Scribd Had A Blowout Year, And So Did the Web Document | TechCrunch (original) (raw)
12:48 PM PST · December 31, 2008
The biggest surprise fro me in the social media rankings that I posted earlier today was the appearance of document sharing service Scribd in the top 20. According to the comScore numbers, it has more unique visitors worldwide than imeem and almost as many as Bebo, with 23.5 million visitors in November, 2008. (In the U.S., it had about 4 million visitors). This is a serious accomplishment for a startup that launched less than two years ago with $300,000 in seed capital.
Scribd, which raised a $9 million B round earlier this month, grew 218 percent from November, 2007. Scribd is heads and shoulders above other document-sharing services such as Docstoc (1.6 million uniques) and Issuu (1 million) in terms of attracting users. (All three are excellent services, by the way, and Docstoc is much closer to Scribd in the U.S.). Scribd users upload 50,000 documents every day.
What this tells me more than anything is that the concept of document sharing on the Web has legs and there is a real demand for it. (Unless Scribd’s numbers are artificially inflated—Quantcast shows an unusually steep drop-off in December, but that could just be a problem with Quantcasts’s data). Desktop-bound document formats like PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint slides, and spreadsheets are increasingly irrelevant if they cannot be viewed and shared online directly in a browser. Scribd’s paper is an embeddable Flash viewer for nearly all document types. (I’ve embedded a document with sample job interview questions below).
It looks like we are not the only ones who like to embed documents on the Web.
Update: CEO Trip Adler explains the Quantcast discrepancy:
The drop-off on Quantcast was caused by the fact that we removed the Quantcast pixel from Scribd for a little while because it was slowing down page loads. However, I’m not sure why these numbers are still on the low side. According to our Google Analytics, we did 39.9 million unique in November, and if you include views of iPaper on other websites, it was way over 50 million uniques.
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Erick has been discovering and working with startups his entire professional career as a technology journalist, startup event producer, and founder. Erick is President & Founding Partner at Traction Technology Partners. He is also a co-founder of TouchCast, the leading interactive video platform, and a partner at bMuse, a startup studio in New York City. He is the former Executive Producer of the DEMO conferences and former Editor-in-Chief of TechCrunch (where he helped conceive, lead and select startups for the Disrupt conferences, among other duties). Prior to TechCrunch, which he joined as Co-Editor in 2007, Erick was Editor-at-Large for Business 2.0 magazine, and a senior writer at Fortune magazine covering technology.
At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving media property. After founder Michael Arrington left in 2011, Schonfeld became Editor in Chief.
Prior to TechCrunch, he was Editor-at-Large for Business 2.0 magazine, where he wrote feature stories and ran their main blog, The Next Net. He also launched the online video series “The Disruptors” with CNN/Money and hosted regular panels and conferences of industry luminaries. Schonfeld started his career at Fortune magazine in 1993, where he was recognized with numerous journalism awards.