We reached out to Scribd CEO Trip Adler, who says that the site is currently toning down its SEO efforts and further reducing pirated content. He also writes that there’s a dip associated with the summer season:
We made some changes that will have a short-term impact on traffic. Primarily: 1) improving our copyright filter, which keeps unauthorized content off the site and 2) reducing the aggressiveness of our SEO, which reduces total traffic in the near term but increases the relevancy of Scribd links in search engine results 3) trending down typical in the summer time — we experienced this last year at this time and other major sites (YouTube , Google Books ) are experiencing the same.
We’re not concerned about the dip – we expect traffic to go back up quickly. The metrics we care about at Scribd are active members of our community and uploads of unique, authorized works. As long as these numbers keep growing, we are positioned very well for long-term growth in unique visitors.
These product changes are part of a long-term strategy to focus on user experience and quality content. We call it a “controlled growth strategy”, similar to what Facebook did a few years ago. We have a lot product changes planned in the next few months that will increase quality / relevance / stickiness of the site.
It sounds like Scribd has some major changes coming, and it’s understandable that the site might want to prepare for those in advance. Still, it isn’t often that you hear about a site voluntarily killing nearly 50% of its traffic — perhaps Scribd didn’t expect its changes to have such a major effect (it’s sort of hard to believe that they aren’t concerned about the dip). That said, Scribd is still ranked as the 130th most visited site on the web by Quantcast, which is hardly anything to scoff at.
A lot of students are on summer break I guess
If that were the reason, one would expect a greater percentage dropoff in the US than globally, which is not the case.
How do you figure? Are you saying the US is the only country with college summer breaks?
Summer breaks long enough to fit the time period we’re talking about, yes. Most outside the US have considerably shorter breaks.
In France, summer break spans from June to September.
in some places, you didn’t even know there WAS a summer break – some countries have trimesters and quarters instead of the usual semesters
no but to suggest that because it’s summer break and people don’t read or research is kinda laughable and that’s why i laughed at that summer break excuse. if people wanted to use scribd they would use it regardless of weather/seasons. also if what they are saying is true that must mean that there is always a dip with scribd traffic when students are off school all around the world, and that doesn’t always come in summer or the months of may, june, july, august, and early september or whenever school starts for students after their breaks. also there are multiple breaks during the school year for students so they must also have a traffic dip then too.
are most users of scribd students? and do they mostly fall in the youth-30 demographic? anyone know the answer?
Don’t know for sure but I would assume so (demo of users).
Let’s face it – if this were a normal “school break” dip Adler would have said so – instead he gave a list of changes for it –
hollym
http://www.thessayist.com
I used to use Scribd to discover online books, but if they block pirated contents, then I see no value in Scribd .. lol. These days I use http://books.boilingpage.com to discover popular books based on how popular they are among people and it directly takes me to Amazon for a preview. It will be nice if Scribd can integrate with this site. That would be awesome.
Dude, you gotta check http://www.cruxle.com under books section. They have the integration with Scribd and they do have awesome recommendations too. However, it’s a little different from http://books.boilingpage.com, which is a real-time site.
Maybe they don’t want to be the YouTube for Documents, in the sense of a site whose traffic is primarily based on pirated copyrighted works (in its early years at least). Unlike YouTube, Scribd has a couple obvious monetization strategies that don’t rely on advertising, so amassing page views isn’t as important to them.
I think their CEO just bullshited some excuses to mask the fact that Google shut down their black-hat SEO tactics. Their company brand is scrap now, it’s going to be a slow painful death.
In the meantime, Docstoc traffic WAY UP
Hang in there Trip, sounds like you guys are improving an already great product.
Yeah, it’s easier to go up when it’s so much lower to begin with…
According to Quantcast:
scribd.com US – 6.8M
docstoc.com: US -1.9M (”rough estimate”, not verified)
Compete: http://siteanal...om+docstoc.com/
scribd.com US – 7.2M
docstoc.com: US -1.7M
Not sure if you were making a joke that just went over my head, but credibility and all that…
Thanks for looking up those rough estimate not verified numbers, super helpful.
