Why Are Lyrics Sites So Profitable? (And How Bob Dylan Wins)

rapgenius SEO mistake

Dumb SEO Mistake

Lyrics searches area a major deal, especially in search advertising. Do a search on Google or Bing for your favorite song with “lyrics” attached and you’ll see a number of results. Companies such as AZLyrics, Sing365, MetroLyrics, SongMeanings, Lyric Freak etc all tend to out rank even artist sites as they compete with each other for the very profitable first or second position.

Despite their shady legal status, intense competition, inability to do much in the way of paid search, and dubious marketing tactics they are thriving.

Why are there so many of these sites and why are they so profitable?

It’s a matter of simple economics. Despite the rise of social media like Facebook or the presence of “old school” avenues such as newspapers or billboards or television spots, Google has created and maintains the easiest and (far and away) most profitable advertising channel ever developed by humans… its search index. While modern marketing and advertising agencies might try to sell you on other channels, Google search is still the money maker and can be a make it or break it for your company whether you’re making money by CPM (ad placements, impressions etc) or via CPA (visitors actually have to do something on your site like click a link or buy a product or subscribe to a service for you to make money).

Things are further complicated when you consider that there are two main ways to “advertise” on Google and it’s a fairly democratized process if you’re willing to get over the initial hurdle of learning how to work with tools that Google provides freely and in all earnestness such as Webmaster Tools or AdWords. Combine those with Google Analytics on your site, and you’re 80% of your way to being a full blown marketing agency. It’s not hard and Google intends to make these tools as pedestrian friendly as possible on purpose. If more people are spending just a few dollars a day on rankings, not only does it add to Google’s bottom line directly but it also encourages companies like mine to spend more and more (money and time and attention) to stay relevant and profitable.

It’s a fantastic growth strategy that shows no signs of slowing down while newer companies such as Twitter or Facebook still struggle to get their advertising platforms off the ground. The difference is that Google’s search advertising is a very impersonal yet highly engaging experience for both advertisers and users.

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram etc are all using very antiquated notions of brand advertising and cost-per-impressions to lure in larger brands for initial investments while alienating users with more billboard-style advertisements. Until these social media companies figure out the magic that has made Google’s advertising such a success (with future proofing beyond anyone’s recognition as Google continues to tweak its algorithm and suck us deeper into its advertising infrastructure with great products, services, phones, wearables, cars, robots etc), they don’t stand a chance. Simply put, you can’t do cost per impression advertising with any large scale success in 2014 and beyond (and only Google and Amazon get this on the web).

Democratization is profitable.

Lyrics sites, in particular, are easy to set up and advertise. The content has already been generated and is fairly easy to obtain (legally or illegally). The long tail potential of this content to keep generating pageviews overtime is immense. Google any song you can think of and you’ll see the first four pages are completely filled with lyric sites. Add to that the understanding that if a user visits your lyric site, they’ll probably be spending anywhere from 3-5 minutes average on your site reading the lyrics or singing along to their googled song. That’s incredibly valuable in a world where the average page view on a content site is somewhere in the 1.5 second range over time (median). More time = more money in the algorithmic world of internet marketing because those people click things, buy things, sign up for things and/or go places linked on your lyrics site generating you all sorts of income channels. It’s a win-win.

One of the few artists who “get it” happens to be Bob Dylan. If you google any song by Bob Dylan, you’ll see a collection of lyrics sites but you’ll also see BobDylan.com. Whoever is in charge of Dylan’s site and licenses to his music understands this economy and has listed every single Dylan song along with full lyrics (themselves a trademark). Instead of going after lyrics sites with trademark and copyright takedown letters, Team Dylan has successfully put themselves at the top of the lyrics search. Well done, Bobby.

Lyrics sites aren’t the only type of site that fall into this category and the entire affiliate marketing industry has been riding this understanding for over a decade and shows little sign of slowing down (despite Nexus laws in states looking to charge tax on these types of transactions which does make things a little more cumbersome but not crippling).

With a little knowledge of python scripts combined with basic HTML to create a site, you could launch a lyrics site in a matter of minutes. You’re a millionaire! Congrats. Oh wait… you’ve got to get people there.

