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March 6, 2007

Scribd “YouTube for Documents” Gets $300K

Nick Gonzalez

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scribdlogo.pngScribd, a site for sharing documents, is coming out of private beta this morning with a fresh Angel investment of $300K on top of their original Y Combinator nest egg of $12,000. Scribd is most easily described as a text version of YouTube. It is a social network that lets you tag, share, and comment on uploaded documents (.doc, .pdf, .txt, .ppt, .xls, .ps, .lit).

Scribd is not just a carbon copy of YouTube. They borrowed a lot of the basic design principles, but also took advantage of the written format by including flexible file formats for download and upload along with some interesting analytics tracking. Documents can be displayed and embedded as html or the under-utilized, and faster-than-a-pdf, Flash paper format. They can be downloaded as .pdf’s, .docs, .txt, and even .mp3 files. The mp3 version is created by Scribd’s text-to-speech package (powered by Nuance) that lets you listen to the text of your document in a quivering British accent (downloadable example here). People have uploaded all sorts of documents for the private beta, like this guide to dating and seduction for dummies, or this less than legal copy of Visual C++ in 21 days. Scribd also lets you “geek out” on all the analytics generated by documents you post, such as how many votes and views your piece gets, as well as geographic location and http referrer that brought the reader there.

We’ve seen a lot of different social networks pop up around different mediums, photos, video, and even audio, but dominating a medium is no guarantee of an easy business model, as the “For Sale” sign on audio-focussed Odeo reminds us. So far social sites around the written word have dealt with books, rather than user generated, or at least user-uploaded content. Scribd lets people do something new, we just need to wait and see how far people go with it.

See our coverage of SlideShare as well.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 11:43 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Beanpicks

    March 7th, 2007 at 1:22 am

  2. Usable Content » YCombinator - A Force to Reckon With, A Model to Replicate

    March 19th, 2007 at 8:42 am

  3. ::lemonup:: » It’s Still Very Early, But Scribd Looks Like A Winner

    March 27th, 2007 at 8:40 pm

  4. Scribd - Doing For Documents What Slideshare Does For Presentations « UK Web Focus

    March 29th, 2007 at 10:33 am

  5. DiscBlog » Blog Archive » It’s Still Very Early, But Scribd Looks Like A Winner

    April 3rd, 2007 at 11:00 am

  6. Scribd Rocking Along, Rumored Financing

    April 25th, 2007 at 11:54 am


  7. May 1st, 2007 at 9:41 am

  8. Blogjoy.de

    May 11th, 2007 at 3:49 am

  9. chosaq » Circumvent PDF DRM… with Scribd!

    July 16th, 2007 at 6:27 pm

  10. Vuzit Document Viewer Blog » Blog Archive » TechCrunch Loves Documents

    February 19th, 2008 at 7:43 pm

  11. Scribd is important | The Sixth W

    April 19th, 2008 at 9:49 pm

Comments

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  1. permanent hater

    March 6th, 2007 at 11:51 am

    So useless…

  2. ...some Drifter

    March 6th, 2007 at 11:57 am

    interesting, to say the least.

    it seems like a logical concept.
    but i question the real-world validity

  3. sharpshoot

    March 6th, 2007 at 12:06 pm

    smart - coupled with a good search will be a great knowledge source

  4. Colin Dowling

    March 6th, 2007 at 12:09 pm

    @3 - I agree. Perhaps what they are trying to do is make a great search engine for text documents that are not website content. Interesting.

  5. Robert

    March 6th, 2007 at 12:15 pm

    Sounds like an easy way for students to share plagiarized term papers…

  6. marco

    March 6th, 2007 at 12:18 pm

    a great resource for college essays. saves me tons of time from writing my own.

  7. matthew

    March 6th, 2007 at 12:18 pm

    pretty cool. i’d be interested to know how much ownership y combinator got for their two measly rounds of funding.

  8. why?

    March 6th, 2007 at 12:36 pm

    only ape venture capitalist invents money on bananas.

    Nothing special about scribd site.

