Ask HN: Is this an idea worth pursuing further?

The way I see it is that you are taking advantage of bad search results in a specific area. You are simply creating a web page that tries to match a specific video with a specific search query and monetize by putting your ads around the content (the youtube video).<p>If you simply built a single page with a collection of links with that text to the video of interest, you'd largely serve the same purpose for users - search engines would rank the actual video higher for that query, but unfortunately you wouldn't be inserting yourself into the middle in order to extract revenue.<p>Your model is negatively effected by search engines improving their ranking algorithms with respect to video content. That seems like a bad place to be.

it's a good idea, and has some decent traffic #s(i.e. "sweet home alabama guitar lesson" 14,800 searches/month) but it seems to be a little bit competitive. Go exact searching for "sweet home alabama guitar lesson" and you get 185,000 sites.<p>I think "sweet home alabama guitar tutorial" is a much better fit. Only 53,700 hits, and none are really an exact match for the search on page 1(which is probably true for all other searches). And that still gets you 6,600 searches a month.<p>So update your titles to be [SONG TITLE] guitar tutorial.<p>And you should be able to hit some decent traffic numbers with that.

I like the idea. Not sure about making money from it, but definitely see it as useful.<p>typo on home page... "Also contact us if you want to contribute by helping uns organizing the links."<p>Can you add more specific information to your search results lists? For me right now, this page... <a href="http://www.learntoplayanything.com/component/tag/green%20day" rel="nofollow">http://www.learntoplayanything.com/component/tag/green%20day</a> returns 20 results that all are "Boulevard of Broken Dreams " - would be more useful if there was some additional info to differentiate.<p>On this page: <a href="http://www.learntoplayanything.com/component/tag/green%20day?start=20" rel="nofollow">http://www.learntoplayanything.com/component/tag/green%20day...</a> Which is the third page, the paginated link to page 1 actually goes back to the third page. The link to page 1 on all paginated results pages seems to link to the current page instead of page 1.

This is a good aggregation idea for learning - why not find a few content providers/creators that could serialize a process for learning - so pieces of a song, or basic chords for guitar. Get some content made by people looking to raise their recognition, and customize it for the site. I'll bet you could get free contributions, or even mechanical turk it for different languages. Ad-supported is definitely the model right now, but what about taking requests and getting people to "donate" for specific content providers to produce requests - you may have a runaway hit for people that can tab/teach/play. Best of luck.

If you included guitar tabs and perhaps allowed users to upload custom tabs (so that people can improve on publicly available ones), it'd be absolutely great. I'd use it on a weekly basis at least, if not daily.

If you are hoping to turn this into some kind of business or money-generating thing, it's not. You are creating very little long-term value, as the others have noted, it seems mainly an SEO play.<p>I do like the basic idea though, If you really wanted to make it good, you'd have to create much better navigation/browsing/finding options (that's the only value you're adding), and you'd have to seed it with 10000s of videos, and you'd have to add something, like forums or reviews something, that increases the value for users.

Pretty cool idea. It would be a more open competitor to Apple's GarageBand music teaching features. I think your idea of adding more value to the site would be a good one. Apple has quality and integration with a nice music creation software. Perhaps you could include more information from lyric sites and guitar tabs and sheet music as you noted.

clickable link: <a href="http://www.learntoplayanything.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.learntoplayanything.com</a>

I like it.<p>Clicking on the logo should bring you back to the homepage.

As a guitarist this is a very painful spot for me and good instruction is worth a lot. If you can figure out a model that connects people like me with quality content efficiently then you win.

ask Adrian Holovaty what he thinks. maybe even get him to contribute. he's clearly a good hacker, plus, a good guitarist. rare mix. may be smart to leverage it.

Thanks everyone for your input! Those comments are very interesting and we have a lot to think about now. :)

I, for one, like the idea and can see myself using it in the future.