What blatant hypocrisy. The author of this article offers no evidence that Scribd has deliberately used porn to increase traffic-- that the proportion of porn in Scribd is any higher than any other large repository, like the Google index. And yet it seems pretty clear that the author himself is using the topic as a way of increasing traffic.
Porn is like the Special Forces of startups. Special Forces were known as "force multipliers" because they can take a small army of native people and make them have a big impact. Looks like porn can take a small company and give it a huge kick in the butt.<p>
The question is whether they want to go this direction or not. I know some companies run from it at all costs. Some embrace it. It'll be interesting to see where they go with this, assuming the article is true.
This has a little of the flavor of "Valley Wag" -- subtly
slamming innovators for failing to fix the
internet/economy/government. Scribd allows people to share
content and, lo and behold, people use it to share porn -- just
like Facebook, youTube, Flickr...<p>The author can't really make up their mind as to where Scribd is
in error: are they using porn to drive up traffic, or do they
fail to have right the disclaimer? Going so far as to ask
whether it is "acceptable for a VC backed company to drive
growth via porn?", the author back pedals and asks for an "Are
you OK with this?" dialogue, though the site already has it.
(Maybe that changed recently?)<p>
Oh come on. The adult group is the biggest is because you're required by Scribd to add your adult content to it.<p>You're still free to add it to any additional group too, but this is essentially Scribd's way of tagging the content.
Well, the internet is for porn (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MvSAoJdMW0" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MvSAoJdMW0</a>), after all...
What is this "compete.com" site, and why are people believing this bogus data and even cite it? <p>The data from this site is highly irrelevant and false.
And the Search Analytics is a joke: For example for wikipedia top keywords are "snape kills dumbledore page" and softpedia.com has "vanessa hudgens pictures", mit.edu has "romeo and juliet", slate.com has "girls gone wild"... huh? What is this bs?
interesting. I think that scribd is bound to get blocked by school and work firewalls and other services leading to the site being less useful for the general population. I would propose they create something like adult.scribd.com (or an entire different domain name) that can be easily filtered and enforce that all adult content must be posted accessed from this URL (where they can add age verification if needed).