Near the end of the article is a link to this very interesting write up about airBnB's 'growth hacking' on craigslist. It acts as a useful counterpoint to rapgenius' case.

http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-do...

It's interesting, but it's one of those unique things that you can't easily duplicate with other business types.

> Yesterday, the site had 234,590 unique visitors, according to Quantcast (...) On Monday, before it was knocked out of Google, it had 1,376,535 unique visitors.

So Google gave them over 80% of all their uniques, meaning that they have an insane bounce rate and very poor user retention.

The nature of their site means that people will often display the following usage pattern:

-search Google for something like 'rapgenius track X'

-read the page covering the track that they're looking for

-close the page

Similar to songmeanings.net or other lyrics+ sites.

Or they are just looking for lyrics, and don't care about the interpretation. Then the usage is:

-search Google for something like 'track X lyrics'

-click the first link that looks correct

-close the page

As a RapGenius user, I use Google to search for specific links to pages since it saves me time from having to go first to the site then run a search. Also, it's not really a site that people browse, they go to look for a specific song so coming from a search engine would be the expected behavior.

Bear in mind that Google also effectively delisted them for searches like "<some song title> rap genius", and that since (like many sites) their own search engine apparently sucks, most people who knew about and liked the site probably got there that way.

I suspect that Rap Genius' bounce rate and user retention (both before and after this issue) is an order of magnitude better than all of their competitors.

what do you mean by 'retention'?

I imagine they mean that it is deliberately sought out as the source for people's rap lyric needs, but that it's sought out via Google queries (e.g. "birthday song rap genius") as the other comments suggest. Based on the response I'm seeing on Twitter it seems that many people believe that the site was inexplicably shut down due to its disappearance from the Google results.

The article mentions sending SMS invitations and shows as an example the case where the user apparently did not mean to send the text message.

Do text messages cost the user money in the US, too? In Europe, they do, and while it's not a big amount, I would be furious if an App just sent out a text message on my behalf without making very sure I wanted to do that. It's both my reputation with my friends and my wallet they're damaging here.

So SMS "invitations" seem to be an extremely risky move to me.

I pay $0.25 per text message on Verizon (note: I don't have a text plan, which I could get for $10/month. But I don't send/receive enough texts to make it worthwhile)

A lot of this just seems like it wasn't thought through correctly.

on Circle's Growth Hack: "You cannot sign up without location, and they hide this "spam hack" in Bay Area, maybe even entire California."

Ha. That is especially hilarious. I wonder if it's true?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21TmsT1qsPo

I'd love to read an article about "Growth Hacking Gone Good"...because I'm sure there are a few good cases to follow, in situations that were more difficult to get growth than Rap genius.

The first thing that comes to mind is Imgur. I've only read about the site's growth casually, but what I remember as a user was that one day, someone announced the service to Redditors, people loved it, I liked it, but assumed it was a small minnow in an ocean that include Flickr, Picasa, Tinypic, Twitter-friendly services like yFrog, and so forth. Even more problematic was that the feature that made Imgur likeable -- hotlinking hosted images -- was basically impossible to attach user-retaining measures/loyalty/SEO-hacks, etc, all the while sucking up massive bandwidth.

Edit: also worth noting: not only is Imgur not a place to (easily) search and revisit, as a domain, it has the same copyright-infringing/duplicative-content risk that RapGenius does too.

And yet Imgur is now a behemoth, by not jilting its main feature for easy profit...I'm still wondering..how the hell did they do that? I pay attention to imgur because I'm a geek who often looks at URLs. Even among redditors I must be a rare case, but my perception is that Imgur did things so right and so well that, now they're close to becoming a near-essential service of the Internet

cotap could not be more annoying.