  9. anonymouse

    March 6th, 2007 at 12:39 pm

    tagging? check
    unnecessary social network features? check
    exclusion of vowel in name? chck
    generic implementation of an abstract idea? check!
    valuation: $200 million
    expected exit strategy: acquisition by google, even though their documents search is 1,000X more powerful
    unexpected plot twist: after acquisition, publishers everywhere jump on the lawsuit gravy train

  10. Matt Rubens

    March 6th, 2007 at 12:46 pm

    It’ll be interesting to see what kind of content becomes popular. Term papers? Government documents? Porn? All of the above?

  11. Nick

    March 6th, 2007 at 12:49 pm

    I can’t imagine viewing documents for fun…

  12. Walker Hamilton

    March 6th, 2007 at 12:54 pm

    I like it alot. Their use of Flashpaper is nice to see, as that format does not get the love it deserves.

    I can’t wait to see the site mature.

  13. Thomas Irizarry

    March 6th, 2007 at 12:56 pm

    Tough crowd.

  14. Juan

    March 6th, 2007 at 1:03 pm

    Very interesting research tool for multiple types of documents, we’ve just added it to our search dashboard at Crossengine.com
     under web >> multi , beside “esnips” which offers a similar service.

  15. senapati

    March 6th, 2007 at 1:07 pm

    This really is a novel concept. The current crowd is growing up on bucket-loads of ephemeral content in the aural or visual form. It will be interesting to see if the “How-Tos” style of writing of the past can ring a bell once again. Long time since people stopped sharing text on as grand a scale as usenet in the 80s/90s.

  16. Colin Dowling

    March 6th, 2007 at 1:16 pm

    In a sign that college professors are smarter then their students, most Universities already have software systems in place wherein professors can scan and submit papers and, by pulling from a database of other papers and book resources, the system will alert the professor to plagarized content.

    It’s very cool.

  17. Ed

    March 6th, 2007 at 1:19 pm

    Oh man, that paper was hilarious. The student received a “D-”? I was expecting an “F”, but a “D-”? May as well give him an “F”. The thesis statement was great. I hope my son doesn’t do something similar for a research paper he’s working on.

    I can see use for this. You can then download them as PDFs? That’s great. Download papers, book, presentation. View it anywhere/anytime.

  18. Randy

    March 6th, 2007 at 1:27 pm

    Maybe if this company had not needlessly removed the ‘e’ from “Scribed” people would not be universally pronouncing their name as “Scribbed” (yeah, like one pronounces, “ribbed”). WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS?

  19. Randy Follow up

    March 6th, 2007 at 1:30 pm

    “Scribd, for her pleasure.”

  20. foobar

    March 6th, 2007 at 1:44 pm

    Hmm… let’s think about this a bit. A site where you can upload text documents and then allow others to link to them and tag them. Isn’t that a description of all websites? How is this any difference than an FTP site?

    This company will be in the deadpool in less than 6 months.

  21. Automatt

    March 6th, 2007 at 1:45 pm

    It’s great how this site reports on the smaller angel investments that the venture community can overlook, I like that. Go TechCrunch.

  22. Harb

    March 6th, 2007 at 1:57 pm

    So, how will someone make a lonelygirl15 for this?

    This is interesting. It has some potential, but it will depend a lot on the community that it can attract, and what they think to do with it.

  23. Neil

    March 6th, 2007 at 2:53 pm

    Like it a lot. Hope it doesn’t get spammed into oblivion.

  24. whynut

    March 6th, 2007 at 3:09 pm

    For certain niche communities, this will be a godsend. I participate in some criminal-justice groups, and we always need to refer to various case-related public records that people have as pdfs. It will be good to be able to point to Scribd and have people get reference materials from there.

  25. Joe

    March 6th, 2007 at 3:42 pm

    I’m not sure how this is beneficial. Who reads ebooks in a web browser?

    SlideShare has the advantage that you can use it as a presentation backup; in case your laptop blows up, you atleast have an online link you can use to present with someone else’s computer. If you really wanted to share text, you might as well use BitTorrent. If you really wanted to have a ranking list, why not just go with Reddit, or Digg, or something like that?

