Scribd is storing 10 times more words than Wikipedia!
At Dow Jones’ VentureWire Tech Showcase event yesterday I met with Scribd co-founder Jared Friedman to talk about the San Francisco, Calif.-startup’s latest news: reaching profitability and hiring engineers.
“Scribd is the largest social publishing website where anyone can publish original writings and documents and share them with the world,” explains Friedman.
What is sometimes referred as the YouTube for documents has so far raised $13 million and stores more than 10 million documents which translates to more than 35 billion words – 10 times the size of Wikipedia! “We’re storing 1% of all public documents on the Web.”
How Scribd deals with piracy; sees Amazon, Google as main competitors
As for piracy- uploads of copyrighted documents – Scribd has developed technologies to help prevent copyright infringement.
“When infringing works are uploaded to Scribd they are matched against a huge library of reference database that we’ve assembled that has a huge list of works that are copyrighted. And if they found to be a match they are taken out immediately,” adds Friedman.
For Friedman, Google (with its Books initiative) and Amazon (with the Kindle) will ultimately be Scribd main competitors.
The 40-employees startup reached profitability in the second quarter this year, monetising through targeted ads – which displays on the side of every documents – and revenue share for every document sold on its service.
The other good news is that Scribd is actively hiring engineers!
Follows is my interview with Friedman.
I have never heard of them before, but now that I have done so I am heading straight over to Scribd to go and check their offering out. Bigger than Wikipedia is really impressive and hopefully indicative of great things to come form these people.