The trouble comes with the traffic question. This is a very difficult question for many businesses and the reason why I have a company. I help businesses solve this problem by figuring out the “now what” part of making money on the internet. It’s fascinating, challenging and difficult work that is part counseling, part robot engineer, part luck and a lot of statistics and higher level math logic. At least that’s what I make it out to be. Your mileage my vary depending on your time and willingness to succeed.

Generating traffic is seemingly easy. I make a great site based on great content and Google should send its fleet of robots over to properly index my lovely site and send that information back to the mothership. In no time, I’m on the front page for “Justin Bieber Fan” and I’ve got a million page views daily. Wrong. Because of the ease of construction, the fairly easy-to-stomach “costs” associated with getting reliable content (there’s a canonical version for every song’s lyric), and the continual replenishment of highly valuable and sought after information (Bieber, Beyonce, Miley, Jay-Z, Kanye etc are pretty consistent in putting out albums every 12-15 months and the labels space them out so as to not have two hit albums hitting the streets on the same week or even month), there’s little disincentive to start a lyrics site (beyond the legality and all).

Getting traffic to a lyrics site is the main hurdle to economic reward. Of course there is Twitter, Facebook etc available for getting folks to a lyrics site, but the main route of traffic flows from Google.

Within Google’s search platform there are two main ways to “advertise” and get eyeballs and hopefully clicks. The first is organic search. As the name suggests, this type of search and traffic is generated naturally. While not the same metaphor as organic milk or butter, organic search is generally thought of as where you naturally fit into Google’s algorithms based on content’s intentional or unintentional search engine optimization (SEO). If I create a new site for a real estate client, I have to wait a few days for that information to get properly indexed by Google’s robots that are constantly crawling the web like tiny information scavengers. I can help that out using Google’s Tools but if I’m making highly valuable (to Google) content such as a personal blog, that information will surely get indexed and put in the right place. For instance, if you Google “sam harrelson” you’ll find this blog in the top spot. I’ve done a few SEO tweaks but all of that indexing by Google is because of organic traffic. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve been linked to by the New York Times, major blogs, etc but I haven’t “paid” for any of that. Organic traffic can be your best friend if you’re doing the hard work of churning out content. Google likes to reward those who feed their machine with this soylent green of human capital.

On the other hand, there’s what we call paid search. Using paid search effectively is seemingly more intensive and difficult than just putting up blog posts and waiting for Google to send you money. That’s partly true but not the whole story as paying for search is an art in itself but no more of an art than properly doing organic search (with intention) the right way. The difference is that paid search does require money. You pay to be listed in the wonderful tiny little text ads along the side (or top) of Google search results or in YouTube results or in GMail inboxes etc that have launched a thousand companies. Those text ads are incredibly efficient and responsible for both Google’s success as well as the success (and failure) of many companies. Writing ads that fall into the strict guidelines is nothing short of an endeavor that has tested the patience and humanity of many a marketing professional. But they work. Oh boy do those text ads work.

However, they can be expensive. It’s not uncommon for a large advertiser such as Wal-Mart or Target to spend over 300 million dollars a year on various paid search campaigns. National or regional business commonly spend thousands of dollars a month on search ads within Google. Whole companies run their businesses based on these ads. For instance, back to the affiliate marketing industry, there are many companies that exist just to get traffic from these ads within Google to large retailers such as Amazon or Overstock or REI, and in-turn get a small cut of any transaction that a person makes. Those companies probably have a site but the emphasis isn’t on keeping visitors on the site as much as getting them to make what’s called a conversion (buying something or subscribing to something). Making these text ads work is one of the underpinnings of my business so I am paid to care about these details and make sure I’m keeping up with my homework as the algorithms and keys to success withing a paid search campaign are constantly evolving with Google’s brain as well as the web.

Where does all of that money go? What are businesses paying for? In a nutshell, if you do paid search you are in an auction of sorts. It’t not as much fun as a Storage Wars bidding feud, and there are no collectibles or antiques to be had. Instead, you’re bidding on words. We call them keywords, but they are effectively just a collection of letters.

