Scribd: YouTube for Documents

Just a quick post to introduce readers to Scribd, a YouTube for documents.

Let's explore that analogy. Before YouTube, videos were hard to share because they were too big to email and because there were various yucky formatting issues to resolve. YouTube solved this practical problem by letting you share videos via their site (instead of email) and they transparently dealt with all the yucky formatting issues.

I must admit that, while not an active video person at all, I have used YouTube to overcome a simple problem. We use PCs at home, while at school the kids use Macs. We needed to get a video that we produced on our home PC to my son's teacher. After failing about 5 times to get a CD/DVD with the right formatting, I just uploaded it to YouTube and let the teacher watch it from there. Nice. (This was a while back when YouTube was still pretty new and the idea wasn't so obvious.)

In general, these assertions are not true about documents. Size-wise, I can email about 95% of the documents that I use every day. Formatting-wise, about 95%+ of what I use is either Office or PDF.

And there is less, for lack of a better term, voyeuristic tendency to want to read other peoples' documents than there is to see their images on Flickr or watch their videos on YouTube. And documents, much as I love them, aren't on the brink of changing the entire television industry, either.

But there are some documents -- the really big ones -- that bounce on email. Scribd solves that practical problem. And once you've uploaded documents, why not do all the various and sundry social networking things to them (e.g., tag, digg) and why not make new document friends, just like we have work friends (LinkedIn), friend friends (MySpace), tweet friends (Twitter), photo friends (Flickr), and blog friends (blogrolls).

Will Scribd sell for $1.6B like YouTube did? It's hard to believe. But it looks like they're about to raise money at a valuation north of $10M. See this TechCrunch article for more.

Addition: VentureBeat has good coverage of Scribd here.

Audio From My Exit Five CMO Leadership Retreat Presentation

Just a quick post to highlight that Exit Five has published the audio from my presentation at their recent leadership retreat. The presentation was entitled How To Be the CMO Everyone Wants To Work With, and the audio is about an hour long. Exit Five founder Dave Gerhardt published it

On the Socially Acceptable Use of AI in Business

There's a question I've been mulling for a while now, and I think it's time to write it down: when is it okay to use generative AI in a given business context, and when does it cross a line? I'll focus on

The Odd Little Book All Founders Should Read On Selling Their Company

I recently read The Magic Box Paradigm by Ezra Roizen. It's self-published, was first released in 2016 [1] , and you won't find it on most startup reading lists. The writing is uneven and inconsistent. The metaphors are weird. There are too many TLAs (three-letter acronyms). Nevertheless,

Be the CMO Everyone Wants to Work With

I'm a big fan of Dave Gerhardt and the Exit Five marketing community he has built. While I have always liked the idea of peer-networking communities, I think they change from vitamin to painkiller in times of rapid change. Why? Because the playbooks haven't been written

Read more

Audio From My Exit Five CMO Leadership Retreat Presentation

On the Socially Acceptable Use of AI in Business

The Odd Little Book All Founders Should Read On Selling Their Company

Be the CMO Everyone Wants to Work With