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Interestingly, I am revisiting Tim Brady's interview from Founders at work. Tim talks about the early days of Yahoo's traffic and says "The sex category was pro
by prakash 18y ago
Interestingly, I am revisiting Tim Brady's interview from Founders at work. Tim talks about the early days of Yahoo's traffic and says "The sex category was probably 25% of web traffic, just like the VHS industry when it first got going, and the Internet was no different in that respect".
A year and half or so after launch, Yahoo pulled out all their porn links, in that sense Scribd seems to be doing the same thing.
Porn seems to provide the impetus for early traffic, and, once you get a bit of legs under your business, move away from it seems to be the strategy.
- jsrn 18y agoand, once you get a bit of legs under your business, move away from it seems to be the strategy. And as soon as someone buys your startup, the porn comes back (see nsfw reddit and Condé Nast)
- unalone 18y agoThat was a more personal initiative, though. As in, a user created the reddit again after people were allowed to make their own.
- pg 18y agoFrom what I've heard, x-rated stuff was never that big a component of Scribd's traffic. Porn is so ubiquitous that it becomes a component of any general purpose Internet service (e.g. the most popular search queries tend to be about porn), but I don't think Scribd got any particular boost from it.
- zandorg 18y agoBitTorrent started the same way, with a request for porn in NTK.