Scribd Banks $3.5 Million from Redpoint
Nick Gonzalez
30 comments »
Scribd, dubbed the “YouTube for Documents,” was the dark horse of their Y Combinator class, but the social document site now gives its critics pause to think.
Since launching, traffic to the site scaled quickly to 75-100,000 uniques per day with a little help from popular link aggregation sites like Digg. This past month they logged 1.73 million unique visitors.
The site gets about 1,000 new documents each day and recently launched a Facebook application, which has been added by nearly 11,000 users.
The company cites an early $40,000 convertible note from Kinsey Hills Group as getting them off the ground. Today Kinsey Hills is back, investing another $210,000 alongside $3.5 million from Redpoint, with Geoffrey Yang joining the company’s board. Sources close to the deal peg the post money valuation at $17.5 million under competitive bidding, counter to earlier financing rumors.
Scribd’s most immediate plan for the money is to expand their programming team.
See the Scribd fact sheet for more.
1. Make system that enables pirating content (be sure it contains no Metallica)
2. ???
3. Profit
I have to agree: it seems from what I’ve read here & elsewhere about scribd, most (perhaps all?) of their digg driven success has been items of potentially questionable copyright status.
Still, 75K+ uniques, and more than 1.7 million uniques in a given month is no small number. Well done!
Expanding the programming team after that totally makes sense to further enhance the platfrom. One wonders, though, with a post money valuation of 17.5 million…is there a profitable exit here? I can’t see one, but I guess Redpoint must have.
why is it when you go on their site, the tutorial that is displayed is in spanish?
Also it would be nice to know what % of ownership the founders are trading for each dollar they get.
From looking at it: Ycombinator paid $10,000 for 10% of scribd
Congrats to these guys - they have done an awesome job gaining visibility. A system for embedding PDFs! Who’da thunk? Good stuff.
Congratulations Scribd!
I signed-up and have consistently used Scribd to host and share business documents. This website definitely has potential for many businesses, particularly those who need to manage a variety of document types and share them with their colleagues.
“One wonders, though, with a post money valuation of 17.5 million…is there a profitable exit here? I can’t see one, but I guess Redpoint must have.”
A similar sentence might have been uttered about YouTube after their Sequoia funding. LOL.
the ability for Y Com backed startups to get to market, get some traction, and get that next round of funding is quite remarkable. I think scribd usage stats are pretty amazing, while I was not wowed by their value prop it has proven it self as it scales. Congrats to the team for hitting this milestone, should be interesting to watch them evolve.
Congrats the the Scribd guys, job well done. I still don’t understand how a site like this get funded…no revenue model, copyright problems with pirated docs, easily copied by 2 guys in a basement, not viral as something like youtube..thought it has better SEO potential than YouTube. I understand why YouTube gets bought for $1.6B after they capture 40% of the online video market….is that a parallel to the on-line document market? I’m not quite sure what the exit strategy is (and more importantly by whom).
These people are thieves. Throw them in jail!
lots of traffic and…no way to monetize it. selling ads here would be hard enough, but even harder given advertiser reluctance to be associated with mass copyright infringement. well, as long as its VC money being burned and not the public markets’, I guess we’re still not in a bubble
If scribd have open source PDF it would be legal. I’m not sure about Adobe patent rights and the ownership of PDF.
Check out the growth of viewers to these documents: exponential!
http://www.scribd.com/people/view/49193
Don’t know how they got $. Don’t know how they’ll get $ back. Don’t know a high-volume legit usage for this application.
“particularly those who need to manage a variety of document types and share them with their colleagues.”
>ever heard of email?
“I guess we’re still not in a bubble”
>Did you miss the recent moves by CBS? Barely in, but in…
Wow, they still have many pirated materials on their site. I can hear copyright lawyers drooling !
Turns out that Flash embedded PDF viewer is a Macromedia product:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashpaper/examples/
It appears that Scribd rebranded it as their own. What other technology do they really have behind this?
Alot of pirated content /
- lots of competitiors , slideshare? etc …
- Looks like funding was mainly in part be YC or their first 40k
There’s a lot of talk about there about Scribd being over-hyped and overvalued and people don’t seem to understand the purpose or how to monetize document sharing. The ultimate asset that a Web 2.0 is its user base. With Scribd, the user base is made up of the general public, which definitely has some value. But imagine a user base that has a very targeted audience, such as FaceBook has with its micro-communities of college students at specific college campuses. This kind of targeted user base is what gets advertisers salivating.
So, that being said, there is a very valuable for document sharing and using it as the catalyst to build a targeted user base.
The newly launched Scriptovia is the perfect example of how a community can be built around document sharing. It is done by targeting a market that shares the same interest and get value from the documents by building useful tools around the sharing capabilities. For example, Scriptovia is targeted at high school and college students and, according to the website, allows them “to collaborate and receive feedback on their academic work.” This includes essays, notes, lab reports, presentations, and everything else students create to advance their knowledge.
Although Scribd is great, it’s not the pinnacle for this type of technology. I have a feeling though, we’re going to see a lot of other sites leveraging document sharing in very meaningful ways.
laksjd I Kgjdoag jkljfds.
Everything that the “haters” said above, people were saying about YouTube six months before it got acquired for $1.6 billion.
Just pointing out a coincidence.
That is insane amount of money! o_O
I wonder how much I can cash in if I tried to exit..
good site.
Good news for struggling venture people…I am curious to know how they came up with the $17.5 million post-money valuation.