Y Combinator startup Scribd has raised its second big round of financing – $9 million from Charles River Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group. That comes on top of a $3.7 million Series A round in the middle of 2007, plus some scattered angel investments.
Scribd is a site where users upload PDFs and office documents for online viewing and embedding. It has spawned a copycat, Docstoc, which has raised its own round of financing. Issuu is another similar service that recently announced a Series B round in funding of $5 million. We should also note that Google recently added a feature in Gmail that lets you view PDF files inside your browser.
You’d think these services wouldn’t be used much, but in fact they do well with search engines, and sites like ours love to embed uploaded documents. Compete shows Scribd at 4 million monthly U.S. visitors. Scribd reports 50,000 documents uploaded daily.
Scribd also hired George Consagra, the former COO of Bebo, as President. Legendary venture capitalist Bill Tai of Charles River Ventures will also join the board of Scribd.
Love to see a Y Combinator startup to excel. Scribd is a good free offering to everybody and a has an opportunity to make it big on the internet. I am a believer in Scribd.
Isn’t Google Docs doing this now?
Seems like trying to compete with Google is not the best plan.
Here’s a cooler service…analytics for PDFs: http://www.docmetrics.com
How do they plan to make money? Its not obvious.
They don’t. If they started making money, they’d be exposed to lawsuits for profiting from illegal content.
That’s why they raised the money. They can and will become profitable next year by converting leads for local businesses and sponsored docs. Here is how:
http://tinycomb...-for-documents/
It serves it’s purpose, but they seriously need to clean up the amount of illegal ebooks being shared on the site.
I mean, http://www.scri...amp;x=0&y=0 says it all doesn’t it.
Wouldn’t even be hard to filter this out, anything uploaded over 200 pages should be investigated.
Heh, appears they read this and deleted all wrox books. Good for them
But there is still looaaads of illegal content being shared, so please take care of this globally instead of just this specific instance.
Your good intentions are well appreciated, but Scribd is the only site of its kind with a working copyright filter that has to check every single document uploaded against literally tens of thousands of document “thumbprints.” If you had any idea of the amount of content that *is* blocked, you would take a less condescending attitude toward the uphill battle we fight against illegal activity.
There are literally hundreds of copies of Stephenie Meyer books (”Twilight”, etc) that are blocked EVERY DAY, same with Harry Potter, dummies books, etc.
Sure, someone’s going to run a query and find an exception and will post their ‘gotchas’ here. And yes, everyone has an opinion about what Scribd should be doing to combat infringing users. And someone will upload a copyrighted book, and will post their “See?! They STEAL!!” comments before the copyright filter finds it. They always do.
But the fact is Scribd *is* doing far more than any of our competitors in this area. We have a far more responsive and effective copyright policy than any of our competitors. As a result, Scribd has more deals with major publishers than any of our competitors.
Um, I dunno why TechCrunch decided to call me Wesley, but that last comment was left by me, jason@scribd.com
Haha… They didn’t delete them. They’re just hiding them on the default search. Silly people, the tab bar on the top right still says the number of search results found.
And if you select from the drop down to display more than 20 results, voila! all the docs appear again. Pirated books and all.
another site is http://www.gazhoo.com .
they have docs you can buy as well as free ones.
Your query didn’t work for me, but this one did:
http://www.scri...p;x=45&y=11
@dean: Gazhoo.com looks surprisingly good. I like the “buy the download” feature and the ability to get an editable document type (such as PowerPoint) and not just a PDF.
Why hasn’t TechCrunch (and the rest of the Blogo-Valley-Sphere) featured you before? Did your PR have an embargo?
dunno why techcrunch hasn’t written anything up. Maybe they own shares in scribd.
Scribd and Docstoc are awesome. And it is a practical example of how Human-Computer Interaction and Interface Design can play a considerable role in the game. Docstoc had many user interface problems. I remember e-mailed Docstoc CEO Jason Nazar informing him about two major problems one in their interface design and the other
functionality problem and he replied
RE: Design and Functionality problems in DocStoc. Ahmad HCI Spec.
From: Jason Lawrence Nazar (jason@docstoc.com)
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2008 6:37:43 AM
To: ‘Ahmad Ghazawneh’ (g.ahmad@hotmail.com)
Cc: ‘Alon Shwartz’ (alons@docstoc.com)
Ahmad,
Thank you for this email, I think you make very good points, and your feedback is always welcomed. Alon, we need to give users the ability to change their creative commons license.
Sincerely,
Jason Lawrence Nazar
CEO, Docstoc.com´
But nothing changed since June 08. I am not claiming that Scribd has more visitors and attracts more users because of these problems. However, they have to be solved because at least they affect users like me who looks deeply to such issues.
More users embedding PDFs from scribd itself in forums and blogs\websites ,this service is very popular.
Taking the YouTube startup model, Scribds is fantastic, it is a clearing house for pirated and not-pirated ebooks and documents of every sort. Just start searching, you will find almost anything there and more convieint than bit torrent.
It will be bought by Google most likely.
I’d like to understand what percentage of scribd’s documents have been uploaded exclusively to scribd, and how important comments are to the overall value of the site.
Absent that data, it’s toughto judge whether scribd has any competitive advantage whatsoever. Just using a proprietary pdf viewer and aggregating existing content seems like a scary place to bet lots of money.
I agree that Scribd and DocStoc are similiar in terms of basic offering but they are night and day as far as finding useful documents. DocStoc seems to concentrate on relevant documents while Scribd allows uploads of anything and everything. That is not to say that DocStoc did not initially do that with their “Win an iPod Touch” every week contest for the person who managed to upload the most amount of documents. I uploaded 700 while some people just uploaded the c:\windows directory or split a 700 page document and uploaded each page. The nice thing was that after the contest, all the non-relevant documents were gone.