  26. Ari T

    March 6th, 2007 at 4:52 pm

    Is the doc viewer “embeddable”?
    Joe: Reddit, Digg are rankings of external sites, not hosted documents. This is different.

    I think it’s a good idea in search of a niche (or niches). Maybe college kids will use it to share term papers, lawyers their source material, doctors their research papers, politicians their manifestos, and aspiring writers their short stories. I can imagine this being used by publishers to test the waters for an upcoming book.

    But these groups aren’t going to tag and rank the documents in a common pool, nor would they want to cross-share, and I don’t see many people using Scribd for fun as people do YouTube or Digg. Some groups may even want to use Scribd in French or Chinese or as a private sharing network. So the context is different - professional instead of personal, and group use instead of individual use - and Scribd should think about this more.
    Personally I’d like to see usergroups and private/public sharing options.

  27. Allan

    March 6th, 2007 at 4:55 pm

    LOL. “Original nest egg of $12K.” While I commend the frugality, did that even cover the attorney costs? Seriously, if any technology entrepreneur is in SUCH bad shape that they can’t float $12K on their savings/credit cards/family, they should probably take a job for a little while.

    Anyways, this is not novel… see OpenFloodgate.com

  28. d70

    March 6th, 2007 at 5:37 pm

    Flash paper? way to go!

  29. Laurent

    March 6th, 2007 at 5:42 pm

    Reading documents feels like reading through a keyhole.
    Ony the full screen mode gives a descent reading experience.
    I wish I could search by document type (like PPT versus PDF or DOC).
    Search is not precise: it does OR instead of the usual AND.

  30. josh

    March 6th, 2007 at 5:53 pm

    An obvious attempt to make mad cash. Look at all the ads on the site! I like reading documents a whole lot, but unfortunately the other 200 million tards in this country would prefer to watch a video.

    This idea wont go very far, especially with such a crappy system.

  31. Overzealous

    March 6th, 2007 at 6:59 pm

    This website is insane! The mp3 conversion feature is crazy! I’m listening to a damn HTML design book at the moment. I’m truly amazed at the PDF, txt and mp3 conversion.

    Wow!

  32. aeacides

    March 6th, 2007 at 7:10 pm

    Finally a website I might be interested in. The audio book feature is awesome!

  33. Brian Solis

    March 6th, 2007 at 7:32 pm

    I’ve been participating in ThinkFree’s online DocExchange which also allows the sharing of spreadsheets, documents, and presentations. ThinkFree is also a realistic, online alternative to MS Office.

    http://www.thinkfree.com/docexchange/

  34. sagargemini

    March 6th, 2007 at 8:05 pm

    It’s great how this site reports on the smaller angel investments. I like it very much!

  35. fenin

    March 6th, 2007 at 8:33 pm

    Looks great except for the pathetic spam attempts at Digg.

  36. Shane

    March 6th, 2007 at 8:50 pm

    Why do they drop the last vowel from the name? (as asked aboved)

    Well, besides showing investors your goal of becoming a big web 2.0 site..

    The domain name is MUCH cheaper to acquire. Scribed.com would have cost nearly 10x as much.

  37. jordan

    March 6th, 2007 at 8:55 pm

    lame.

    I searched for “trains” in the widget and didn’t get any hits. Basic test failed ;)

    J | http://www.sumolabs.com

  38. Tim

    March 6th, 2007 at 11:34 pm

    Some cool features on Scribd. There’s another similar site I found at
    http://www.youscript.com

    It’s more like a myspace for writers with friends and groups that leans more towards TV and film screenplays but also accepts any other forms of writing. Seems like this is a developing market.

  39. Arun Jacob

    March 7th, 2007 at 1:31 am

    I have a brilliant idea.
    A “platform” website where you upload entire websites and share them using flash!!

    Then we can remove the entire web. All websites will be in one place. There is no need for Google. Due to network effects, nobody else can compete.

  40. IL

    March 7th, 2007 at 4:37 am

    Just flashpaper nothing special …

  41. John French

    March 7th, 2007 at 6:37 am

    Isn’t this just like UGResearch (http://www.ugresearch.org)? I used it when I was in college …

  42. Chris Akana

    March 7th, 2007 at 6:51 am

    plains, trains, and plantains or other non website (upload) content, that is hybridized with analytics is cool. it will catch on…kinda like an improved more efficient consciousness.

