Scribd Turns Three, Gets A New Look And Logo

Erick Schonfeld

Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City. Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily... → Learn More

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Document-sharing site Scribd launched three years ago with the idea of making PDFs and other text-documents more Web-friendly. Now three years later, the site stores more than 10 million documents, which in turn have been embedded more than 10 million times across the Web. Scribd says it reaches more than 50 million people a month worldwide (Quantcast).

To celebrate its birthday, Scribd just rolled out a redesign with a new Zune-brown logo, much faster document search (to support 1.4 million searches a day), and other small new features such as the addition of collections. It lets you explore by category or trending documents.

Scribd took a big hit to its traffic in the middle of last year when it reduced its aggressive SEO tactics and got serious about cracking down on pirated documents, from which it still hasn’t completely recovered. But its stronger copyright filtering makes partners like major publishing houses more comfortable using Scribd as a way to promote and distribute its books. Scribd’s biggest competitor DocStoc is also growing at a nice clip and adding new features at a steady clip.

Scribd is also making a big push into mobile reading by making it easy to send documents to avariety of mobile devices, including iPhones, Android phones, Blackberries, Kindles, and Nooks. The company has raised $13 million total from Charles River Ventures, Redpoint, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Jordan, and David Sacks (who recently joined its board).

Company: Scribd
Website: scribd.com
Launch Date: September 3, 2012
Funding: $25.8M

Scribd is a social reading and publishing website. The company houses tens of millions written works, including best-selling books, magazines, research reports, recipes, presentations, and more. Scribd enables users to upload documents of varied formats, including MS Office Documents, Google Docs, PDF and ePUB files. Scribd then makes those documents searchable (across the web and within the documents themselves), social, and easy to embed within websites and blogs. Scribd’s document reader has been embedded more than 10 million times...

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Company: Docstoc
Website: docstoc.com
Launch Date: August 1, 2007
Funding: $4M

Docstoc is the premier online business for the best quality and widest selection of documents used to start, grow, and manage your professional life and small business. Docstoc provides a platform to upload, share and even sell your documents, and maintains an ever-growing repository of both free and purchasable legal, business, financial, technical, and educational documents that can be easily searched, previewed and downloaded. Docstoc provides technology to help facilitate the sharing of documents across the web, and has popularized...

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