38 ms·

Rapgenius.com Traffic and Demographic Statistics

120 points by themichael 13y ago

dantillberg 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago
    either way, 1 data point isn't a trend. wait and see is the best course of action.
- thehodge 13y 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 13y 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%202013-12-26%2008.42.37.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/lidlugtdycdrrnx/Screenshot%202013-...
- Goopplesoft 13y ago
  The next top result for lyrics thats 'Quantified' on that site: https://www.quantcast.com/lyricsfreak.com?qcLocale=en_US 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-m&cmpt=date http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=lyrics&date=today%201...
- freebs 13y 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=chrome..69i57j69i60j69i61j69i60.1378j0j1&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8#es_sm=93&espv=210&q=rap+genius&start=60 https://www.google.com/search?q=rap+genius&oq=rap+genius&aqs...
- officemonkey 13y ago
  Like nobody posting to Facebook in the morning, combined with completely crashing Steam in the afternoon.
ecaron 13y 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.
- fat0wl 13y 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 13y ago
  I think folks are interested to see how much the penalty hurts.
  - bushido 13y 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.
    - johnpowell 13y ago
      Same here. I am in no way affiliated with Fluther other than being a user and Panda completely screwed them. I think they got screwed because Mahalo scraped their RSS feed to steal their content while providing links to the original content. So there was a thousand links going to Fluther from a shithole of a site.
    - michh 13y ago
joshmlewis 13y 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 13y ago
OT but how do lyrics sites handle copyright issues?
- k-mcgrady 13y 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-lyric-websites-hit-with-copyright-infringement-notices/ http://consequenceofsound.net/2013/11/rap-genius-and-other-l...
random42 13y ago
It'd be interesting to see which website(s) benefited from the diversion of this traffic.
ivanbrussik 13y ago
still way way too early to tell, lets take a look on the 28th before we all go making friends
- sarreph 13y ago
  What do you mean exactly by 'making friends'?
  - ivanbrussik 13y ago
    lol its too early...friends = threads :)
  - ivanbrussik 13y ago
    its way too early to be friends as well, lets wait a few days.
programminggeek 13y 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 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 https://www.google.com/search?q=stop+being+greedy+rap+genius
- notastartup 13y ago
  Another one of DMX's classics: X Gonna Give It To You http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jkeRpQKFDg 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.
metaobject 13y ago
What exactly did they do that google didn't like?
- k-mcgrady 13y 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.
skizm 13y 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.
- raldi 13y ago
  Many of them just make it up: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-traffic.html http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-...
  - jonknee 13y 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).
    - raldi 13y ago
      When I worked at reddit, the shakedown worked something like this: 1. ComScore (or one of their competitors) makes up a small number and tells advertisers that's your traffic 2. Advertisers believe them 3. You call up ComScore and say, "WTF?" 4. ComScore says, "Well, if you don't like the numbers we're reporting, you can just add our tracking bug to your site" And then you're in a position where you either have to betray your users' privacy by putting a third-party tracker on every page you serve, or have your traffic stats dramatically underrepresented to the advertisers you rely on.
      - skizm 13y ago
        That sounds scummy as hell. It also sounds like a problem that needs fixing!
- temuze 13y ago
  Depends on the measurement company, but it's normally a mix between ISPs, browser toolbars and panels.
ateevchopra 13y 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 !
Mc_Big_G 13y ago
This is the best PR stunt ever.
- jpatel3 13y ago
  accidental one!
wehadfun 13y ago
Could they simply pay Google $$$ to fix this issue?
- omarchowdhury 13y ago
  Haha!
dbg31415 13y ago
I'm sorry, do we really think that Christmas is an accurate sample day? L2Math.
jpatel3 13y ago
Its example where trick of growth hacking went wrong!
ddorian43 13y ago
Worse happened to Quickmeme when they were banned from reddit for bot-voting.
- AlecSchueler 13y ago
  Do you have any sources/further information on their numbers?
  - ddorian43 13y ago
    http://www.reddit.com/r/JusticePorn/comments/1hgceg/quickmemes_website_ranking_drop_after_being/ http://www.reddit.com/r/JusticePorn/comments/1hgceg/quickmem...
jpatel3 13y ago
Funnily, that gives idea that how much traffic bing contribute.
tarheel12 13y ago
Thats a huge drop. How accurate is Quantcast?
- johnpowell 13y ago
  From my experience. Fairly accurate.
- Phil_Latio 13y 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://extremetracking.com/free?login=fm3u91 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/freemp3us.com 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 13y ago
  in this case, very accurate. Rapgenius has Quantcast analytics codes on their website.
lanbird 13y ago
hahaha hope its not after my suggestion to google on there facebook page
amirhirsch 13y ago
you're looking at christmas day. it'll be more interesting in a week.
exizt88 13y 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 13y ago
What if the remaining traffic is mainly due to HN people reading this article? Then they're in real trouble..
nailer 13y ago
What does 'online' mean? How can there be more people mobile than the total online?
001sky 13y ago
Error! We are unable to retrieve traffic data for this property at the moment. Well, thats intersting...
mrbuchuk 13y 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 http://www.similarweb.com/website/rapgenius.com
mvkel 13y 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?

