Scribd Launches "Most Interesting Hard Drive Contest" - Win a MacBook Air | Hacker News Reader

Scribd Launches "Most Interesting Hard Drive Contest" - Win a MacBook Air

scribd.com

30 pointstrip10 comments

Absolute marketing genius - they will get tons of interesting content, and thousands of people linking to it. All for the price of a macbook Air.

I disagree. It's a cheap trick. The real aim is to get a bunch of SEO-optimizing people to link like crazy to scribd.com.

So how is that not marketing genius?

The "cheap trick" part is that the winner is determined by number of page views (which really is a factor of the spamming ability of the contestant) rather than any intrinsic "interesting"-ness of the submissions.

I'm not knocking it, the internet runs on this kind of "cheap trick", and it will generate a ton of traffic and new users. I don't know if it will generate much good will towards Scribd.

Playing it a little loose with the term "genius" don't you think?

It sounds more like a desperate trick to bring in irrelevant traffic.

The whole point of the site is to post and share documents, which is what this contest is encouraging people to do. In terms of SEO, inbound linking is never irrelevant.

I really love the concept of this contest.. putting all that random crap on your hard drive to good use.

I must admit, I’m a compulsive hoarder of files.. I’m often surprised when I’m browsing through random folders at all the cool stuff I’ve collected over the years and forgotten about.

It’s like digital archeology. :)

You should definitely put those files to use in the contest :-)

It's brilliant. Everything from the limitations (real text files that can be indexed) to getting people to link their own stuff from other sites is very well thought-out.

There's a double-incentive for users to get their stuff at the top of Digg, Reddit, etc. First is the MBA they win, and second is the fact that it's _their_ stuff that's getting popular - pure brilliance!

And Scribd's slick licensing clause will make people submit their own, original content under an open source or CC license just for the chance of getting that MBA.

Yeah, well... Guess they have good do something to keep those visitors coming...

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