Why Scribd Has Almost 60 Million Users

Scribd currently funnels almost 60 million viewers through its eGates every single month – dwarfing almost every other document sharing site on the net.  Several factors undoubtedly have a bearing on this impressive number.

When Business Week called Scribd “The YouTube of Documents”, they couldn’t have dreamed up a better branded tag line if they’d hired a top ad agency.  People have accepted that definition – and it’s given the relatively new ePublishing company, which has been in business only since 2007, credibility and prestige by association.  

But there are more solid reasons Scribd has caught on so wildly. For one thing, of all the document-sharing companies around, it alone seems to be encouraging everyone from Aunt Joan with her biscuit recipe to Cousin Joey with his Thesis to upload and share their documents in its archives.

While this makes for very uneven quality, it also makes for a stunning historical “snapshot” of where we are as a global society.  It makes Scribd as much as social network as a publisher, and that’s undoubtedly what they intended.

And it doesn’t hurt that you can automatically update Twitter and Facebook with your Scribd activity, if you so prefer.

Or keep your documents strictly private, if you’ve no great desire to share them with the world.

But how does Scribd get past the inevitable problem of helping its users find what they need, with such a gigantic maelstrom of miscellaneous documents?

They’ve thought of that too, with multi-layered categories and sub-categories, and different pages featuring specific types of content – “Most Read”, “Rising”, “Featured”, et cetera – but they haven’t stopped there. Recently, they imitated Google and SEOmoz by adding search operators to their search function, so that one can used advanced sorting data to refine one’s searches.

They’ve added a mobile store, and most recently, a “Send to” button, so you can send documents to any mobile device. They’ve created their own API keys, encouraging development from users. And early criticism of piracy infestation have been defused by their new copyright protection measures, which catch pirated content being uploaded, when a work already exists in its new database.

Hats off to Scribd, to listen to its users – and to the times.  It’s changing as we speak; hopefully for the better, again.

But the true feather in Scribd’s virtual hat?  

It’s easy to use, and it gives you results.