Rap Genius 融资 4000 万美元，更名 Genius，押注注释功能可超越说唱领域

做的是什么生意

Genius (Rap Genius) is a crowdsourced annotation site where users explain text line by line, starting with rap lyrics and expanding toward news, poetry and legal documents, monetized through ad-supported traffic.

启动资金：Andreessen Horowitz led a $15M Series A in October 2012; the July 2014 Series B brought total funding to $56.8M.

起因

Three Yale students, Tom Lehman, Ilan Zechory and Mahbod Moghadam, launched Rap Genius in 2009 to explain rap lyrics line by line, with the stated ambition of annotating the world's text. Y Combinator backed it, and in October 2012 Andreessen Horowitz led a $15M Series A; Ben Horowitz said he had wanted to annotate the web since his Netscape days.

经过

In December 2013 Google demoted Rap Genius for a link-spam scheme in which bloggers received promotion in exchange for inserting lyric links; Quantcast measured daily uniques falling from about 700,000 to 100,000. The company apologized, built a scraper that located and fixed or disavowed over 177,000 offending URLs, and by January 2014 was largely restored. In May 2014 it forced co-founder Mahbod Moghadam to resign after he posted insensitive annotations on the Santa Barbara shooter's manifesto. On 2014-07-11 the company announced a $40M Series B led by Dan Gilbert of Quicken Loans and Rock Ventures with Andreessen Horowitz participating at a valuation under $1B, renamed itself Genius, and launched self-serve embeddable annotations so any website could offer hover-over explanations; the round brought total funding to $56.8M for hiring engineers, designers and community leaders.

可借鉴之处

初创公司可以通过一个细分市场建立受众，但如果仅靠搜索流量作为护城河，便一无所有；持久的解决方案是掌控自有分发渠道，比如嵌入、应用和超越细分市场的品牌。