3 ms·

Hey guys, I'm trying to understand Scribd's purpose as it's written. Re: purpose 1) For publishing a body of text, or a hosting literal file type, there's alre

by jayliew 16y ago

Hey guys, I'm trying to understand Scribd's purpose as it's written. Re: purpose 1) For publishing a body of text, or a hosting literal file type, there's already Posterous and, any free file hosting site. Re: purpose 2) Discovering interesting content .. appears to be served pretty well by the likes of Digg, Reddit, Twitter-link-mining apps, etc. Sharing, there's many bookmarklets and "share this" buttons. If the value is in unique content, but the content is provided by the crowd, then for an individual content creator, what's in it for them? E.g. if I have some really interesting content, I could post it on some public hosting site, or own my own web site, and if it genuinely is interesting, it'll hit the main page of a site like Digg/Reddit, and therefore sell itself. I think the move away from plugin prison to HTML5 is great (am myself a developer), but we know that the mass majority don't buy based on techie cool-ness (if they did, then Apple's developer un-friendly-ness would drive them all to Android!) Sounds to me like you guys want to be the YouTube for documents? (which IIRC wasn't that the goal in the beginning?) I guess like Smugmug's founder's interview, there'll always be a high-end niche of any market (are you trying conquer the "high-end" and "niche" documents? If so, then perhaps it might be a branding problem?) As in, if people perceive you as an expensive brand, then naturally people will _want_ to publish via Scribd. If I was writing an article about animals, I might be better off publishing the article on National Geographic's blog vs. my own no-name blog. Other than that, awesome product! I guess I am still just trying to figure out why I should put my documents on Scribd. Always a fan of YC-startups. Good work, guys.

qhoxie 16y ago
Thanks for the well-thought questions. Being as the web is all about content, there are many players and there is plenty of overlap. We do want to create a place where people want to publish their essays, poems, notes, etc. I too am a developer, and it is sometimes easy to get caught up in the technological aspects of interesting projects such as this, our latest. I do feel, however, that we have/are creating a platform people want to use. Here's an anecdote about some value I feel we began providing recently: I got to work on a little project we called Readcasting a few weeks ago. It basically allows people to passively or actively share what they are reading. A day or so ago, one of the ladies in marketing circulated an article[1] about how the social aspects of Scribd (to a large extent Readcasting) has helped an author gain a great deal of exposure. I thought that was pretty nice to hear. It's always a pleasure to see that people use and like the things you build, but it also pointed directly at the purpose of Scribd - to create a platform that benefits the people who publish on it. 1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kate-rados/where-marketing-mission-a_b_564734.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kate-rados/where-marketing-mis...
- jayliew 16y ago
  You know what, you guys should collect these social proof points and feature them prominently on your first page. So that content creators visiting Scribd for the first time can immediately understand the value proposition right away. This link is a perfect proof point - and priceless, because for the sheer fact that it wasn't written by Scribd itself. You can write anything about yourself, but it's what other people write about you that matters. Your brand is what other people say it is ;) You guys should leverage such proof points more in your marketing effort.
  - snowmaker 16y ago
    That's a great idea. We could definitely do a better job of surfacing stuff like that.
snowmaker 16y ago
These are all great questions - thanks for giving me an opportunity to clarify. Let me try to explain. Regarding 1) We've done site surveys in the past to try to understand why people upload to Scribd. Every time we do it, we find that the #1 reason is: "Scribd gets me readers". Not "it hosts my docs for free", or "I like the display format", or whatever. Readers is what they want, and so we have worked very hard to maximize the number of readers we can get them. I think file hosting sites are great, and Scribd is not attempting to replace them, they just serve a different purpose. If you want to share a file with a few friends, a file hosting site makes a lot of sense. But if you want to build an audience of strangers, posting on Scribd gives you a surprisingly good change of doing that. If you don't believe me, try posting some doc you've written on Scribd. You will probably be surprised by the number of random people bumping into your document brought by related doc traffic, Scribd community traffic, search engines, Facebook, Twitter, our mobile apps, and all the other ways we make Scribd content discoverable. re 2) Absolutely. Scribd isn't trying to be a content discovery site - other sites do a great job of that. Rather, if we've done our job right, then when you bump into interesting links on Digg and Reddit, some fraction of them will happen to be hosted on Scribd. Now that we've launched the HTML5 reader, you will hopefully enjoy clicking over to Scribd to read the document that Reddit surfaced for you. Re making Scribd a "high-end" brand - I think that is a terrific idea. Creating that kind of brand is not easy, but it can be extremely valuable.
- jayliew 16y ago
  Interesting, so you really are becoming more YouTube-for-documents like. I prefer to upload a video clip to YouTube and then embed it on my site vs. hosting it straight on my site, because if I upload it on YouTube, I get more visitors who may learn about my video (that didn't visit my site), and those may eventually be curious enough to visit my site. So "discovery" is the big deal here, the "Scribd gets me [document] readers", like "YouTube get me [video] watchers". Good to know :) And def +1 for doing your market research / cust. dev!

