Scribd.com Comes to the Dark Side • Hacker News Board

Re: Scribd.com Comes to the Dark Side

#31

Post by rmc » Thu, Sep 02, 2010, 3:42 PM UTC

rogeriopvl wrote: post #19

mambodog wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, Scribd's primary business model is monetizing pirated content. So basically it's YouTube, but for documents.

Yeah, but youtube doesn't charge you to watch the videos...

YouTube has ads on videos. It's the same as a TV station airing a pirated DVD and selling the ads

Re: Scribd.com Comes to the Dark Side

#32

Post by jcl » Thu, Sep 02, 2010, 3:46 PM UTC

rogeriopvl wrote: post #19

mambodog wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, Scribd's primary business model is monetizing pirated content. So basically it's YouTube, but for documents.

Yeah, but youtube doesn't charge you to watch the videos...

And Scribd doesn't charge you to read the documents. And for some of their videos, YouTube allows you to download them for a fee.

http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Re: Scribd.com Comes to the Dark Side

#33

Post by duck » Thu, Sep 02, 2010, 4:32 PM UTC

jimbobimbo wrote: post #29

Seriously: what's the point of Scribd? All they do - show your document along with ads all over the place and let people download the source PDF after registration. Why not to just put PDF on your site in the first place?

Or better yet, try not to use a PDF (I know there are some practical examples of why PDF's are good, but in general they could be avoided most of the time) and use markup instead.

Re: Scribd.com Comes to the Dark Side

#34

Post by Lewisham » Thu, Sep 02, 2010, 4:59 PM UTC

jimbobimbo wrote: post #29

Seriously: what's the point of Scribd? All they do - show your document along with ads all over the place and let people download the source PDF after registration. Why not to just put PDF on your site in the first place?

I found it a somewhat more palatable alternative to SlideShare because I was a big fan of the HTML 5 viewer, but I had no idea this was part of their plan. It's a nasty bait-and-switch which isn't signaled when you upload at all.

Not too happy with that.

Re: Scribd.com Comes to the Dark Side

#35

Post by blasdel » Thu, Sep 02, 2010, 5:48 PM UTC

rmc wrote: post #31

rogeriopvl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but youtube doesn't charge you to watch the videos...

YouTube has ads on videos. It's the same as a TV station airing a pirated DVD and selling the ads

Youtube goes to a great deal of trouble to only have ads on verified content.

Re: Scribd.com Comes to the Dark Side

#36

Post by Judson » Thu, Sep 02, 2010, 6:25 PM UTC

jules wrote: post #18

Judson wrote: post #6

While I can for sure appreciate the Scribd service, charging for 24 hour access to "archives" is just silly. It reminds me of Rapidshare, which isn't exactly a brand to live up to. On the other hand. So does the website that posted the article and requires a login to read the follow-up. I like that someone called Scribed out and they fixed the situation.

What exactly do you like about Scribd? Every experience I had with is has been negative. Their reader sucks and to download a pdf you have to register. When somebody posts a link to Scribd I always end up searching for another place on the internet that has it. I don't see any value Scribd provides.

I never said I "liked" the scribd service, only that I could appreciate what they are doing, not necessarily the monetization.

Re: Scribd.com Comes to the Dark Side

#37

Post by thefrostytruth » Thu, Sep 02, 2010, 6:38 PM UTC

michael_dorfman wrote: post #12

[deleted] wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

What complicates things, and makes them worse, is that a large amount of the content is uploaded by people who are not the original authors/publishers, and don't actually have the rights. As far as I can tell, Scribd's primary business model is monetizing pirated content.

This move to re-sell the archives is really surprising -- I can certainly tell you that Scribd doesn't make much money selling electronic documents (i.e., ebooks) right now.

The conversion rate there is b-a-d bad--my experience has been ~3 sales per 200+k reads. Other publishers have seen similar rates. They have an audience who is simply not willing to pay.