It is Docstoc’s choice whether or not to be “Quantified” so it isn’t my fault; perhaps they’ve something to hide. At least I bothered to look up data at all rather than make unsubstantiated claims.
These numbers are as good as any cited in TC posts, so I guess those are all unhelpful as well?
While the compete numbers are not perfect – the site still provides a good “apples to apples” overview.
Maybe people realized they can just continue emailing PPTs and PDFs just like they’ve been doing for 15 years instead.
or, who has an ebook reader.. insert nerd here.
Those brightly flashing ads make me feel like I’m going to have a seizure while trying to read. It’s just too damn frustrating if they’re going to place hideous and downright painful ads around the text. As an advertiser I try to remain mindful of what kind of ad unit won’t actually offend my target demographic, and piss off the sites on which I’m placing advertising. Not everything needs to be an egregious violator.
Plus: really, really slow. Thank monkey-man they’ve axed the SEO, I was getting sick of clicking the little “X” in my Google results.
this has also been my experience
it was blocked in China
Scribd always SUCKED! They have a crap product: viewing PDFs in a tiny window using the cancer of the internet (Flash).
All their content is basically stolen. Just search for the word “Copyright” to see to whom the documents belong to.
Brian -
No argument here with respect to viewing a PDF in a tiny window, but seriously Flash a cancer?
Adobe Flash Media Servers deliver a shit load of video content over the internet just fine!
Cancers are generally very successful.
I completely agree scribd sucks. Flash too: so leaky.
lol. well atleast they’re working on getting rid of pirated information…which basically means they will die a slow death. i agree with chris matthews comment above and also deborah.
Only thing that bothered me was their aggressive SEO. If you searched for “sad panda” and their thing came up, it would add the word “Sad panda” to the article so next time google spidered it, it thought it was even more relevant for that phrase.
That’s why I never bother clicking links to scribd when they come up in Google results — they’re always irrelevant.
that’s also been my experience and i always hated it so that’s one of my reasons why scribd sucks.
Exactly, their black-hat SEO practices permanently turned their brand into a shady wasteland.. they wont recover from that, certainly not to monetize.
where would they ad the word? in the description?
Methinks it is the removal of copyrighted content that is the predominant traffic punisher. So it goes…
obviously…oh but wait it’s summer is also to blame. lol.
Interesting thread about it : http://news.yco.../item?id=748826
Remove Pirated content and the traffic is bound to suffer, I guess the same will happen if YouTube removes user generated content (if it ever does that)
obviously. i mean i don’t go to youtube to see authorised videos that i can see elsewhere. i like that youtube has a mix of approved and “illegal” content. youtube can clean up it’s site though and still have a pretty big userbase but they will definately lose users. i mean itunes is here now but people are still downloading all sorts of pirated content. it’s the way of life.
Interesting – my 14 year old daughter is positively addicted to writing and uploading stories to this site. Seems to be working fine for her – she gets good feedback and some friendly community. We’re not exactly making submissions to the Pulitzer committee, but she’s having fun and getting better.
ill advised. pedopiles and other miscreants exchange the location of their latest stash on scribd.
I know some large companies have blocked Scribd at the firewall for some reason. Probably view it as a security potential.
Harry “that second sentence was pretty obvious now, eh? why did I type it?” Wang
Is is possible this was a mistake for them to get into books? I question how interested their audience ever was in books. Free books are one thing but these books have prices. Got to imagine docstoc and others are popping champagne – their biggest competitor may have committed hari kari. What’s their burn?
Pirated content are a lot in a website that allows users to upload stuff. I’m sure they are getting worried about being sued and removing those. Good luck to them, but hard to keep copyrighted content off of it just like youtube.
