Remember Scribd? It was the big site that was going to help Publishers sell outside of the Kindle eco-system.
Plus it was offering to take just a 20% cut from Publishers (as opposed to Amazon’s 50%+ cut).
To top it all of it was going to start policing illegal books on Scribd.
Well, guess what - Scribd traffic is down 48% in the last 2 months.
Here are traffic graphs from Quantcast -
You mean if we remove illegal books, people will stop visiting?
Notice how international traffic has dropped a lot more than US traffic.
Scribd CEO thinks its seasonal and SEO related
Scribd CEO said that it was because its summer and kids are out playing instead of studying. He also said it was because Scribd had stopped being ‘aggressive’ about its search engine optimization.
The thread at TechCrunch points out -
- The ‘aggressive SEO’ Scribd is talking about was probably Black Hat SEO and Scribd might have gotten a Google penalty.
- That the removal of illegal books is probably what caused the loss in traffic.
If we jump into Scribd siteinfo at Alexa (owned by Amazon, by the way) we see a few interesting things -
Seems like on June 15th Google smacked Scribd for being naughty
- Confirms the drop in traffic. Interesting that its a gradual downturn slope.
- Huge downward spike on June 15th – certainly looks like a Google penalty or a huge number of kids leaving college on the same day.
- US traffic is just 20.6% of Scribd traffic.
- The percentage of Scribd traffic that comes from search engines has dropped 10% in the last 3 months.
That’s certainy interesting.
What it means for ebooks and the Kindle
Losing 48% of your traffic in 2 months is never a good sign. Scribd suddenly seems like a very weak threat to the Kindle Store.
- The percentage of Scribd’s traffic that comes from search engines has dropped just 10% – this certainly indicates that there’s more to the drop than just Google.
- The likeliest culprit is the reduction in number of illegal books.
- Scribd is the YouTube of Books, except there are no longer free, illegal books.
The lesson seems to be (i’m joking so don’t take it to heart) -
If your site is built on illegal content others have created, selling to Google for $1.65 billion is better than removing the illegal content and trying to go legit.
Filed under: publishing Tagged: | kindle vs scribd, scribd
what are illegal books?
Not sure about your question. Illegal = books that are copyright books but have been uploaded freely to sites like Scribd.
I have put a novel on Scribd, but as nothing happened, I decided to take it off again. But guess what: it seems that Scribd keeps the copyright. So, my work is now floating about in the cloud. Luckily, it cannot be read from the screen anymore, being encrypted. You have to be a Facebook member, which I am not and not willing to become one either. Anyway, Scribd has basically turned out into an obnoxious billboard of ad tags, and that might be the reason why so many people pull out. Let Amazon do the big boys job.