29-Year-Old Gets $15 Million to Decipher Song Lyrics

But once they started talking about Sandberg and Andreessen annotating books, speeches, reports, etc... that has to be where they're headed. I can see some sort of monetization strategy there.

If the site focus eventually shifts (and I doubt this was planned from the beginning) to "true experts explaining things," I can see a lot of potential there. Maybe not "bigger than Google," but certainly far "bigger than a lyrics explanation site."

The founders court popularity as their primary business function, and they hype Rap Genius lavishly.

Monetization is completely an afterthought.

I am convinced that Rap Genius is the purest consumer play.

But I've found Rap Genius useful recently for finding explanations of poems by Yeats,Wordsworth and many others. The convenience of being able to see the explanation right there without having to scroll or navigate away really helped me get into the poetry. I can see this approach being extended into many other areas.

Theres a lot of potential in the idea of being able to annotate select parts of a document instead of having to comment on the whole document. I think we need an annotator for the web. Maybe it would work as a browser extension and users could annotate any part of any website with extra comments , photos etc.

Another approach might be to develop an embeddable widget which could allow anyone to annotate any part of a web page.

But I couldnt figure how to handle changes to the original document if the model isnt under our control.

Bigger than Google, yeah ok. $300 billion market cap, $50 billion in cash, $50 billion in sales, within 15 years.

The outcome for Rap Genius is far more likely to be that of a Hunch, than a Google. I've yet to see anything about Rap Genius that suggests their technology or approach will yield such a breathtaking commercial windfall as Google. Even their reach is pretty mediocre for a nearly three year old service (speaking in terms of the huge future outcome they pander to for headlines). See Pinterest for a comparison on size (they're 15 times larger than Rap Genius), and those guys don't go around claiming to be the next zillion dollar company. Zero chance Rap Genius can springboard that to Google like results. Google was at the center of the most important Web utility of its time: the ability to accurately and quickly find anything online; and their technology was mind boggling good. Rap Genius is more like Wikipedia - it's a content solution provided by the user base, and there isn't anything earth shattering about that (see: Answers.com or Quora).

I'd say that within 24 to 36 months they'll pivot or be sold. Reality usually hits like a hammer when you proclaim yourself the next Google (or Facebook).

Not as big a winner as they thing though but that posturing may just be due to having been in fundraising mode or preemtively positioning themselves as a juicy aquisition target..the mentioning of Instagram among Facebook, Google, Wikipedia was rather strange.

"Annotating stuff in a way that doesn't suck" and "getting stuff annotated by others" are two major pain points that they seem to solve rather well. The rest is automatic as long as they can figure out legal hurdles in the domains they want to tackle. If they can't they'll be the Napster and someone like Amazon will probably build the iTunes.

Annotations by domain experts/creators is probably the biggest thing. Basically allows them to extend certain products i.e. deluxe editions of books with annotations from authors (like those director/actor comments tracks for movies)

When I started picking up programming, I learned by copy-pasting code bits from everywhere, and reverse-engineering it to fit my learning projects. If, along with that, I could have gotten thorough explanations for each block of code I copied, I feel I'd be much more proficient in understanding the "why", not just the "how" of programming.

Seems to me that Rap Genius is corrupting that concept.