But still, sites like these do have an issue with generating revenues and you see it affecting them. DocStoc’s searches now include so many google ads on the pages that it is confusion to look at the results. My wife was searching for a software contract last week and I suggested DocStoc. She called me back and told me that she could not find anything because it was too confusing.
I believe that sites likes these can only be successful and relevant if they specialize in certain verticals that apply to documents (law documents, contracts, school research papers, etc…) and offer premium services such as allowing authors to sell their services (a lawyer could offer his/her services for contract customization by putting up a vanilla contract and then allowing users to pay a fee to have it customized – the site can make a money by charging commission).
I think that with creative product management more and more features can be added that will make these services more and more relevant to the business world and not just the pirated books and pornography world.
The owners of Gazhoo.com trying to get PR for themselves I dont blame you… NO offense but how do you guys get all those documents if you are run from Korea
who says we operate out of Korea???
This is great. I hope they use the money to put in some filtering software as others have suggested – not only for illegal material, but also for pornography. This site is inundated with porn and the owner’s do NOT take this seriously. If they wanted to allow porn then they should have some sort of mechanism to allow age appropriate people in. Yes, there are ways around it, but you don’t leave the door open thinking that it doesn’t matter because someone could always break in through a window.
It’s a good service, like most things and has good intentions, but you can’t let the inmates run the asylum.
Gotta stop ya there, Jeff. I’m the community guy at Scribd, and I gotta tell you we take porn VERY seriously. Porn is removed as soon as its detected or reported and users that peddle porn on Scribd are removed from the site. I don’t know where you got the idea that “the owners do NOT take this seriously.” That’s simply flat-out wrong. The inmates do not run the asylum.
If you have specific instances of porn on Scribd that you’d like to report, I would love to hear from you at jason@scribd.com.
Jeff, you’re way off base. We take porn VERY seriously. For each document that contains porn, I personally commit to researching the original source of the porn, even if it requires access to subscription based porn services. If I find the original source, I will peruse the rest of the site to determine the extent of porn that is published on the original site. After that, I will take a bathroom break. Five minutes later, I will resume browsing, and zealously seek out the next offending item. So please, before you judge a porno by its title, take a minute to see if you recognize any of the stars in the video.
HA! LOL
Sorry, but that was awesome. 
So what you are describing is a “Re-active” approach. What I am describing is the need for a Pro-active approach.
You are waiting for a complaint.
If you do have ways to Pro-actively detect Porn, please enlighten me as to what those are. This of course would mean that at this very minute you have No porn on your website or your Pro-active detection is not good.
As I previously stated, I think it is a great service and I use it myself. I just wish I could let students use your site. I do appreciate you taking the time to answer my comment (twice).
Sorry, Jeff, that’s not what I said at all. I said we remove it as *soon as it’s detected* or reported. If any one of the administrators comes across pornography or sexualized nudity in the course of administering the site, they remove it. I do regualr sweeps for it in recently uploaded documents, and I find and remove as much of it as I can. Which is not at all as fun as it sounds.
Yep, our proactive detection is human powered. Which is inherently imperfect, and does not at all imply that “at this moment we have no porn on your website.” As for our methodology not being very good, well, it’s not for lack of trying.
Bear in mind, we’re still a startup. The whole point of raising a Series B is to be able to hire talent and either acquire or develop better detection technology that will help us detect all possible pornography the moment it’s put up on the site. We want to get to a point where students of all ages can comfortably use the site.
Regardless, the notion of a laissez-faire policy regarding porn (or copyright for that matter) is just wrong.
It’s probably just a matter of time before Scribd will have to pay out all this money in lawsuits.
I mean, look at “their” content… it’s ALL stolen!
Not true, Daves. What you don’t realize is that much of the “stolen” content is on Scribd legally, through one of our publisher partnerships. As much as I hate to stoop to literary cliché, you can’t judge a book by its cover.
execellent. I see in the past few months so many investors pulling out of their money from startups. It is great to hear they are able to secure funding in these critical times.
It’s not just about PDFs, and in fact, I’d argue one of the best things about Scribd and other such services (disclosure: my company has a play in the document embedding space) is the ability to view all document formats online, in a single player. Certainly there is conversion to a single format (likely PDF) behind the scenes, but the magic lies in not having to know that is happening.
Congrats to Scribd on the raise. I think online document viewing and services built around it is one of the most promising new plays in document management.
Yay for Scribd!
congrats to team at Scribd for raising their round in a tight market… it’s encouraging to know that interesting companies are still getting capital
(obviously you guys are doing something right!)
hmmm.. forgot to use the Connect option on comment.
mike/henry: maybe you guys should place that above form option?
if i’ve used Connect at least once, you might want to preference that option.
Congrats to Scribd — Jason and the whole team have always been insanely on-the-ball when it comes to responding to the community and it’s paying off.
I would love to have this locally, on my PC (as a Firefox add-on maybe?). I have to read a lot of PDFs that my colleagues send me and I cannot upload them anywhere but
1. I hate that typical “fuzzy” look of fonts in normal pdf viewer (Is that antialiasing? – I hate it, makes my eyes tired). I would like to see pdf as a normal web page.
2. I would love if I could use Firefox add-ons like that dictionary where you just point at the word you don’t know and you see a “bubble” with translation… it does not work with PDFs, only with normal web pages.
Go Scribd! Good for the SEO’rs out there
Glad to hear that this great company continues to thrive. Always nice to see another Rails site achieving success on a large scale.
Anyone know how much of the company they had to give up to secure the 9M? At what valuation? Clearly one term was to bring in someone with a few more years of shaving under his belt. Some maturity there will likely help. So long 24 yr old C-levels.
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