Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist(blog.ericgoldman.org) |
Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist(blog.ericgoldman.org) |
* You have to charge from the very beginning. If you start a free service, and then try to establish a pay system afterward, your users will feel tricked and trapped and they will rebel loudly. Scribd seems to have been in a hurry to get adoption, so they made it free to host documents; as this guy said though, he much preferred hosting with Scribd over doing it manually on his university's web server. That could have been Scribd's value proposition, and a small yearly fee for that probably would have worked OK.
* SaaS could get itself in trouble if there are too many incidents like this. I already hear from clients that are concerned about using online services; the most common questions are, "What if they change their terms?", "What if they go away?", and those are legitimate concerns. Many of my clients aren't the most computer-interested people, so if they have concerns like that, then that means that stories like this have penetrated very deep into the consumer market.
If you lock behind a paywall things previously available for free, sure. And they'll be right too.
An other option is to add features which are only behind a new paywall. Issue then is providing additional services of value and a way for users to discover them.
I don't agree with their choice (or methods) but it makes sense for them to do this.
Middle Scribd fixed their own brokenness by moving to HTML 5 (which is sometimes more convenient than a PDF, and is certainly "open" and accessible).
Late Scribd is again breaking the web by moving documents behind a paywall. Some qualities are just baked into a company's DNA.
You can still get the viewing stats, your just not at the services whim, simply move your file and the service will just remove the listing. Makes sense to me, probably some stuff like this out there seems fairly obvious.
Fundamentally though, they're about locking away documents behind a pay wall. And personally, I don't see their value proposition at all.
Nothing wrong with that, btw.
Your documents will automatically be entered into the Archive after an initial period of time. You can recall a document from the Archive by opening the document's properties, clicking the Archive Status tab, then clicking the Recall from Archive command. If a document's properties page doesn't have an Archive Status tab, then that document has not yet been placed into the Scribd Archive. To learn how to edit your documents' properties, please see our Writer's Guide.
After a couple months your document will return to the Archive, and you can repeat this process to recall it again.
I changed it for my own account only after reading the article. Funny enough, it's an inversely-worded checkbox in there (unlike all of the other options):
[ ] Do not include my documents in the Scribd Archive program. Learn more.
But they are scare off the wrong people: the readers. Why use a service to pay for reading something that the publishers WANT to give me for free? Not enough: Many publishers would pay for it, as it is convenient and absolutely user friendly.
This won't work. Well no, actually it will work - but not as a service that proclaims "show your work to the world for free".
Even if both are mere PR exercises, it's an improvement on the kind of content-free hand waving I'd expect from a company desperately seeking profitability.
Instead, it sounds like Mr. Goldman just wants to bitch. He feels like Scribd used him? Did he not use Scribd? At least Scribd provided value to him (as he indicated); whatever value he provided Scribd, he is now trying to destroy it with this blog post.
There was a submission on here last week: If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1684732).
I never use Scribd, and I'm not really concerned either way with how successful they are. But I'm starting to get really annoyed with everyone's sense of entitlement these days. Louis CK hit it on the nose with his remark, "How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only ten seconds ago." (http://barefootmeg.multiply.com/video/item/56 - it's a great clip if you haven't seen it)
Basically, it was a response, but "not much" of one.
As a start-up, we're constantly trying to strike the right
balance: building products that people love but that also
help us make money (to cover server cost and everything
else associated with running a company).
I'm not sure that's what is going on in Scribd's case, though.
When you don't pay for a service, you shouldn't expect anything in return. A guarantee of perpetual free access has to be paid for somehow and if they are not making money from ads presumably because nobody's seeing or clicking on them, then all bets are off!
You get what you pay for. Next time look for a price tag.
Also, Scribd would be nothing without the thousands of hours people have spent uploading content without charging Scribd. The situation isn't as clear cut as you make out.
I discover that my chi.mp account is the back-up e-mail, which is great; the service lets me decide which e-mail address to forward to.
I go to chi.mp, think for a minute to remember my password, and get to the e-mail-forwarding screen. The account is set to forward to an e-mail address that is inconvenient (I can't remember the reason), so I remove the forwarding I've set up and---
"Something, something, you need a Pro account to create a forwarding address."
What the hell is a Pro account, I think to myself, a thought that is quickly eclipsed by the fact that a) The guys screwed me over without telling me, and b) I have no way of saving my e-mail account from a potential invader, unless I pay these <expletive>s.
I have yet to e-mail them and give them shit for it, but I didn't want to let it ruin my week, but I'll be sure to contact them when I can muster the time and energy.
Recently, he left and we added another engineer. So I removed engineer #1 and couldn't add engineer #2 unless I paid to upgrade the account. I don't mind paying when it makes sense, but a) HopToad was totally unwilling to grandfather the account, which meant I couldn't add the new engineer, and b) there was no messaging that the plan changed. I found out about it when I tried to add engineer #2. Lame.
