Scribd Had A Blowout Year, And So Did the Web Document

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/31/scribd-had-a-blowout-year-and-so-did-the-web-document/

by trip • 18 years ago

38 50 18 years ago

there• 18 years ago

i wonder how many of those visits resulted in a comment on the referring page complaining about scribd and asking for the actual pdf...

axod12• 18 years ago

This is sad news. Just when you thought flash was dead for all but video, it's now being used to show text.

marketer4• 18 years ago

Have you ever thought about using flash for your web chat service? I'd actually prefer it over standard javascript, especially because it would have a real socket connection.

Also, flash has pretty good support for text rendering. You can embed any font into any swf file, and it has anti-aliasing and effects. There was a presentation about the new flash 10 text features recently - http://is.gd/ejKj

axod12• 18 years ago

From a user point of view, why do you care if it has a real socket connection, or a emulated connection that does exactly the same thing? I'm not sure any user anywhere would notice the difference. There is no noticable difference in terms of latency, negligible difference in terms of bandwidth. I have thought about the possibility of using it where available, but I don't think it'd really be worth the effort and potential issues.

Fair enough for text rendering, but html is getting better font rendering also. I know which I'd put my money on. I can't even select the damn text on scribd.

hapless• 18 years ago

I realize that someone, somewhere, is running webtv and would love a service like Scribd. That person is not able to use it because it's a flash and javascript nightmare.

The rest of us, who have regular PCs with the modern software that scribd requires, have document readers for all of the various file formats. The very worst of these readers is faster and more pleasant to use than the best scribd rendering.

Lastly, as usual, TechCrunch measures success in terms of users and investor capital. Ask yourself: Does it really make sense to measure the success of a free hosting service in terms of unique users?

trapper2• 18 years ago

I think it does, IF your goal is acquisition. Adobe must be their prime target in my opinion, google wouldn't (too much js focus).

axod12• 18 years ago

What would Adobe do with it if they bought it?

jasonkester• 18 years ago

Scribd is a cool service run by cool people, and I'm happy they managed to scrape together enough funding to keep going for a while longer.

But then possibly I'm biased, because without them we'd be forced to roll our own pdf/doc/xls/ppt viewer to stick inside of Twiddla. As it is, Scribd is just about a perfect fit for us off the shelf.

But you're right. They've got a bit of an oldskool business model that sort of relies on Google buying them at some point. I hope things work out for them.

marketer4• 18 years ago

About the speed issue - how is a 20 MB reader (Adobe Reader 9) plus the cost of downloading the entire pdf faster than a 200 kb swf file and having the document streamed? That makes no sense.

axod12• 18 years ago

Half of the "documents" seem to be either plain text, or a plain image (porn).

The most viewed "document" on scribd of all time: http://www.scribd.com/doc/26896/SUING-FOR-TOO-MUCH-SEX

Do you think it's sane to "stream" that document? What the hell are these people thinking??? They're wrapping plain text inside flash. One can only imagine their warped mentality. Why not convert plain text to a video, upload it to youtube, and embed the video. It'd make about as much sense.

jules2• 18 years ago

Not a fair comparison: you need a viewer for swf files too. Downloading is not a problem. If it takes 0.3 s on scribd vs 0.8 s with pdf, then I'm willing to wait to have a viewer that allows me to scroll with my scrollwheel.

zain2• 18 years ago

Man, you guys are harsh. Even if it isn't a service you yourself would use, why bash a service useful for others? The first goal of many Y Combinator startups is to make something people want, and Scribd clearly fits the bill if millions of people are using it.

cstejerean• 18 years ago

Yes, millions of people are using it for reading pirated ebooks.

mattmaroon7• 18 years ago

PG didn't say "build something legal that people want".

axod12• 18 years ago

I disagree.

ONE person decides to use scribd to show some text on techcrunch, and suddenly the whole readership of techcrunch are "users" of scribd? Measuring success in terms of pageviews in a passive widget isn't a good measure.

Mazy• 18 years ago

I highly doubt comscore is claiming to be tracking embed/widget traffic. Those numbers are supposed to be for the site itself.

They are quantified, and quantcast shows the vast majority of their traffic is to their destination: http://www.quantcast.com/scribd.com

see scribd.com vs The Scribd Network

mattmaroon7• 18 years ago

How about the 50k documents uploaded every day? Can you really question that Scribd is a product that a lot of people want to use?

unalone2• 18 years ago

Of course we're harsh. Start-ups are almost all extremely competitive, and the people who use start-ups are cutthroat capitalists. Everybody's looking for the absolute best things can get. I remember, two years before Tumblr launched, I would go between blogging platforms at the rate of one a week, pounce on every update, install and test every beta and every plugin, looking for a platform that would work well for me. I still do it with certain things. Any time a social network claims it's got something Facebook doesn't, I check it out. I'd like to think this isn't entirely unusual behavior here. People in this field are very often perfectionists.

