I think there are a few takeaways here:<p>* 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.<p>* 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.
Early Scribd broke the web by taking open format documents, putting them in a proprietary wrapper, and calling it a "service".<p>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).<p>Late Scribd is again breaking the web by moving documents behind a paywall. Some qualities are just baked into a company's DNA.
I can't actually believe that they would go the paywall route. It honestly seemed a few months ago when they added HTML5 support that they were going in a really great direction and now I will avoid them like the plague.
From the FAQ (this is crazy):<p>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.<p>After a couple months your document will return to the Archive, and you can repeat this process to recall it again.
I don't care if they want to establish a paywall, that's there perogative, what I don't like is taking my content, which I uploaded under the belief I'd be able to host it there at no cost to end users (persumably subsidised by ads) and then charging my readers for it. I post my content (mostly slides from talks and such) for readers, I'd probably even pay to put my content there, it's rather convenient.
I've never seen the appeal of Scribd, and I'm no fan of the direction they seem to be stumbling in, but it seems a bit unfair to dismiss invitations to join a user advisory board and/or come visit them as "not much of a response".<p>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.
Guys: you could write your next software for people like this gentleman, <i>or</i> you could write it for a 50 year old woman who pays money for software and services. Choose wisely.
This reminds me of chi.mp. I recently suspected that my Gmail was hacked, so I clicked maniacally to get to the page where I could reset my password.<p>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.<p>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---<p>"Something, something, you need a Pro account to create a forwarding address."<p>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.<p>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.
Sometimes, when reading pieces like this, I think it is time that we as internet users reach a certain point in our understanding of entitlement. There are so many services we readily use, most free of charge, while some of them provide a huge service to us. Some even make us money. But if the service providers themselves try to validate their business by making money out of it in some way, we start bitching...<p>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?<p>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.
Getting a bunch of people to give your free service content and then suddenly changing policy so that you can charge for that submitted content always felt pretty sleazy to me.<p>Kind of like raising a bunch of money for starving orphans and then buying yourself a yacht.
I have content hosted there too and value the "open access" spirit, but would also like to see Scribd develop a viable business model. An alternative is the service will close down and everything -- both free and archived -- will go away.<p>Another question: Besides an archive paywall, what else could the company do to build revenue (such as professional services, print-on-demand, etc.)
If people put the documents available for download for free, I think they should be left that way, no one likes someone else to makes actions for them without their knowledge.<p>Everybody is surprised when someone tells him "Why have you made the document available for download only via purchase?"<p>If they don't fix this thing soon I'll stop using Scribd completely.<p>Also, a really funny sentence in the response from Scribd:<p>> You’re right that our communication around the Archive should have been more clear.<p>It sounds like, yeah, we know, but we like it this way for now.
In the time it took him to write his rant, he could have clicked the checkbox to make all of his old content available for free again.<p>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.
I feel that the main issue is the lack of open and direct communication with the users.<p>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.
People still don't understand all of the things they are agreeing to on sites like this:<p>Scribd Creator Terms Of Service
<a href="http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/scribd-creator-terms-of-service/" rel="nofollow">http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/scribd-creator-term...</a>
Thanks to everyone for the feedback and comments, Scribd just announced they are making changes:
<a href="http://blog.scribd.com/2010/09/21/the-scribd-archive-an-apology-and-immediate-changes" rel="nofollow">http://blog.scribd.com/2010/09/21/the-scribd-archive-an-apol...</a>
This reminds me of what happened at the end of the dot com bubble, where the hasty erection of a paywall usually meant that the death of a site was imminent, and users often did feel "tricked and trapped" or that their community relationships had been violated.
I've encountered a few documents that were 1 page application forms for community resources, and all were shocked when those were suddenly behind a rather expensive paywall. I also was really annoyed the first time I noticed some obscure document I read was broadcast to all my "followers." That means I've encountered both of these major beefs myself. I was never a scribd user, but I sure as hell would never use them now. This is not an issue of not charging early - it's expertsexchange all over again.
That paywall pays for hosting, the platform and the tools that guy used--not to mention the fact that it also pays for hundreds of jobs and fuels the entrepreneurial economy. If that causes a benign blogger to add the service to his or her shitlist, then I think Scribd will live on.