Scribd "YouTube for Text" Gets $300K
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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's implementation is absolutely top-notch. I'm very excited for them, especially knowing that our ideas are shared by some other clever folks.
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?
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.
There are MSWord documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, etc. These are documents that someone might want to simply embed in a blog post. A user might want to embed a PowerPoint presentation on their MySpace profile. Getting videos online was not an impossible task before YouTube. YouTube made it easier, as you mentioned, by enabling users to view without worry of player or codec. With Scribd's flash viewer, people are able to view through their browser regardless of document type.
I'm no fierce advocate of Scribd; in fact I'm not too familiar with them. I just know it's something that would make things easier for me personally. This is reason enough for me to be a believer.