I do not especially condone what Scribd is doing here, nor can I say I would have anticipated that behaviour (harvesting interesting content and subsequently making the whole service pay-only is not the dumbest thing ever), but if you take a second when you first start using a service and try to think about the fact that they some day will have to make money, you should be able to get some conclusions. What options does the provider of the service have to make money at all? Which of these options would be ok for me? Which would piss me off badly? And how do I avoid being in a trap like the OP?
If one thinks about those questions instead of just feeling entitled to use a service, which might be "free" at the moment, the awakening should not be to abrupt.
Kind of like raising a bunch of money for starving orphans and then buying yourself a yacht.
Another question: Besides an archive paywall, what else could the company do to build revenue (such as professional services, print-on-demand, etc.)
Can you please or anybody else explain me why you see any added value of scribd at all? I see it only as an annoyance. If I'd like to read a pdf I'd prefer to click on the link and read it, not to go to some suspicious site which demands from me to sign up there only to do what otherwise would be one single click.
As far as I know the only "advantage" of the service was to make content infringement easier (a site for documents which is like youtube was for videos), and that the site owners expect people to pay for access to it is hardly surprising. But I like other mechanisms more.
My suggestion for everybody who is the owner of his own documents and wants to upload them: host them as the normal files on the normal sites, unless you do want people to pay for access to them.
1. They don't have webspace and want to put a PDF somewhere online.
2. They do have webspace, but are worried, possibly unnecessarily, that it'll cost them too much money if they send out a link to a big PDF to a large-ish mailing list.
3. For Mac users, where PDFs don't load in a plugin in the browser by default, they want to be able to link to a PDF that opens in the browser instead of popping up an external viewer.
4. And, yes: They have a PDF that is at best gray-area which they want to distribute without hosting it themselves, like a scan of a book chapter for a reading group.
Everybody is surprised when someone tells him "Why have you made the document available for download only via purchase?"
If they don't fix this thing soon I'll stop using Scribd completely.
Also, a really funny sentence in the response from Scribd:
> You’re right that our communication around the Archive should have been more clear.
It sounds like, yeah, we know, but we like it this way for now.
When you use a free service, you have to expect them to need to make money somehow--and that means you should expect them to try changing the mix of what is free and what is paid now and then, and changing defaults. Accordingly, you should expect that on occasion you might have to change settings in order to get the thing to work the way you like.
Sure, making the paywall opt-in by default increases conversions. But you still have to tell the user about it rather have them discover one day that a lot of their documents are no longer being read. That sucks.
Scribd Creator Terms Of Service http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/scribd-creator-term...
As a courtesy, I sent a prepublication draft of the above post to Scribd's press team and asked for a response. They were kind enough to reply to me pretty quickly with the following
The value of your service to a user isn't going to increase simply due to the passage of time or growth of your site. If they wouldn't pay for it on day 1, the odds are they won't pay for it after 2 years of using the service. If, in the process of trying to monetize your service, you "hold hostage" a portion of the value that the user has contributed to your site, they are going to be pissed.
This has all happened many times now. I think companies trying this route in the first place will be easier to change than peoples' reaction to it.
For real. This always reminds me of the dude who tries to be friends with the girl so he can eventually date her, instead of simply asking her out, and risking the 'No' like a man.
Slimy.
i agree.
The value of your service to a user isn't going to increase simply due to the passage of time or growth of your site.
i disagree. many users may not pay on the first day because they don't see the value in it, or don't understand how the site works. but being able to use it for free and coming to depend on it may put a higher value on it over time.
how many users would pay $1 per month to access facebook now that all of their friends are on it and they use it every day? probably a lot. those users probably wouldn't have signed up for an account in the first place if they had to enter a credit card number.
Yes it will. If that user uses your service every day, over time, it will be more valuable to them. Most services also don't just stay the same over time. More features are added and bugs are fixed, which adds to the value.
"If they wouldn't pay for it on day 1, the odds are they won't pay for it after 2 years of using the service."
If you never gave them the option of paying in the first place, how do you know?
"I think companies trying this route in the first place will be easier to change than peoples' reaction to it."
The answer is to not have free services in the first place. Many companies have tried the freemium model and then realize that it can't scale (IE: the costs to support this free user base out weighs the benefits).
It was probably something like this: People upload a lot of stuff to their service. Once content goes "stale" no one is viewing it anymore, but they are still storing it. They decided they could either remove the material to make room for new stuff or monetize the old material in a way that justified keeping it around.
The cost of storage is pretty low so maybe I'm reaching a bit here on their behalf. I have no idea what sort of scale they are at. Perhaps I just like to believe that people aren't trying to be evil.
I disagree, at least in one specific case. A new dating site doesn't have enough of a userbase of the gender that I am interested in for me to signup and pay a monthly fee. If they successfully complete their marketing play, I will gladly sign up.
But when you make a service available for free and take pride in that fact, harvest your users content, and then suddenly flip over to a paid service without even giving your users adequate notice or tools to opt out I can completely understand how users might feel cheated.
Isn't the company partly responsible for creating the sense of entitlement you're talking about?
