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While founder Benjamin Yoskovitz doesn’t make any references to the candidate side, I assume any documents that the employer wants to share with the candidate could also utilize the iPaper plugin.

What I like about this partnership is that it will allow candidates to upload the formats that work best for them — they aren’t forced into Microsoft Word or a PDF. 

Here’s an example of the iPaper integration:

Check out Benjamin’s tips for hiring top talent at your startup.

Here’s how the system works. If you are a content publisher (let’s say a book publisher), you can upload your documents into the QPP and set them as copyrighted. This will prevent anyone from uploading the document into Scribd as the Scribd hamsters will scan the document and if it’s a match, you get nothing. It appears that documents uploaded into the QPP will also make their way onto Scribd as they note, "Publishers who join Scribd’s QPP can manage their own distribution groups and integrate threaded discussions alongside their documents, resulting in instant feedback from readers." I don’t like that – I should be able to set the flag to not show on Scribd but protect my document in any case.

The issue with this and why I said its a fail is that with the millions of publishers worldwide, how many are really going to both know about Scribd and take the time to upload their documents. Furthermore, how well will the matching technology work?

It’s a great marketing play by Scribd as it makes them appear like good citizens but I doubt the effectiveness in this regard.

Scribd has also released stats showing more than 10 million monthly unique visitors — I assume this is to the documents and not to the site. I wonder which documents are the most popular? They also claim to be larger than Wikipedia in the count of written words — 4 billion Scribd to 3 billion Wikipedia.

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?