It has always been fascinating to me that the most incredible and effective method of advertising ever created by humanity is based on the very simple premise of bidding on ancient technology created sometime around 4,500 years ago in a small and dusty population center by merchants looking to make sure they knew how many barrels of beer to send down the Tigris river from Sumer to Ur or Uruk.

Here’s a better explanation than I could make of how Google uses its “Adwords” platform to house the auction for these letters and words:

How does Google AdWords work? - infographic
Infographic by Pulpmedia Online Marketing

It’s neurotic and fun work. But it works and will continue to work for both advertisers, businesses and especially users. Some say search is dead, but I say it’s only evolving and will continue to be more effective than social media ads.

With this knowledge in hand, let’s go back to our lyrics site. While these sites are major spenders in Adwords and have a very competitive keyword space. It’s not uncommon for keywords such as the title to the latest Miley or Jay-Z hit to be in the hundreds of dollars. However, these ads have been controversial since Google got into the ad business 10 years ago and don’t appear in most searches because record labels and attorneys see this as Google profiting from the work of illegal (or non-copyright compliant) lyrics sites. It’s a tricky issue with many parameters.

As a result, lyrics sites resort to organic search as the main current of traffic flow. There are various SEO tactics to help them and the highest ranking sites are doing an enormous amount of behind the scenes work to make sure their lyrics to Hotel California show up above a competitor.

Another tactic to increasing their organic search placements is to get links from other sites. Sometimes these are paid for but mostly they are acquired freely. Getting links has been one of the double-edged tools that Google has long loved and hated for ranking sites properly. PageRank itself (one of the first algorithms used to index sites and named after Google co-creator Larry Page, not a reference to webpage as widely thought) is based on the recognition that who links to you matters:

Google has invented many innovations in search to improve the answers you find. The first and most well known is PageRank, named for Larry Page (Google’s co-founder and CEO). PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.

When Google became the most used search engine sometime in the early 2000’s, it became critically important to rank well (unlike Yahoo or Alta Vista who ranked sites in a more hierarchical index format that had less recognition for inbound and outbound links). Google PageRank was a real and incredibly important development for how we process information and has quite literally changed the world (for the better in my opinion). In the early 2000’s, SEO became the hot ticket as a result of this recognition of Google’s growing power on how people find, discover, and ultimately visit sites.

Being humans, we always look for the shortest path to riches. Thus was born link building. Google now has very strict rules about swapping, buying, asking for, and trading links as they continually try to best the blackhat SEO gamers.

However, with the rise of blogs in the early 2000’s came the rise of the hyperlink. Getting and giving links to other blogs you read or enjoyed was common. Blog software such as MovableType, WordPress, Userland Radio etc all included easy ways to add links to what came to be known as a blogroll. Including a link to a friend or colleagues blog in your public blogroll was akin to favoriting them on Facebook or +1’ing them on Google Plus today. We all did it and it benefited us with both recognition and traffic. Google liked blogrolls because it helped them see who was connected to who and which sites were seen as more valuable than others. Very quickly, this time of link economy became much more valuable to Google than something like the number of views a site might have gotten. It’s still the reason that blogs like this can compete with major sites like the NYTimes.com in search results.

Yet, there was an ugly underbelly of paid links and link begging from companies and marketers looking to circumvent the system. Even though Google cracked down on the practice, it continued and it’s still going strong today in a number of forums, email groups, and sites that I won’t link to here.

So it was shocking to see a somewhat reputable company (at least in Silicon Valley) resort to link begging on Facebook in order to get more organic links for the newly released Justin Bieber album…

Their business depends on their search engine ranking position SERP’s on Google. Hyperlinks connect the web and determine SERP’s. Thus, the most powerful weapon RapGenius can deploy is a series of powerful hyperlinks. You can see in Mahbod’s email that he is asking for hyperlinks from high-page rank sites personal blogs with anchor text that mentions tracks from Bieber’s most recent album.

via RapGenius Growth Hack Exposed – John Marbachs Blog.

