Scribd is Youtube for Documents, Literally

When Techcrunch first reviewd Scribd, they called the service a “Youtube for Documents” and indeed Scribd is turning out to be a Youtube for documents in more ways than one.

Just as on Youtube, Scribd for the first time has made it dead simple to share documents with people at large. The User Interface, comments, tagging and ratings are similar to Youtube if not a blatant copy. Just as Youtube, Scribd´s internal dynamics encourages copy right violations and they are adopting similar tactics to cope with it “We will take it down, if and when you will ask us to do so”, but till than it won’t hurt us to ride on the traffic generated by such documents. And last but not least posting and viewing could be done anonymously, so no one can catch you for any violations what so ever.

Having said all this Scribd is and will be a winner, it serves a genuine need, is naturally viral, is Google-friendly (most documents are traversely the Google page rank). Scribd now has around 10,000 registered users, 13,000 uploaded documents and 100,000 unique visitors a day (again just like Youtube, More viewers than contributers). But Scribd is definitely better suited to fight copyright law suits, firstly because it will be a lot easier to build a tracking mechanism to automatically track and take down copy righted materials and secondly because documents are more easily created than videos and are in abundance as compared to videos.

The only question that remains to be seen is whether Scribd will have a similar exit or not. As far as this one is concerned I am willing to bet on this right away.

Also see Techcrunch and VentureBeat.

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