Woah, good reason not to get involved with Quantcast, eh? One of these days everybody looks at you and says, “What happened, bunky?”
We deliver you nothing but the best @ http://www.thessayist.com Check it out for yourself. You have to admit it is a revolutionary service.
Scribd being blocked in China did not help either. It is a great service and we hope that it will not be blocked more in the future.
you hope that it won’t be blocked. You also hope that Youtube and Twitter won’t be blocked, but unfortunately “hoping” is not enough.
You need to fight and protest if you want things like freedom of Internet, Independent Trade Unions, etcetera, not just count your money and “hope” that scribd will be unblocked. Come on Chinese people, time to speak up for your rights and stop kowtowing while you count your RMB and spend your lives working as slaves to pay off your mortgages!
I was an early fan of Scribd. But then their “SEO” tactics of scraping the Web to put documents on their site turned me off. Reminds me of whatever site is scraping forums and repurposing it on their own domain with ads all around the abbreviated post and a small “see the original post in context” link. Scumbaggery.
hmm. i’m not surprised. anyone who has come into contact with this website knows what’s up, even without them giving their reasons for this. i haven’t used scribd in about a year and i avoid it when i am doing research. it’s good for content theft though.
I’ve seen Scribd links a few times in YC.
Clicked on them about two times.
Scribd requires javascript and is as ugly toat as youtube.
So I ignore scribd links in YC now.
wondering … how many other people did the same?
*ouch* It looks as if this site also requires JS?
That’s because now it’s more like an ebook store than thre free ebook database that it was before. People like free stuff.
It is no longer possible to find books easily, all the new ones are a few pages of the real content, so I just go to the bookstore now.
Scribd came out of nowhere. Easy come, easy go – it will now pale into obscurity.
Jason – in response to “These aren’t fuzzy stats, either— Scribd is QuantcastQuantified, which means the traffic is directly measured”
Quancast says your stats are directly measured even if you remove the tracking code. There is no way for you to turn it off either.
We tried out the stats Javascript embed, but decide to remove it – only to have advertisers say we had no traffic (due to the horrible estimates they make).
at some point unique visitors stops being a helpful metric for analyzing the business. unless it’s in steady state / uniques correlated to other usage metrics & revenues, it’s just directional.
while it’s perhaps helpful to know foot traffic thru the door at the local WalMart, Lexus dealer, or Longs Drugs, making overall predictive analysis w/o also discussing sales & profits at these widely varying businesses.
a thousand customers buying chewing gum at the local drugstore might only be equivalent to one new Lexus customer.
Of course their traffic dropped off- you guys stopped writing about them!
Scrib’d is not really a high utility app- most of the content is questionable and its possible that Google is demoting it a bit, given that anyone can add whatever content they want. God only knows how this application will ever make money or become of value to an acquirer- wizbang flash document display not withstanding, I just don’t see the value with docstoc or scrib’d. Maybe the lowly http://www.your...elegalforms.com, i could see, but their traffic is anemic, so who knows.
There is other BIG problem with Scribd and I do not know if they will recover. They got the traffic by openly sharing books, and now they are globally blocking sharing except properly copyrighted uploads. Also, they started to sell books, that looks like a great service EXCEPT that it is ONLY for USA. So you get an akward math: block worldwide books without rights and sell only USA books. That will cut the audience for sure, and do not fits into the public identity that made Scribd famous. Other interesting places like Issuu have a great interface but no idea about marketing and seems to be clueless about selling books. None of those pose a threat to Amazon as they only sell American books in a world market where USA does not produce, sell or read more books than the world.
Hi Jason, in my experience there are a number of startups that build up traffic in the early days so they can test business models at scale. When they are lucky enough to hit upon something that works (in Scribd’s case either Ads or their eBook stores, or simply a come-to-Jesus discussion with their board) and are confident that the business model has legs they can start to weed out traffic that is deemed “unmonetizable”. For instance Scribd’s traffic is very international (the US and other developed countries account for less than 40%, according to Alexa’s stats, assuming these are remotely accurate). It is definitely harder for them to maintain any margins for their ads business internationally as they scale (think Facebook). As for the eBook store I can guarantee the conversion rate is close to 0% and lifetime value is also close to 0 rupees in the majority of geographies they currently serve. Look for the mix to become more “developed” going forward.
