{"id":2231,"date":"2008-02-19T16:15:27","date_gmt":"2008-02-19T21:15:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/02\/19\/scribd-cool-feature-or-actual-business\/"},"modified":"2008-02-19T16:15:27","modified_gmt":"2008-02-19T21:15:27","slug":"scribd-cool-feature-or-actual-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/02\/19\/scribd-cool-feature-or-actual-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Scribd: Cool feature or actual business?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know it’s kind of quaint to wonder about business models with Web 2.0 companies, and a number of people (including Fred Wilson) have argued that startups shouldn’t worry about monetization until they get some scale, but I have to say that I felt that old twinge of concern when I first saw Scribd, which just re-launched with a new format and features<\/a>, including its own Flash-based document viewer. I think the service is great, but the business angle kind of makes me wonder.<\/p>\n

There’s no question that Scribd is pretty cool — especially when you consider that it was created by a couple of twentysomethings through the Y Combinator startup program run by programmer and VC Paul Graham. There’s a video of co-founder Trip Adler here,<\/a> in which he looks like the next-door neighbour’s kid, the one you get to look after the cats and maybe mow the lawn while you’re away.<\/p>\n

Trip and his team are clearly smart as well, since they ditched Adobe’s Flashpaper, which they were using initially, in favour of their own Flash viewer called iPaper — which appears to be faster, has a smaller footprint and has a bunch of custom features<\/a>. It’s pretty cool to be able to view what looks like a PDF document with images and everything, in an embedded Flash widget. And it’s easy to implement on your site so that links to Word documents or PDFs are autoconverted<\/a>.<\/p>\n

All that said though, I just can’t see how Scribd makes money, even though the service does include the ability to put ads<\/a> on document pages. I don’t see that being a huge revenue generator (although I could be wrong). I suppose there could be tiers of access to documents or sharing features, but I have no idea what those might be, or whether people would actually pay for them. Maybe Scribd could get bought by Google — I think Google Docs could use a few of those cool features.<\/p>\n

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I know it’s kind of quaint to wonder about business models with Web 2.0 companies, and a number of people (including Fred Wilson) have argued that startups shouldn’t worry about monetization until they get some scale, but I have to say that I felt that old twinge of concern when I first saw Scribd, which … <\/p>\n

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