Scribd "YouTube for Text" Gets $300K

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/06/scribd-youtube-for-text-gets-300k/

by perler • 19 years ago

12 6 19 years ago

danielha3• 19 years ago

I love this idea. My co-founder and I were working on something similar a while ago before deciding to pursue our next idea.

Scribd's implementation is absolutely top-notch. I'm very excited for them, especially knowing that our ideas are shared by some other clever folks.

nickb2• 19 years ago

This has nothing to do with YouTUBE. This is just a pirate's heaven that will be taken down by some angry publisher.

danielha3• 19 years ago

Your second sentence made it even more analogous to YouTube.

When YouTube was younger, its popular use was to facilitate the spread of copyrighted content. Now there's a whole slew of user-generated videos out there.

There will inevitably be pirated material on Scribd, sure. But surely you can see further than that. Sharing group documents? Helping some self-"publish"? Spread works in the public domain? Share academic and/or research papers?

nickb2• 19 years ago

Ever heard of HTML/XML? How about CSS? How about Prince? http://www.princexml.com/ Why would anyone wanna publish through Flashpaper?! Oh, that;'s right... only if you have a scanned book. But even then, Google Books' AJAX reader is so much nicer than Flashpaper.

YouTube solved the problem of not having a codec or a media player installed. Scribd is solving a non-existing problem. No one wants to read a book in some tiny window.

There's a huge difference from writing books and making videos in front of a camera. I'll let you figure out the difference in magnitude of work required to do each.

Also, most of the people don't read that much.

Sorry to rain on the parade but Scribd is NOTHING like YouTube! It's just a "clever" marketing gimmick.

ed• 19 years ago

I think the concept sounds great and it is beautifully executed.

Books don't have the same broad appeal as videos but are definitely easier to classify, search, and analyze. There's a whole lot of semantic data to work with in a book so a site like Scribd should be much easier to monetize than youtube with context-sensitive advertising. Couple this product with some sort of publisher agreement a la youtube and you'll definitely have a winning investment.

Congrats on the cash infusion! Spend wisely!!

Scribd "YouTube for Text" Gets $300K

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