![]() Standalone media companies can still be successful, but it’s not quite the unicorn opportunity that “annotating the internet” once was.Īccording to Bloomberg, many of Genius’ investors and employees won’t be paid out in full due to the company’s obligations to preferred shareholders. When Genius sold last week, it sold a multimedia company focused with a focus on hip-hop content. But the courts dismissed the case because Genius did not own the copyright itself. ![]() Then in 2019, Genius tried to sue Google for copyright infringement because Google display songs lyrics from Genius at the top of its search engine results before it links back to Genius. In many instances, Genius didn’t show up until the 5th or 6th page-even when people searched for “rap genius.” Google hates when sites play games like this, so it punished Genius on its search engine optimization. It artificially juiced its value on Google search rankings by asking for other sites to embed code on its site that linked back to Genius. In 2013, the company tried to pull a fast one on Google. ![]() As Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton wrote, “You get to own this universal layer, on top of everything online! Like the platform giants, you can build a business doing something - indexing, sharing, whatever - to an entire universe of content you don’t have to create yourself.”īut Genius learned the hard way how dependent its platform was on another universal internet layer-Google. A sample of that vision is on this Business Insider webpage when the company raised $40 million. It created a world where Jadakiss could explain what he meant when he said he had, “the scales that they weight the whales with.” We could quickly clarify whether Lloyd said “ she’s fine, too” or “she’s 5’2.” It was a beautiful thing.Įarly investors like Andreessen Horowitz wanted Rap Genius to annotate the entire internet. Often, the artist offered that annotation. People could add context to popular lyrics, which viewers could see with one click of a button. Hip-hop lyric websites weren’t new, but Genius stood out because of its annotation. In the early 2010s, Rap Genius came out the gates hot with its bro culture image. It was sold for $80M, which is less than it raised! It’s a disappointing exit for a company once valued near $1 billion, but it’s a reminder of the importance of platform dependency. Last week, Genius was sold for $80 million in a fire sale to MediaLab.AI Inc.
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