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Is Scribd a Porn Document Network?
Written by Allen Stern - October 15, 2007
Please note that this post is NOT SAFE FOR WORK (NSFW). While I have not embedded any offending images, some of the content and links are objectionable.
One of the most popular services for bloggers is called Scribd, a so-called "YouTube for Documents". It's a very useful service that allows you to take almost any document format and show it in a Scribd player (it's Flash) which makes posting documents easier than coversion to PDF or creating an image. The startup came out of the Y Combinator camp and received $3.5+M in funding this past June. Checking the traffic charts on Alexa and Compete (displayed below), their traffic growth is amazing with Compete reporting 1.1 million visitors in September.
Compete:
Alexa:
But where exactly is the traffic coming from? Compete's new search analytics tool shows the following top 5 search terms for Scribd:
- how to eat pussy
- how to make lsd
- scribd
- kamasutra
- eating pussy
Nick from TechCrunch noted shortly after their launch, "Scribd is an example of a small startup doing many things right. They created a naturally viral product and made it ridiculously easy to use." I guess porn is very viral? Are these traffic-increasing methods acceptable for a VC backed company to drive growth via porn?
If we look at the top groups, the most popular group is "adult" with over 24,000 documents. A couple of the safer ones include, "Sexy Brunette Gets Naked in the Tub", which include links to buy porn on another site inside the Scribd document, "College Girl Flashes Her Fresh-out-the-Shower Pussy", and they get more pornographic from there. Should you fancy a look at the entire most popular adult documents list, go here. You can even check out the latest U.K. Maxim full of nude women with just a click. Whether you are gay or straight, male or female or into a fetish, it appears that you needs can be satisfied on Scribd.
While I have no issue with Scribd being used in this manner, shouldn't there be some disclaimer that the content on the site might be objectionable and the user must agree to the age restrictions before viewing any nudity? It does appear some documents are flagged but I found many that aren't, and I would suggest that the adult group should have a blanket age restriction before you can even view the docs. Does it worry you as a Scribd user that if someone clicks from your document to the Scribd site they might be immediately faced with porn?
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You offer no evidence that Scribd has deliberately used porn as a traffic-increasing method-- that, for example, the proportion of porn in Scribd is any higher than in Google's index.
However, you did in this article, didn't you?
Paul - no where in the article do I note that Scribd has deliberately allowed porn as a traffic builder. I am just noting the facts about where it appears the traffic is coming from. And Google indexing porn is different than a service which houses the porn, right?
> no where in the article do I note that Scribd has deliberately
> allowed porn as a traffic builder.
You come awfully close:
"Are these traffic-increasing methods acceptable for a VC
backed company to drive growth via porn?"
there is a difference btw "deliberately allowed" and it just happened - I like the scribd service and think it could be a winner - they probably need to figure out this adult content issue - probably look into a service such as keibi - or the one someone pointed out on y combinator news - using mturk to find the adult content.
And perhaps they should look at spinning off a new site just for the adult content?
Then you haven't even tried to search Playboy. I can see how they can get into some copy right issues...
Some good end of the day reading Allen... I would be worried if I was a parent and had moderately technical children... though if I did I would imagine there are even easier ways for them to access pron (Google image search?).
+1 for not feeling comfortable about sending business/family/friends to the site...
Allen, you hit the nail on the head. Paul Graham *knows* quite well what is going on with Scribd. He is just being cynical in letting the Scribd folks exploit the proven traffic building powers of porn. Perhaps they will clean it up once they get it to decent traction, so they can become respectable, in anticipation of Paul's favored "exit", namely an acquisition.
When you allow unlimited uploads, no questions asked (no sign up, nothing), what else do you expect? It is an invitation to both copyright violation and porn. Just check *how many* of the documents will fall in either category, or both at the same time. It is difficult to imagine that these two categories contribute to only a small portion of their traffic (as Paul would like to imply).
I have been hearing a lot about the content on scribd, and how they are getting traffic because of pornographic material.
From what it looks like, there has been no attempt at stopping "that kind" of content. So maybe it is a genuine strategy which is being used to draw in more traffic, i guess. It is a trade-off (wrt NSFW content, children, family) but one must see that the numbers suppport what they have done(nearly exponential traffic growth.
Isn't this the problem with any of the web 2.0 User Generated Content websites. Youtube has a good number of p0rn videos too, which are flagged and removed. So is it with Flickr.
However, Scribd being a text based website, I do agree that it might list high on search engines. And porn is one of the top search terms on the search engines as well, and when those users visit scribd through related listings, the porn related searches increase too.
Bottomline is that it is more of a web 2.0 problem than Scribd's..
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