Search Engine Land and TechCrunch has more on Rap Genius and here’s the fun Hacker News thread for your reading pleasure.

I wouldn’t call this a “growth hack” at all.

RapGenius quite literally made a stupid mistake that shows either a complete lack of understanding for how Google and marketing works or a naivety akin to my 6 year old daughter’s understanding of the internet. I cannot fathom how a company with $15 in funding from very reputable venture companies would make this sort of either blatant or unintentional mistake. Cautionary tale indeed.

In any case, this is a lucrative market that shows no sign of slowing down. Despite the shady legal status of the whole idea of a lyrics site, the inability to do much in the way of paid search, the intense competition based on democratization, and the dubious tactics of its biggest traffic generators, lyrics sites have evolved with the underbelly of the web and thrive.

Some of them just need better marketing.

“Can I Handle the Seasons of My Life?”

Last night, I had a crisis.

On the way to celebrate Christmas with my wife’s family in Spartanburg, SC I realized that I had made a major mistake. I pounded the steering wheel and had an adrenaline-spurred moment of animal rage followed by the inevitable realization that the deed had been done and the only thing left to do was figure out how to fix the situation.

My daughters had been with us over the weekend and gone ahead with Merianna to the family party while I stayed back in Columbia and worked for a couple of hours. I had too much to do, left the house in a hurried panic to make the Christmas party, and completely forgot their elf. It was my duty to bring along “Leroy.”

Leroy is a four year old elf that has become part of the family in many ways and has transcended the elf-on-the-shelf cliche-ness into something akin to a family member that flies in for a couple of weeks. I suspect my six year old sees through the “Leroy is a real elf that does mischievous things for a couple of days then flies back home to the North Pole” and keeps the myth going for my three and a half year old. Regardless, Leroy isn’t as much as a creepy judging watcher as someone who has a past, present, and future with her experience of Christmas. It’s like advent on training wheels as Leroy and our family look forward to the twelve days of Christmas time that start tomorrow when we celebrate the presence of God in this world and the “at-handness” of the Kingdom of God.

As a dad, it’s insanely important for me to make sure that my girls cherish this time of the year and realize that Advent and expectation are just as important for our faith and family as the actual Christmas event.

So, I knew what I had to do. I had to drive. Drive a good deal.

I left the Christmas party, we dropped the girls off with their mother and they headed back to Asheville. I left Spartanburg and headed back to Columbia. I arrived in Columbia at 9pm, ran into the house, picked up Leroy from his last mischievousness (making smores with a candle) then headed back to Asheville. I got to their mom’s house at midnight and dropped Leroy off in a passed-out pose on the wood pile outside of her house. He and I felt the same at that point. Then I left to drive back to Columbia and finally crawled into bed at 3am.

During my ten hours on the road, I had a lot of time to think and listen. I’m completely fine with long drives. I loved driving from South Carolina to Connecticut when I was in graduate school and I always loved my late night drives in college. It’s been a few years, but I remembered my old tricks to get me through. A few hours on a current Audible audiobook, then a few minutes of silence, then a few songs that I sing/scream along with while on cruise control.

It was sometime around 2am near Clinton, SC that I realized I was listening to much of the same music that got me through late night drives to Wofford College then to Columbia and back to my hometown of Mullins fifteen years ago. There was Willie and Waylon, Johnny Cash and the Beatles, Beastie Boys and George Strait. Finally, I turned to Fleetwood Mac and John Lennon (the two that got me through late night drives in my old Jeep with headphones attached to my cassette player because there was no stereo and that I had recorded myself on a mixtape).

I thought of late night drives to see girlfriends in the past, or to see my best friend and college roommate. Then I thought even further back to my high school mentor who loved Stevie Nicks in an unhealthy but inspiring manner and how much he both changed my life and inspired me to be a teacher (and how many of his tricks I stole when I was a middle school teacher). I thought of what I thought I would be when I was 15 or 20 and how things have turned out.

And then Landslide came on.

