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By Matt Marshall 03.28.07
Updated
Scribd, the new Silicon Valley company pitching itself as the “Youtube for documents” is getting some good traction, in part because it hosts copyrighted material.
Scribd launched three weeks ago, and is attracting 100,000 unique visitors a day. Those are the viewers. Far fewer have signed up to upload documents — about 10,000 users have uploaded 13,000 documents.
Why, we asked initially, are people coming to a site to post documents, when all they have to do is post them on their own blog? One reason is because Scribd makes it dead simple — just like YouTube makes it easy to post videos. Whatever document you want to upload (Pdf, Powerpoint, .lit, .ps, .txt, Word, etc), Scribd throws it into a convenient Flash player format, so that it can be easily read by anyone. It converts simpler documents to HTML.
This saves hassle: If you want to load say, 30 documents online, most blogging software converts them to links that you paste into your blog, and which require visitors to download them for viewing. Scribd lets you upload readable files to its site within ten seconds. Scribd makes documents both searchable and taggable. It lets you zoom in on text. Scribe wants to foster a community around the documents (like YouTube’s community around video), with comments and ratings. Each person who posts gets their own profile (here’s the person who uploaded the Da Vinci Code, apparently copyrighted material; the person’s profile links to a 17-year-old Myspace user).
Scribd offers more features than competitor sites such as Slideshare.net, which is only for Powerpoint documents.
Adobe has not released Flash tools in a way that consumers can easily create a display player on their own blogs (perhaps because Adobe wanted to avoid cannibalizing its other product, the Pdf).
The second reason for Scribd’s popularity is apparently because you can read copyrighted material there without being tracked (posters of material do have to disclose an email address to Scribd, though that can be spoofed).
Scribd has received 30 copyright take-down notices already, according to co-founder Trip Adler. He has removed hundreds of documents, he told VentureBeat today. The problem is acute because Scribd lets you easily download the documents (there’s a prominent download button, and you can download in multiple formats: .pdf, .doc, .txt, and .mp3 files), something YouTube doesn’t let you do easily.
VentureBeat found a couple of copyrighted Harry Potter books online, and Adler said he was aware of them, but at the time hadn’t been able to take them down — he was in his car during our interview, and besides, Scribd is just three guys: “We can’t control it,” he said. He added: “We’d like them to let us know to take it down.” Adler did email us later today to say he’d taken the Potter books down, and pointed to his copyright policy, to indicate Scribd is DMCA compliant. However, another book hosted at Scribd that he was aware of, The Da Vinci Code, is still up several hours later, as of this writing. See screenshot below.
How will Scribd make money? Advertising can be targeted to the text of documents. Scribd may offer premium accounts for various services, from licensing document conversion tools to other sites (perhaps at five cents per conversion), to printing, to allowing authors to sell documents through Scribd.
Scribd is raising venture capital, and should close a round soon. It received $12,000 from Y Combinator, and $300,000 from angel investors (as reported by Techcrunch) in convertible notes, but has spent a total of only $30,000 to date, Adler said. Joining Adler is Jared Friedman, 21, and Tikhon Dernstan, 27. Adler and Friedman studied at Harvard, and they met Dernstan, from Dartmouth, at the Y Combinator school in Cambridge, Mass. last summer. Adler studied biophysics, while Friedman and Dernstan studied computer science.
Excellent… Let’s steal people’s content and then say “gee, we can’t control what people do.”
Right. Because it was huge surprise, after Napster, Kazaa, etc and Youtube that people would upload content that they have ZERO rights to. I’m just shocked… I’d never have seen that coming. (insert rolling eyes here)
The underlying technology sounds cool - but it’s lazy bordering on criminal to say that Scribd can’t screen content as it’s uploaded. There are several products that allow teachers to screen student papers for plagiarism. If a teacher sitting at a desk can use software to screen electronically submitted student papers, are we really to believe that a cutting edge company that’s the Youtube of documents cannot so this on each and every submission it recieves?
Please…
Could you correct the part that says they got $300k from Y Combinator? We never invest that much. We did a seed round for Scribd, and then they went on to raise $300k from angel investors.
Thanks Paul, corrected.
What a silly “startup.” Fact is, people don’t read as much and reading through some small flash player is just painful. They’ll get sued soon. Hope they can raise enough money for their defense fund!
actually, IMO, legal issues aside, this would seem to be the most practical way to distribute any printed material online… could also serve as a great discovery/preview engine for books, manuscripts, course material, etc. not to mention, the content screening process on this type of service is significantly less of a burden than that of a video/music service (you can just do a text match!) - and they can do brilliant contextual advertising w/out relying on flaky tag/name/description data. lastly, considering there’s no digital amazon (or at least a mainstream one), I can think of a million opportunities for this company. ok, my fanboy piece is over. cool site :)
Actually the third founders name is Tikhon “Bernstam” not “Dernstan”