  43. M

    March 7th, 2007 at 8:35 am

    I love Scribd and have been using it since it first came out. I think it’s a great way for people to share all sorts of information. To all those negative comments, at least the guys behind Scribd are doing something with their lives and not just putting people down because they have nothing better to do in their mother’s basement all day. Have a great day.

    Please visit http://www.Scribd.com

  44. david ingram

    March 7th, 2007 at 8:59 am

    Great, but limited. Now I have yet another place to publish my stuff.
    Did you see http://www.izimi.com, launched on monday. Any file type, any size, any quality, no restrictions on quantity.
    The twist in that plot: you dont even need to upload, just publish and serve from your own machine, and your stuff is accessible via a web browser (its peer to browser, not peer to peer).
    Declaration: I work for izimi, so I’ll always say its great. Not an irrelevant plug, relevant to the fact that all these other niche sites restrict what you can and can’t publish.

  45. Mark Madsen

    March 7th, 2007 at 12:09 pm

    It’s a logical expansion of the SlideShare approach, hitting all doc types. I like some of the features like the text-to-speech of docs.

    The problem I have with many of these sites is that they initially garner a traffic surge of people playing with them, but the long-term prospect isn’t so apparent. In a way, this is a modernized community content management system.

    Their terms of service have some odd elements and one or two look like they are not enforceable (like the “major search engine” spidering - does a niche content spider count? who decides? what about startups?). Ditto “offensive material”. I know people who would consider calling Oedipus a “fucking douche bag” offensive, and this is the featured demo document on the site (an entertaining draw for many people).

    I have my doubts about these companies as viable businesses, although there may be an opportunity to sell themselves as branded content delivery infrastructure/services to companies that have or generate a lof content.

  46. Louise Cotts

    March 7th, 2007 at 3:49 pm

    I’ve really enjoyed browing for docs and uploading was made easy with the variety of options—-you can even upload in bulk! Cool!

  47. David Mackey

    March 7th, 2007 at 9:11 pm

    Interesting idea, though I’m not sure who is going to be interested.

  48. Tina Seelig

    March 7th, 2007 at 10:03 pm

    There is another new company in this space. Check it out: http://www.openfloodgate.com. This site will allow users to share and sell content. Also, it allows you to control access to the material. It can be public, private, or only available to people in your “group”.

  49. Thea

    March 8th, 2007 at 2:43 am

    Great site. Those who can, do, those who can’t, criticize. For writers, this site is a godsend. We don’t really give a crap about all the techno-babble. It’s great to be able to post writing without needing your own web site.

  50. Frank P

    March 10th, 2007 at 11:23 am

    Awesome idea…

    Will get bought by google, yahoo, msn or interactive corp within 6-18 months for between 25 and 100 mil…

    you heard it here first

  51. Julia

    March 11th, 2007 at 1:46 pm

    eioba.com is far better app in this topic

  52. Michael Vu

    March 14th, 2007 at 3:08 pm

    This is a good idea. I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

    Spam control is going to be key.

  53. Steven

    March 17th, 2007 at 11:12 pm

    OK. I must be missing something. Why is this preferable to signing up directly with eBay’s Commission

    Junction affiliate scheme?http://www.allconverter.net

  54. Bob Dingwell

    March 25th, 2007 at 12:31 am

    No 39:Arun Jacob –

    Y-Combinator will invest $127.69 for a 30% stake in your new venture…Google in a widget! Deal?

  55. Bob Dingwell

    March 25th, 2007 at 12:33 am

    No 32: Steven –

    And why it is preferable to buying junk bonds? :)

  56. shashank

    March 25th, 2007 at 1:18 am

    that scribd server is down i think its not opening up…

  57. Dale

    March 25th, 2007 at 5:46 am

    great site!

  58. Daniel

    March 25th, 2007 at 2:31 pm

    The flash thing for viewing documents is awesome. I don’t see why people are complaining. It’s quite interesting…

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