This is already happening to some degree, however it has generally mostly been the smaller & weaker players who have been soaked first. And in many cases the web & search ultimately helped build up a lot of these players before later knocking them down.

A lot of people are quite apathetic until the impact is direct. They recognize their own usage of the service rather than empathizing with a story from someone who was soaked. Here is a perfect example from a smart, tech savvy person who is big on self-interest / own vertical, but entirely apathetic toward other verticals - and this post is less than 4 hours old https://twitter.com/blam/status/419537614014672897

The tricky part in all of this is that one man's life work is another man's spam. Everything at scale has some mix of original editorial vs user generated content vs scraped & reformatted content vs policing of the mix. Ultimately the entity with a built in audience will be able to win more and more verticals over time due to preferential placement. A lot of people are unaware of how the knowledge graph will keep extending to swallow a larger and larger portion of the overall query stream. Anything of significant value that can be structured eventually will.

One of the more alarming articles I have ever read was one from 2007 where the New York Times explained about Query Deserves Freshness coming about after Google found that their own new finance service didn't rank as well as it should have. That was the beginning of the end for the indy web. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/business/yourmoney/03googl...

The 2009 recession was the icing on the cake that cut Google's revenue growth rate & got them fired up on moving beyond direct marketing to focus more on brand, brand, brand.

Google's value is derived from its users, and its customers will remain if the eyeballs are there to justify the investment. The best way to keep those eyeballs is to continue to serve the best results, and in this case Rap Genius is often the best result.