With Scribd we're a mix of benevolent and indignant. Benevolent, because it's YCombinator. Indignant, because it renders text in Flash.In both cases, though, the response is the same. Benevolence isn't being kind and wishing good luck. Look at sites with that attitude, or real life institutions, and there you'll find the places where progress becomes stagnant. In order to encourage progress, it helps to have a bit of an edge. And it attracts the right people. I plan on launching a beta preview of my current project to members here, because I want to be ripped apart before anybody else sees this. I figure it'll do me and my partner a world of good.

ajkirwin• 18 years ago

Screw scribd. Give me something that converts pdfs into straight (x)html, and I will be happy.

jawngee• 18 years ago

> soffice -headless -accept="socket,host=127.0.0.1,port=8100;urp;" -nofirststartwizard

> java -jar jodconverter-cli-2.2.1 yourpdf.pdf yourpdf.html

Happy now?

justin• 18 years ago

Fuck the haters. Scribd is awesome because it's a great utility for easily sharing your shitty Word docs and PDFs, and there is obviously demand for it as Scribd and all the Scribd-like knockoff sites each have more users than your worthless websites. Complaining about Scribd putting text in Flash is like complaining about how ugly Myspace pages are: while you were out bitching, a few talented people were out giving the masses what they wanted, no matter how many standards got violated, and will subsequently get paid for it.

schoudha• 18 years ago

Yes, Scribd has had great success and everyone in the HN community should be happy for them. However, there's a legitimate criticism to the direction Scribd is taking - it's arguably bad for the web.

What is the mission? All documents are created offline, uploaded to Scribd and displayed via iPaper? I think we already have a great framework for distributing text information - HTML (Although Scrib's traffic may indicate otherwise). It's flexible, it's fast, and it can be viewed on any device, it can be indexed easily, etc... Think about how much better nytimes.com is then the New York Times newspaper.

Instead of creating new standards, the industry should be trying to help people create HTML formats as first class objects. With that said, it would be really cool to bring all the books/magazines from the past to the internet (books.google.com).

axod12• 18 years ago

If they get bought, I'll gladly eat my hat. If they become profitable by sharing documents free, whilst expanding the documents size massively by wrapping it in flash, I'll eat another hat.

unalone2• 18 years ago

So, wait. If they become profitable WITHOUT being bought, you still eat two hats? Or are they entirely separate hat affairs?

startingup2• 18 years ago

I will be charitable here (you can tell I am not a huge fan either!). I have seen a couple of people use the site, and they use it to publish short stories and such. They could always post it to a blog, but I think Scribd gives them nice search engine optimization. Even for this legitimate use case, the flash player is a bit of a turn-off for me.

But the reason I am not a huge fan is the sheer extent of copyright abuse going on there. Turning a blind eye to it - hiding behind DMCA really - is not kosher, and I frankly wouldn't want to do business that way, no matter what the profit.

captainobvious• 18 years ago

Guess you are anti-ISP too?

startingup2• 18 years ago

Exactly the response I meant by "hiding behind the DMCA". To call Scribd an ISP is a stretch. They pretty much invite anyone to upload anything, and it is not clear they take any step to take out copyrighted content (entire books can be found there) until someone sends a DMCA notice. An ISP is a transmission service, while Scribd is a stateful, long lasting, very search-engine optimized storage service. An ISP doesn't by design intent (SEO!) carry traffic to copyright infringing content. Some day a distinction like that could come back and bite them in the ass, but their hope must be to "exit" before that happens.

snprbob86• 18 years ago

Flash provides a PDF viewer component. I'd like to use it because I intend to adorn documents on my pages with additional controls and interactions. I can't inject my own UI and logic into your desktop PDF viewer.

Unfortunately, this Flash component only handles PDFs, not the wide spectrum of document formats. If I could reliably convert Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, etc. server side to PDF, then I would be a very happy boy.

Does anyone know of any such software that can do this? I doubt Scribd would be the one to provide it, but I would really love a simple `anything2pdf` that "just works": `cat foo.doc | anything2pdf > foo.pdf`

Scribd Had A Blowout Year, And So Did the Web Document

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