Once 200 IQ is earned, users are granted access to the Rap Genius forums, where people may post about any topic and posts are ranked with a voting system similar to Reddit. Rap IQ can be earned by writing new annotations or suggestions to already existing ones as well as having those submissions upvoted by site editors and moderators. Once a person makes an account, they can earn Rap IQ points for their contributions to the site. In April 2013, the Rap Genius founders were interviewed on NPR Music, shortly before they announced the launch of News Genius (shown below), a way to annotate current events, on May 1st. News of this investment spread on Wired and Gawker. In October 2012, Rap Genius announced that venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz would be investing $15 million into the site, one of the fastest-growing sites to come out of the startup incubator Y Combinator.

As press around the site continued to build in 20 with features on Mashable, the Next Web, Esquire and BetaBeat, other sections of the site launched including places to annotate rock lyrics and poetry and literature (shown below). Around the same time, they launched their Twitter account, which has accrued more than 100,000 followers within the same time period. In January 2010, the Rap Genius Facebook fan page launched, gaining more than 388,000 fans as of July 2013.

In November 2009, Rap Genius saw its first bit of press after annotating the lyrics to Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' 2009 single 'Empire State of Mind.' That month, the review was featured on the Huffington Post, Newser and BlackBook.

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