[0] http://tess2.uspto.gov/

On "initial interest confusion":

http://www.klemchuk.com/30-trademark-infringement-by-meta-ta...

Yeah, that's incredibly shady.

The whole thing is pretty parasitic.

'How I let other people create so I don't have to work'

Reminds me of how some companies will take out Adwords for direct competitors' names to show up in the top of search results for their competitors.

So you're putting the name of a competitor on your site to see if it improves your seo? You're a madlad! I wonder if it'll work.

Where did the initial seeding of all the lyrics & bands come from? Also, are most of the new lyrics contributed by users and if so how do you handle authenticating that the lyrics provided are accurate?

My license provider has a database of over 1.2M lyrics.

But matter of fact is that Directlyrics hosts only around 10k. A decision made early on to focus on less pages compared to competitors that needed to rank 1M+ paghes.

So where did the lyrics come from when you started the site? Did you type them out yourself, take from some other site in the same niche, etc?

How has the advent of ad blockers affected your revenue stream?

I never measured that. But the numbers I deal with are so large, that even after blocking the number of ad impressions are still huge.

The biggest revenue hit was the decline of ringtone revenue.

Have you ever studied what your competition is doing wrong and why you've managed to stay ahead of them for so long?

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