Scribd quietly growing like crazy (and profitable)

I don't use (or happen to use, through search or other means) Scribd much, but whenever I do, I get frustrated as hell by the way it loads content and usually end up closing that tab in disgust. I admit, I haven't tested it much and might be completely wrong, but sometimes I open a 600 page manual or something like that, and I'm on page 285 (bevause google determined thats where my keyword was) and nothing happens. I wait a minute and then scroll to top and see it's gradually populating from the very first page onwards, and it would take 5-10 minutes before it reaches page 285 that I'm interested in... I don't have Fladh installed and naturally use the HTML5 version; maybe Flash version is smarter in the way it loads content.<p>It's absolutely great on small documents though, a great service.

I think tikhon is starting to make hacker news and YC Companies look bad. The poster of this link is the founder of scribd and a YC alum. If you look at his last submission on Parse you'll see this isn't the first time. We don't come to HN to be spammed with subtle marketing for YC Companies. We will start to go somewhere else.

I've never been able to understand the legality of Scribd. Apart from the reputability of YC and the focus on written documents, what makes them different from other file sharing sites?

Interesting, I've noticed that alot of sites I read started using them as well. I dont know why, because IMO its a giant step backwards compared to pdf's, at least you can always search and copy-paste relevant sections from those. Not so on a few documents I've encountered on scribd.<p>As an example: <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/91764042/April-2012-TEF-Commentary" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribd.com/doc/91764042/April-2012-TEF-Commentary</a> When I try to copy-paste some text from that document it comes out gibberish. And I cant search in it either.

Scribd is great and all, but a quantcast screenshot doesn't show it's profitable or represent their growth in anyway.<p>Anything else to add?

Congrats to the scribd team. It's refreshing to see a post about being profitable rather then just how much was raised.<p>Lots of love for scribd here.

Ever since you moved to HTML5 viewer, I've loved Scribd.

This is an interesting graph. It looks like the mid-point of 2011 to the mid-point of 2012 was ~80mm visitors (2011) to ~90mm (2012) which constitutes 12.5% YoY growth. The largest delta between some 30-day interval in the last year and this latest 30-day interval seems to be ~30mm visitors (~90mm - ~60mm) which is still only 50% annualized growth.<p>I find Scribd to be a very valuable service but this chart makes me wonder if monetization rate is growing more quickly than visitation. If not, perhaps the monetization potential of content publishing is lower than with other kinds of user-generated content.<p>Great that it's profitable, though, gives the team indefinite time to figure it out, or identify an acquirer who values it strategically.

Interesting seasonal trend. Must be more than just students, though.