Earlier today I complained about one class of hopeless apps that often applied for grants from Sunlight. It eventually became clear to me that web annotation tools were another. That’s not to say that they weren’t cool–heck, we even built some ourselves. But it’s definitely a low-percentage play.
Consequently I think that Genius’s efforts to expand into a news app are probably hopeless (there’s no money in news apps to begin with, and probably even less in this one). But that doesn’t mean the site hasn’t done something clever.
In particular, they’ve paired excellent technical execution with even better timing. It seems clear that lyrics sites can make at least some money–the web is littered with heaps of garbage like azlyrics.com. They’re benign parasites, the geothermal vent-hugging tubeworms of the internet, thriving in an ecological niche made possible by larger, more popular cultural phenomena. The Genius guys picked just the right genre (hip hop, with its closely associated and copyright-averse mixtape and sampling cultures) and just the right moment (when noncorporate reproduction of others’ IP became a part of everyone’s daily communication habits). This let them become a more polished operation than the fly-by-night SEO lyric farms that had lived and died by the whims of record company lawyers and Russian webhosts. And that, in turn, has let them take investors along for what looks like a pretty fun ride.
The calculated executive outrageousness and appearances on various future-of-news plenaries are meant to distract you from a business model that has always been founded on accidental Google traffic and encouraging visitors to click on popup ads.
Perhaps there’s a plausible escape route. But what seems more likely is the story we’ve seen again and again on the internet: somebody builds a business next to an existing one, the incumbent waits until revenues appear and then throws a fit, and the courts decide if it’s Napster time or Spotify o’clock. Usually it’s a more interesting underlying industry and a less compelling product. But we’ve been here before.