My guess is that Scribd is taking the first steps to building an end-to-end metrics-driven business that considers not only raw traffic acquisition but also cost-of-acquisition, cost-to-serve, conversion rates and lifetime value of their user-base. Deals like, say, the ones they’ve done with the big publishers were probably revealing that their eBook model is incredibly inefficient in terms of conversion / LTV and cost-to-serve. If they want to compete with or be acquired by Amazon or Google (natural end games) they’ll need to step up their game or admit that they’re overcapitalized.
To the boys at Scribd: if you’re not lucky enough to have investors who will keep writing cheques to fund the YouTube-esque let’s-just-get-eye-balls-and-wait-til-we’re-a-top-ten-trafficked-site-in-the-world-and-someone-else-will-buy-us-because-they-think-they-know-how-to-monetize model then you’ve done the right thing.
AMEN!
All the website is a harder way for people to view information, think of it has a website within a website or a website with frames on each content page.
I cannot believe TechCrunch fell for Scribd’s line – the traffic dip was voluntary. No web company would voluntarily cut its traffic by 50% – that would be committing suicide. I cannot believe TechCrunch fell for Scribd’s line – the traffic dip was “voluntary”. No web company would voluntarily cut its traffic by 50% – that would be committing suicide. Here is the scoop. Scribd was doing black hat SEO from the beginning. That was the secret of their traffic. Ask any SEO expert about what they were doing – they were link farming which made their pages come up in irrelevant searches. That was the secret of the traffic growth. It was clear to anyone who has been doing SEO for a while that sooner or later Google was going to penalize them (I am surprised they have not been banned).
Google finally penalized them in June – at that point they stopped doing all the SEO tactics. Look closely at the dip in quantcast, you will see the story there. I am sure that the VCs are pissed (invested at a very high valuation).
Bottom line: don’t play SEO games if you are trying to build a real company.
No web company would voluntarily cut its traffic by 50% – that would be committing suicide. Scribd was doing black hat SEO from the beginning. That was the secret of their traffic. Ask any SEO expert about what they were doing – they were link farming which made their pages come up in irrelevant searches. That was the secret of the traffic growth. It was clear to anyone who has been doing SEO for a while that sooner or later Google was going to penalize them (I am surprised they have not been banned).
Google finally penalized them in June – at that point they stopped doing all the SEO tactics. Look closely at the dip in quantcast, you will see the story there. I am sure that the VCs are pissed (invested at a very high valuation).
Bottomline, don’t play SEO games if you are trying to build a real company.
What I think is comic is that Redpoint doubled down on Scribd, knowing their traffic was inflated through SEO tricks. IMO not smart given the world doesn’t need another AMZN. Stop buying the hype that 23 year old college drop outs or Harvard grads are a sure bet. The only ROI on your money here is too arrogant to know any better boys playing with Daddy’s money. Maybe Scribd will reinvent itself as the “Twitter of books with a 10,000 character status msg. limit”. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
100% of the time I have clicked thru to a scribd link it has been useless.
I don’t even understand why they exist and I don’t want to.
lol. most of the time with me too. i can’t believe them. also about the google penalty thing…obviously. i was surprised it took so long. gah. if i can avoid it i really steer clear of scribd. even when i get there by accident i leave…but it’s always nice to see things like what that father was saying his kid was doing. lots of people using scribd…makes them so exposed. always good for someone with complete nefarious intent.
Note: Scribd PPV is like 2. So you are NOT alone. Everyone leaves the moment they realize they were duped.
I am struggling to understand why people seems to be against Scribd so much. Given Scribd’s popularity, I can only assume these comments are from the minority.