120 points by themichael 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago
  either way, 1 data point isn't a trend. wait and see is the best course of action.
thehodge 13y 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 13y 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%202013-12-26%2008.42.37.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/lidlugtdycdrrnx/Screenshot%202013-...
Goopplesoft 13y ago
The next top result for lyrics thats 'Quantified' on that site: https://www.quantcast.com/lyricsfreak.com?qcLocale=en_US 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-m&cmpt=date http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=lyrics&date=today%201...
freebs 13y 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=chrome..69i57j69i60j69i61j69i60.1378j0j1&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8#es_sm=93&espv=210&q=rap+genius&start=60 https://www.google.com/search?q=rap+genius&oq=rap+genius&aqs...
officemonkey 13y ago
Like nobody posting to Facebook in the morning, combined with completely crashing Steam in the afternoon.

ecaron 13y 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.

fat0wl 13y 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 13y ago
I think folks are interested to see how much the penalty hurts.
- bushido 13y 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.
  - johnpowell 13y ago
    Same here. I am in no way affiliated with Fluther other than being a user and Panda completely screwed them. I think they got screwed because Mahalo scraped their RSS feed to steal their content while providing links to the original content. So there was a thousand links going to Fluther from a shithole of a site.
  - michh 13y ago

joshmlewis 13y 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 13y ago

OT but how do lyrics sites handle copyright issues?

k-mcgrady 13y 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-lyric-websites-hit-with-copyright-infringement-notices/ http://consequenceofsound.net/2013/11/rap-genius-and-other-l...

random42 13y ago

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

ivanbrussik 13y ago

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

sarreph 13y ago
What do you mean exactly by 'making friends'?
- ivanbrussik 13y ago
  lol its too early...friends = threads :)
- ivanbrussik 13y ago
  its way too early to be friends as well, lets wait a few days.

programminggeek 13y 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 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 https://www.google.com/search?q=stop+being+greedy+rap+genius

notastartup 13y ago
Another one of DMX's classics: X Gonna Give It To You http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jkeRpQKFDg 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.

metaobject 13y ago

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

k-mcgrady 13y 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.

skizm 13y 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.

raldi 13y ago
Many of them just make it up: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-traffic.html http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-...
- jonknee 13y 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).
  - raldi 13y ago
    When I worked at reddit, the shakedown worked something like this: 1. ComScore (or one of their competitors) makes up a small number and tells advertisers that's your traffic 2. Advertisers believe them 3. You call up ComScore and say, "WTF?" 4. ComScore says, "Well, if you don't like the numbers we're reporting, you can just add our tracking bug to your site" And then you're in a position where you either have to betray your users' privacy by putting a third-party tracker on every page you serve, or have your traffic stats dramatically underrepresented to the advertisers you rely on.
    - skizm 13y ago
      That sounds scummy as hell. It also sounds like a problem that needs fixing!
temuze 13y ago
Depends on the measurement company, but it's normally a mix between ISPs, browser toolbars and panels.

ateevchopra 13y 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 !

Mc_Big_G 13y ago

This is the best PR stunt ever.

jpatel3 13y ago
accidental one!

wehadfun 13y ago

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

omarchowdhury 13y ago
Haha!

dbg31415 13y ago

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

jpatel3 13y ago

Its example where trick of growth hacking went wrong!

ddorian43 13y ago

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

AlecSchueler 13y ago
Do you have any sources/further information on their numbers?
- ddorian43 13y ago
  http://www.reddit.com/r/JusticePorn/comments/1hgceg/quickmemes_website_ranking_drop_after_being/ http://www.reddit.com/r/JusticePorn/comments/1hgceg/quickmem...

jpatel3 13y ago

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

tarheel12 13y ago

Thats a huge drop. How accurate is Quantcast?

johnpowell 13y ago
From my experience. Fairly accurate.
Phil_Latio 13y 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://extremetracking.com/free?login=fm3u91 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/freemp3us.com 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 13y ago
in this case, very accurate. Rapgenius has Quantcast analytics codes on their website.

lanbird 13y ago

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

amirhirsch 13y ago

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

exizt88 13y 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 13y ago

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

nailer 13y ago

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

001sky 13y ago

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

mrbuchuk 13y 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 http://www.similarweb.com/website/rapgenius.com

mvkel 13y 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?