* You have to charge from the very beginning. If you start a free service, and then try to establish a pay system afterward, your users will feel tricked and trapped and they will rebel loudly. Scribd seems to have been in a hurry to get adoption, so they made it free to host documents; as this guy said though, he much preferred hosting with Scribd over doing it manually on his university's web server. That could have been Scribd's value proposition, and a small yearly fee for that probably would have worked OK.
* SaaS could get itself in trouble if there are too many incidents like this. I already hear from clients that are concerned about using online services; the most common questions are, "What if they change their terms?", "What if they go away?", and those are legitimate concerns. Many of my clients aren't the most computer-interested people, so if they have concerns like that, then that means that stories like this have penetrated very deep into the consumer market.
If you lock behind a paywall things previously available for free, sure. And they'll be right too.
An other option is to add features which are only behind a new paywall. Issue then is providing additional services of value and a way for users to discover them.
I don't agree with their choice (or methods) but it makes sense for them to do this.
Middle Scribd fixed their own brokenness by moving to HTML 5 (which is sometimes more convenient than a PDF, and is certainly "open" and accessible).
Late Scribd is again breaking the web by moving documents behind a paywall. Some qualities are just baked into a company's DNA.
You can still get the viewing stats, your just not at the services whim, simply move your file and the service will just remove the listing. Makes sense to me, probably some stuff like this out there seems fairly obvious.
Fundamentally though, they're about locking away documents behind a pay wall. And personally, I don't see their value proposition at all.
Nothing wrong with that, btw.
Your documents will automatically be entered into the Archive after an initial period of time. You can recall a document from the Archive by opening the document's properties, clicking the Archive Status tab, then clicking the Recall from Archive command. If a document's properties page doesn't have an Archive Status tab, then that document has not yet been placed into the Scribd Archive. To learn how to edit your documents' properties, please see our Writer's Guide.
After a couple months your document will return to the Archive, and you can repeat this process to recall it again.
I changed it for my own account only after reading the article. Funny enough, it's an inversely-worded checkbox in there (unlike all of the other options):
[ ] Do not include my documents in the Scribd Archive program. Learn more.
But they are scare off the wrong people: the readers. Why use a service to pay for reading something that the publishers WANT to give me for free? Not enough: Many publishers would pay for it, as it is convenient and absolutely user friendly.
This won't work. Well no, actually it will work - but not as a service that proclaims "show your work to the world for free".
Even if both are mere PR exercises, it's an improvement on the kind of content-free hand waving I'd expect from a company desperately seeking profitability.
Instead, it sounds like Mr. Goldman just wants to bitch. He feels like Scribd used him? Did he not use Scribd? At least Scribd provided value to him (as he indicated); whatever value he provided Scribd, he is now trying to destroy it with this blog post.
There was a submission on here last week: If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1684732).
I never use Scribd, and I'm not really concerned either way with how successful they are. But I'm starting to get really annoyed with everyone's sense of entitlement these days. Louis CK hit it on the nose with his remark, "How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only ten seconds ago." (http://barefootmeg.multiply.com/video/item/56 - it's a great clip if you haven't seen it)
Basically, it was a response, but "not much" of one.
As a start-up, we're constantly trying to strike the right
balance: building products that people love but that also
help us make money (to cover server cost and everything
else associated with running a company).
I'm not sure that's what is going on in Scribd's case, though.
When you don't pay for a service, you shouldn't expect anything in return. A guarantee of perpetual free access has to be paid for somehow and if they are not making money from ads presumably because nobody's seeing or clicking on them, then all bets are off!
You get what you pay for. Next time look for a price tag.
Also, Scribd would be nothing without the thousands of hours people have spent uploading content without charging Scribd. The situation isn't as clear cut as you make out.
I discover that my chi.mp account is the back-up e-mail, which is great; the service lets me decide which e-mail address to forward to.
I go to chi.mp, think for a minute to remember my password, and get to the e-mail-forwarding screen. The account is set to forward to an e-mail address that is inconvenient (I can't remember the reason), so I remove the forwarding I've set up and---
"Something, something, you need a Pro account to create a forwarding address."
What the hell is a Pro account, I think to myself, a thought that is quickly eclipsed by the fact that a) The guys screwed me over without telling me, and b) I have no way of saving my e-mail account from a potential invader, unless I pay these <expletive>s.
I have yet to e-mail them and give them shit for it, but I didn't want to let it ruin my week, but I'll be sure to contact them when I can muster the time and energy.
Recently, he left and we added another engineer. So I removed engineer #1 and couldn't add engineer #2 unless I paid to upgrade the account. I don't mind paying when it makes sense, but a) HopToad was totally unwilling to grandfather the account, which meant I couldn't add the new engineer, and b) there was no messaging that the plan changed. I found out about it when I tried to add engineer #2. Lame.
I do not especially condone what Scribd is doing here, nor can I say I would have anticipated that behaviour (harvesting interesting content and subsequently making the whole service pay-only is not the dumbest thing ever), but if you take a second when you first start using a service and try to think about the fact that they some day will have to make money, you should be able to get some conclusions. What options does the provider of the service have to make money at all? Which of these options would be ok for me? Which would piss me off badly? And how do I avoid being in a trap like the OP?
