Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
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Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
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Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#2I have content hosted there too and value the "open access" spirit, but would also like to see Scribd develop a viable business model. An alternative is the service will close down and everything -- both free and archived -- will go away.
Another question: Besides an archive paywall, what else could the company do to build revenue (such as professional services, print-on-demand, etc.)
Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#3Sometimes, when reading pieces like this, I think it is time that we as internet users reach a certain point in our understanding of entitlement. There are so many services we readily use, most free of charge, while some of them provide a huge service to us. Some even make us money. But if the service providers themselves try to validate their business by making money out of it in some way, we start bitching...
I do not especially condone what Scribd is doing here, nor can I say I would have anticipated that behaviour (harvesting interesting content and subsequently making the whole service pay-only is not the dumbest thing ever), but if you take a second when you first start using a service and try to think about the fact that they some day will have to make money, you should be able to get some conclusions. What options does the provider of the service have to make money at all? Which of these options would be ok for me? Which would piss me off badly? And how do I avoid being in a trap like the OP?
If one thinks about those questions instead of just feeling entitled to use a service, which might be "free" at the moment, the awakening should not be to abrupt.
Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#4I can't actually believe that they would go the paywall route. It honestly seemed a few months ago when they added HTML5 support that they were going in a really great direction and now I will avoid them like the plague.
Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#5"readcasting" sounds like an excellent SEO siloing play. Lots of inter-related internal links. Good google-fu.
Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#6Did you try contacting them to clarify ? If so, what was their response ?
Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#7I've never seen the appeal of Scribd, and I'm no fan of the direction they seem to be stumbling in, but it seems a bit unfair to dismiss invitations to join a user advisory board and/or come visit them as "not much of a response".
Even if both are mere PR exercises, it's an improvement on the kind of content-free hand waving I'd expect from a company desperately seeking profitability.
Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#8I have content hosted there too and value the "open access" spirit, but would also like to see Scribd develop a viable business model. An alternative is the service will close down and everything -- both free and archived -- will go away. Another question: Besides an archive paywall, what else could the company do to build revenue (such as professional services, print-on-demand, etc.)
> I have content hosted there too
Can you please or anybody else explain me why you see any added value of scribd at all? I see it only as an annoyance. If I'd like to read a pdf I'd prefer to click on the link and read it, not to go to some suspicious site which demands from me to sign up there only to do what otherwise would be one single click.
As far as I know the only "advantage" of the service was to make content infringement easier (a site for documents which is like youtube was for videos), and that the site owners expect people to pay for access to it is hardly surprising. But I like other mechanisms more.
My suggestion for everybody who is the owner of his own documents and wants to upload them: host them as the normal files on the normal sites, unless you do want people to pay for access to them.
Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#9I think there are a few takeaways here:
* You have to charge from the very beginning. If you start a free service, and then try to establish a pay system afterward, your users will feel tricked and trapped and they will rebel loudly. Scribd seems to have been in a hurry to get adoption, so they made it free to host documents; as this guy said though, he much preferred hosting with Scribd over doing it manually on his university's web server. That could have been Scribd's value proposition, and a small yearly fee for that probably would have worked OK.
* SaaS could get itself in trouble if there are too many incidents like this. I already hear from clients that are concerned about using online services; the most common questions are, "What if they change their terms?", "What if they go away?", and those are legitimate concerns. Many of my clients aren't the most computer-interested people, so if they have concerns like that, then that means that stories like this have penetrated very deep into the consumer market.
Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#10People still don't understand all of the things they are agreeing to on sites like this:
Scribd Creator Terms Of Service http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/scribd-creator-term...