by jayliew 16y ago

qhoxie 16y ago

Thanks for the well-thought questions. Being as the web is all about content, there are many players and there is plenty of overlap. We do want to create a place where people want to publish their essays, poems, notes, etc. I too am a developer, and it is sometimes easy to get caught up in the technological aspects of interesting projects such as this, our latest. I do feel, however, that we have/are creating a platform people want to use. Here's an anecdote about some value I feel we began providing recently: I got to work on a little project we called Readcasting a few weeks ago. It basically allows people to passively or actively share what they are reading. A day or so ago, one of the ladies in marketing circulated an article[1] about how the social aspects of Scribd (to a large extent Readcasting) has helped an author gain a great deal of exposure. I thought that was pretty nice to hear. It's always a pleasure to see that people use and like the things you build, but it also pointed directly at the purpose of Scribd - to create a platform that benefits the people who publish on it. 1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kate-rados/where-marketing-mission-a_b_564734.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kate-rados/where-marketing-mis...

jayliew 16y ago
You know what, you guys should collect these social proof points and feature them prominently on your first page. So that content creators visiting Scribd for the first time can immediately understand the value proposition right away. This link is a perfect proof point - and priceless, because for the sheer fact that it wasn't written by Scribd itself. You can write anything about yourself, but it's what other people write about you that matters. Your brand is what other people say it is ;) You guys should leverage such proof points more in your marketing effort.
- snowmaker 16y ago
  That's a great idea. We could definitely do a better job of surfacing stuff like that.

snowmaker 16y ago

These are all great questions - thanks for giving me an opportunity to clarify. Let me try to explain. Regarding 1) We've done site surveys in the past to try to understand why people upload to Scribd. Every time we do it, we find that the #1 reason is: "Scribd gets me readers". Not "it hosts my docs for free", or "I like the display format", or whatever. Readers is what they want, and so we have worked very hard to maximize the number of readers we can get them. I think file hosting sites are great, and Scribd is not attempting to replace them, they just serve a different purpose. If you want to share a file with a few friends, a file hosting site makes a lot of sense. But if you want to build an audience of strangers, posting on Scribd gives you a surprisingly good change of doing that. If you don't believe me, try posting some doc you've written on Scribd. You will probably be surprised by the number of random people bumping into your document brought by related doc traffic, Scribd community traffic, search engines, Facebook, Twitter, our mobile apps, and all the other ways we make Scribd content discoverable. re 2) Absolutely. Scribd isn't trying to be a content discovery site - other sites do a great job of that. Rather, if we've done our job right, then when you bump into interesting links on Digg and Reddit, some fraction of them will happen to be hosted on Scribd. Now that we've launched the HTML5 reader, you will hopefully enjoy clicking over to Scribd to read the document that Reddit surfaced for you. Re making Scribd a "high-end" brand - I think that is a terrific idea. Creating that kind of brand is not easy, but it can be extremely valuable.

jayliew 16y ago
Interesting, so you really are becoming more YouTube-for-documents like. I prefer to upload a video clip to YouTube and then embed it on my site vs. hosting it straight on my site, because if I upload it on YouTube, I get more visitors who may learn about my video (that didn't visit my site), and those may eventually be curious enough to visit my site. So "discovery" is the big deal here, the "Scribd gets me [document] readers", like "YouTube get me [video] watchers". Good to know :) And def +1 for doing your market research / cust. dev!