If one thinks about those questions instead of just feeling entitled to use a service, which might be "free" at the moment, the awakening should not be to abrupt.
The value of your service to a user isn't going to increase simply due to the passage of time or growth of your site. If they wouldn't pay for it on day 1, the odds are they won't pay for it after 2 years of using the service. If, in the process of trying to monetize your service, you "hold hostage" a portion of the value that the user has contributed to your site, they are going to be pissed.
This has all happened many times now. I think companies trying this route in the first place will be easier to change than peoples' reaction to it.
For real. This always reminds me of the dude who tries to be friends with the girl so he can eventually date her, instead of simply asking her out, and risking the 'No' like a man.
Slimy.
i agree.
The value of your service to a user isn't going to increase simply due to the passage of time or growth of your site.
i disagree. many users may not pay on the first day because they don't see the value in it, or don't understand how the site works. but being able to use it for free and coming to depend on it may put a higher value on it over time.
how many users would pay $1 per month to access facebook now that all of their friends are on it and they use it every day? probably a lot. those users probably wouldn't have signed up for an account in the first place if they had to enter a credit card number.
Yes it will. If that user uses your service every day, over time, it will be more valuable to them. Most services also don't just stay the same over time. More features are added and bugs are fixed, which adds to the value.
"If they wouldn't pay for it on day 1, the odds are they won't pay for it after 2 years of using the service."
If you never gave them the option of paying in the first place, how do you know?
"I think companies trying this route in the first place will be easier to change than peoples' reaction to it."
The answer is to not have free services in the first place. Many companies have tried the freemium model and then realize that it can't scale (IE: the costs to support this free user base out weighs the benefits).
It was probably something like this: People upload a lot of stuff to their service. Once content goes "stale" no one is viewing it anymore, but they are still storing it. They decided they could either remove the material to make room for new stuff or monetize the old material in a way that justified keeping it around.
The cost of storage is pretty low so maybe I'm reaching a bit here on their behalf. I have no idea what sort of scale they are at. Perhaps I just like to believe that people aren't trying to be evil.
I disagree, at least in one specific case. A new dating site doesn't have enough of a userbase of the gender that I am interested in for me to signup and pay a monthly fee. If they successfully complete their marketing play, I will gladly sign up.
But when you make a service available for free and take pride in that fact, harvest your users content, and then suddenly flip over to a paid service without even giving your users adequate notice or tools to opt out I can completely understand how users might feel cheated.
Isn't the company partly responsible for creating the sense of entitlement you're talking about?
Kind of like raising a bunch of money for starving orphans and then buying yourself a yacht.
Another question: Besides an archive paywall, what else could the company do to build revenue (such as professional services, print-on-demand, etc.)
Can you please or anybody else explain me why you see any added value of scribd at all? I see it only as an annoyance. If I'd like to read a pdf I'd prefer to click on the link and read it, not to go to some suspicious site which demands from me to sign up there only to do what otherwise would be one single click.
As far as I know the only "advantage" of the service was to make content infringement easier (a site for documents which is like youtube was for videos), and that the site owners expect people to pay for access to it is hardly surprising. But I like other mechanisms more.
My suggestion for everybody who is the owner of his own documents and wants to upload them: host them as the normal files on the normal sites, unless you do want people to pay for access to them.
1. They don't have webspace and want to put a PDF somewhere online.
2. They do have webspace, but are worried, possibly unnecessarily, that it'll cost them too much money if they send out a link to a big PDF to a large-ish mailing list.
3. For Mac users, where PDFs don't load in a plugin in the browser by default, they want to be able to link to a PDF that opens in the browser instead of popping up an external viewer.
4. And, yes: They have a PDF that is at best gray-area which they want to distribute without hosting it themselves, like a scan of a book chapter for a reading group.
- I can post papers or other documents that other people might value but not otherwise be available, such as court docs, academic papers, etc.
- I can embed the documents easily in my blogs (and before at the publication I worked at)
- I don't have to worry about hosting. I could easily upload the PDFs to the Web server my school grants me, but after I graduate, it's gone, and I have to find another solution and change the links.
Another idea: Cut out the middleman and sell a "print to webpage" plugin for Windows.
Everybody is surprised when someone tells him "Why have you made the document available for download only via purchase?"
If they don't fix this thing soon I'll stop using Scribd completely.
Also, a really funny sentence in the response from Scribd:
> You’re right that our communication around the Archive should have been more clear.
It sounds like, yeah, we know, but we like it this way for now.
When you use a free service, you have to expect them to need to make money somehow--and that means you should expect them to try changing the mix of what is free and what is paid now and then, and changing defaults. Accordingly, you should expect that on occasion you might have to change settings in order to get the thing to work the way you like.
Sure, making the paywall opt-in by default increases conversions. But you still have to tell the user about it rather have them discover one day that a lot of their documents are no longer being read. That sucks.
Scribd Creator Terms Of Service http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/scribd-creator-term...
As a courtesy, I sent a prepublication draft of the above post to Scribd's press team and asked for a response. They were kind enough to reply to me pretty quickly with the following