“But time makes you bolder
Children get older I’m getting older too
Yes I’m getting older too, so”

I don’t know how or why my subconscious mind knew that I needed those ten hours away from a computer and work and building a company in complete and forced solitude. I was cut off from Twitter or Google Adwords or a CSS file that I’ve been struggling with and forced to focus on a single and seemingly absurd task of delivering a cloth elf.

It was beautiful and it was a great way to end an incredible year of my life. The best present I could have given myself despite my state of sleep deprivation today.

Thank you, Leroy.

Quantifying Myself in 2014

I’ve been meaning to get around to doing a Thinking Daily about this.

Hopefully, I’ll get to that sooner than later. Hint: I’m a big fan but for reasons you might not guess.

More soon (hopefully):

We’ve already written about why 2014 is really, finally the year that the “internet of things”—that effort to remotely control every object on earth—becomes visible in our everyday lives.

via How the “internet of things” will replace the web – Quartz.

I like this Alot

Worth your time to go read as it will change the way you interact with other humans (and Alots)…

So the next time you are reading along and you see some guy ranting about how he is “alot better at swimming than Michael Phelps,” instead of getting angry, you can be like “You’re right!  Alots are known for their superior swimming capabilities.”

via Hyperbole and a Half: The Alot is Better Than You at Everything.

The Problems with Bitcoin

Bitcoin

Good piece that I hits the points that have unsettled me about bitcoin all along…

I want Bitcoin to die in a fire: this is a start, but it’s not sufficient. Let me give you a round-up below the cut.Like all currency systems, Bitcoin comes with an implicit political agenda attached. Decisions we take about how to manage money, taxation, and the economy have consequences: by its consequences you may judge a finance system. Our current global system is pretty crap, but I submit that Bitcoin is worst.

via Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire – Charlie’s Diary.

Sprint Buying T-Mobile??

As a loyal fan of T-Mobile’s no-contract services, I can only respond with “whaaaaa????”

Please dear baby divinity no…

Sprint, the third biggest wireless carrier in the US, is preparing to buy out its rival T-Mobile, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. While the deal is a ways off, Sprint is expected to put in its bid in the first half of 2014 and could pay more than $20 billion for its rival.

via Sprint reportedly preparing to purchase T-Mobile in 2014 | The Verge.

WordPress and the Longevity of Good Software

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The new WordPress 3.8 is definitely beautiful on the admin side. I’m glad to see open source software like WordPress continue to persevere (and thrive) over such a long period on the web (10 years old) given how much publishing on the web has changed and how fads have come and gone.

WordPress is, in many ways, the cornerstone of my web presence and I am excited about the update…

Today the WordPress core team announced WordPress 3.8 “Parker”, a major milestone for the web’s most popular blogging software. In its 10 years WordPress has seen many changes, one of the most significant being the “Crazyhorse” redesign that came with version 2.7 in 2008. Today’s update is the biggest visual update to WordPress since that release.

via The Design of WordPress 3.8 | Matt Thomas.

Not Every American Needs to Learn How to Code

Let’s make sure our citizens are literate first and capable of doing basic math before we try to sell the next “American Dream” as being a app maker to our kids.

I love coding. I loved when my students were interested in coding as a middle school teacher. However, I made it clear to them that while hard work will get you halfway there, there’s a lot of persistence, skill and luck involved in developing the next Angry Birds.

While we realize the hard work involved in something insanely complicated like electrical wiring, we tend to gloss over the difficulties involved in computer science careers because “it’s just computers” and not a physical thing that you have “to do” in order to see results.

Code is only the latest in the classic American / Horatio Alger dream that hard work and the right education will by the golden key that ensures everyone has a job. Go west, get a farm. Learn chemistry. Become a mechanic. Learn how to fix computers. So on and so on and so on. Now: Learn to code! It fits very nicely with the current disruption/app/techie focus of the economy and suggests that the companies and donors that comprise it are necessarily the country’s future. They’re not.

via No, Mr. President, Not Everyone Needs to Learn How to Code – The Wire.

Edit: Dave Winer has a great post on this as well:

Bottom-line: In all likelihood, coding will NOT make you rich. So you’d better have another reason for wanting to do it, because it’s not easy.

Like blogging, coding isn’t easy and probably won’t make you rich!