![]() ![]() Trip, are you ready to take us to the top?Īll right, good. He launched Scribd in 2007 and they now have over 80 million monthly readers and 500 thousand subscribers. He grew up in Palo Alto, California and graduated from Harvard. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Scribd, a digital library and document sharing platform. We pay for a little bit, but just a small amount.” We don’t have to actually pay for marketing. So, we basically just market our subscription service to those a hundred million users. “We started the service as just a free service for publishing and sharing content and it today reaches over a hundred million monthly users. And that’s what took us from launch to one hundred million monthly users pretty quickly.” Saving on marketing costs by going direct to Scribd’s 100 million users So, we really got that growth going early on. And then of that SEO traffic, a small fraction of people would come in, upload their own content and that would kind of get the cycle going. “In the early days, the initial idea was we would just allow someone to take a piece of content, publish it on the web, and then we would find an audience for them primarily via SEO. And mostly people are searching for things on Google and then long tail searches bring them to our library of content.” Adler on overcoming the ‘chicken and egg’ problem of Scribd’s marketplace And basically we have over a hundred million people a month who come to visit that library of content. “We have this library of 70 million documents that have been uploaded by users. Transcript Excerpts Why free users find Scribd through SEO, not books In 2017, Scribd reached $4.5 million MRR. In 2017, Scribd hit $54 million in revenue. “And we’re just trying to continually get that kind of growth loop going.” ![]() “The more we grow the subscriber base, the more revenue we have to return to publishers and authors, and we can get more and more content in the service,” Adler says. Since Scribd simply markets to its free users, the company pays very little in marketing costs.įor now, Scribd’s main aim is to continue to add subscribers. The other major expense is for talent - hiring good engineers, designers, and other product builders to build upon Scribd’s 120-person team. Much of the company’s costs go towards its deals with publishers. Scribd pays the publishers for a read any time somebody gets through at least 20% of a book. Eventually larger publishers joined in, and the company now has one million books in its virtual library from major publishers like Bloomsbury and HarperCollins.Īny time a publisher comes out with a new book, that book automatically appears in Scribd’s library too. “Most people couldn’t even envision that.”Īlthough publishers weren’t originally keen to include their books in Scribd’s subscription service, Scribd got the ball rolling with smaller publishers. They decided to turn it into a subscription “At the time, the idea of a book subscription service was pretty crazy,” Adler says. Instead, Adler and his team noticed that Scribd’s freemium model was performing very well. Advertising didn’t convert well and Scribd didn’t see great results from partnering with publishers to sell content. To become profitable, though, Scribd cycled through different ideas before finding its current subscription model. In 2017, with half a million paying customers, Scribd earned about $4.5 million MRR and $54 million ARR. Now the company remains profitable on its own, growing 50% each year. “With the subscription model, the beauty of that is it gives users really the freedom to just kind of explore different types of content … and you kind of focus on what to read and not what to buy,” Adler says.Īfter the initial $12,000 in funding, Scribd received nearly $50 million from organizations like Silicon Valley Bank and Coastal Ventures. In the past, Scribd has been called the “ Netflix for books.” But unlike Netflix, which offers tiered payment plans, Scribd offers one subscription plan with one flat rate. The subscription model is simple enough: For $9.99 per month, users have unlimited access to Scribd’s selection of ebooks, audiobooks, podcasts, and magazines.
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