Scribd opened the document publishing, distribution and interactivity market, and for that reason alone, we should all be thanking them. No one is forcing anyone to use Scribd. We all have the choice to use or not to use. The level of criticism here is uncalled for.
They have used various tactics to gain the level of success they are demonstrating today. Yes, some of us, will never use those tactics, but end of the day, it is business.
Personally, I was surprised at the commercial route Scribd took by going after Amazon.com’s market. This is something we also thought about at early stages, but decided against it due to our own reasoning.
Our mission is about making documents work harder for your business. Even for us, it took such a long time to come up with a viable commercial model.
There are two camps in web 2.0 arena. Those who build a great product and work out a commercial model after few years of collecting users. Other model is the old model, which is to generate revenues. First model requires significant VC funding, and that is exactly what Scribd has done.
In my opinion, Scribd is in a great place where they can almost pick couple of commercial models to follow.
I for one, is keen to see Scribd grow from strength to strength. Competition will only help the customers – so be thankful instead of complaining.
Best regards
Manoj
Why don’t you disclose that you are the founder of eDocr a similar site in the same space? Why the buttock kissing, you want to be acquired by Scribd?
uh it’s not a minority. students use scribd…we know what it’s about actually and we also know how to tell it like it is. it’s not my fault i have to avoid that site now is it. out of all the schools i’ve been in no one i know uses scribd. if they do they always submit weak work. i was on scribd a good couple months ago and it made me realize why i wasn’t on that website anymore. they can start maybe by getting rid of the flash and the frames within a frames look. they can start by cleaning up their website. yes we/some were aware of some of the tactics they use to drive up their traffic. oh well. such is life. once again i have nothing against them, but if i didn’t have to avoid it so much because of them i would be there all the time.
I love scribed! When I release the new edition of my eBook for work at home parents, I will be releasing it though scribd.com and my website: http://www.darkbluesun.com.
I bet this fluxuation is due to the season. More people are out and about. And you have to expect a site about ebooks to have heavy and nonheavy upload days. People are probably not always writing the same amount throughout the year. Like me, when the weather gets nice. I want to be out in it!
uh i still don’t care about weather anytime of the year. i read all the time. if they made my experience better maybe i would continue to go to their site. i mean it’s not that hard.
I think the VCs and angels for Scribd must be kicking themselves to have been fooled by this seo led growth. Scribd has raised serious money 10 million. of course that money was based on the traffic, now the traffic is down 50%… so is their valuation and their money
The lesson for everyone here is – black hat & questionable SEO tactics cannot build a internet company…
Wonder who are the VCs for scribd… they must be smarting right now… I am sure they are the laughing stock of the investor community in silicon valley right now
Seeing the success of questionable SEO practices and their success in
1) getting more traffic
2) getting VC funding based on questionable traffic
maybe it is time for me too leave my day job and to start a internet company.
VC’s of scribed – Watch out here I come . Please help me in getting rich too.
lol.
Talk to this guy – http://www.redp...eam/geoff-yang/
Scribd has some amazing technology and we are lucky to use their technology
Am I the only one that thinks iPaper is a huge pain? I mean, why not just convert that stuff to HTML? What am I missing?
nothing. it is huge pain.
The lesson for everyone here is – black hat & questionable SEO tactics cannot build a internet company…
Wonder who are the VCs for scribd… they must be smarting right now… I am sure they are the laughing stock of the investor community in silicon valley right now
Hey, Judy – ain’t it kinda weird that “Mike” said this exact same thing a few comments ago? Get a sex change in the past few minutes? Hmmm, who’d want to stack the deck against Scribd?
Red Point : http://www.redp...eam/geoff-yang/
Clearly the smartest guys in the room.
They have been cleaning house. If they didn’t it would have been overridden by pirates and spammers.
Great Post! They had no idea that the loss of traffic was coming.
Thanks
Jason Berkes