- I can post papers or other documents that other people might value but not otherwise be available, such as court docs, academic papers, etc.
- I can embed the documents easily in my blogs (and before at the publication I worked at)
- I don't have to worry about hosting. I could easily upload the PDFs to the Web server my school grants me, but after I graduate, it's gone, and I have to find another solution and change the links.
Another idea: Cut out the middleman and sell a "print to webpage" plugin for Windows.
How is it now? Do they still have higher rank? I'd consider than that a bug in Google ranking.
Not only do I value Facebook's service at less than $1/mo, but I'd be highly resentful of the switch, especially if I percieved it as a money grab or network lock-in attempt, instead of a reflection of their increasing costs (which could still be problematic if I knew they were wasting lots of money).
It has scaled wonderfully for Evernote:
"From the start, Libin modeled Evernote to be profitable at a 1% conversion rate ... Right now, roughly 2% of all Evernoters are premium customers ... Libin wants to maintain that rate at 5% or less. If people start converting en masse, 'that means our free product isn't good enough,' he says."
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/147/next-tech-remember-t...
This is the exception rather than the rule.
FYI, PDFs absolutely load in the browser by default.
It uses the native Quartz PDFKit backend.
I'm not very active in Reddit anymore -- HN is my last distraction now -- but I did watch that situation carefully because it was interesting. I got the sense that the outrage died down only because Reddit promised to migrate its paid features into the "free" arena. Until then, a lot of people were angry that there was going to be some kind of "elite" class on the site.
Practically speaking, even if Reddit had managed to permanently piss off this chunk of its userbase, I doubt they would have left altogether, and even if they did, there's no way to gauge what fraction of Reddit's traffic was really represented by these guys. It could've been (and probably was) just a tempest in a teapot.
But either way, in that specific case, there would have been some vocal rebellion if the paid-for features stayed locked behind a paywall.
As a Charter and gold reddit member... not really. It was well understood early on that most of the "gold" features would be stuff that was too expensive (computationally) to give to everybody (especially before the server upgrade), at least from the start.
The great fear gripping everybody was truly that Reddit would somehow become "for-pay", and that content previously free would now become non-free (a fear which didn't make much sense as the community is the one providing the content, and the admins might not be too media and ad-savvy, but they're not stupid)
> But either way, in that specific case, there would have been some vocal rebellion if the paid-for features stayed locked behind a paywall.
Doubtful. 1000 comments/thread is a nice feature for instance, but it didn't exist (at all) before gold and it's not exactly a deal-breaker.
Edit: Was mistaken. Assumed the parent was responding to the entire comment, rather than just a part.
Embed: Who really needs embedded PDF? What for? To have it harder to read? Just give me the plain link, thank you.
Hosting: See the first paragraph.
OK, anybody knows some better reason?
If someone is literate sufficiently with the internet to know how easy is to get hosting, and how cheap, then really there is no reason.
their value depends on users being ignorant.
To be fair, that's what he did at the time. This account also had some added features he valued.
Note however that he does "self publishing" experiment. Enough readers here would be able to make him one click upload script in less than 10 minutes. Ditto for parsing the logs. I don't feel sorry for him for choosing scribd and feeling how he feels now.
Both assumptions are common and valid business strategies.
I'm just wondering how the suggestion to use Google Sites or another free service is any different then using Scribd?
For case of stopping providing the services, take as the example Geocites -- it took a decade for them to stop hosting, and the only victim were the long forgotten and deserted pages. On another side, there is still content I uploaded on Tripod at least ten years ago, for which I forgot my passwords years ago.
If years of free hosting are not enough for you, then you have to pay for the hosting and have a bit more control. But even the hosting site to which you pay can go out of business. Nothing is forever, you just have to maintain your online content if you want to have control over it.
I'm still curious to learn about the advantages of scibd. I admit I don't know why most users use it.
With enough ideas or usage scenarios, maybe somebody will make something better!
> I'm still curious to learn about the advantages of scibd.
You really mean "I'm still curious to learn about the advantages of scibd for me." If you meant what you originally said, your being purposefully obtuse.
Indeed, in rereading you original comment, you were simply dismissive, and all the alternatives you provided lacked the specific feature sets he was looking for.
> With enough ideas or usage scenarios, maybe somebody will make something better!
Yeah, another document host. Scribd2.
"I admit I don't know why most users use it."
Note: most users. If you can't answer, please restrain from trying to make a conflict. The responses like "embed," or "ease of upload," or "read statistics" are actually useful! I'd really like more of such answers, but your answer is both unusable and insulting. When I commented on some of the features mentioned it's only because I want to hear something "yes feature A is easy but there is also the advantage B" etc.
The argument that you can post to scribd and worry less that it will become inaccessible compared to when you upload it to some other site is what scribd themselves already proved to be false.
Within the context of this thread, you initially responded to a post, and, whether intending to or not, you dismissed his reasons for liking Scribd. ilamont gave you three reasons. For example, embedding was one answer. In your immediate reply to my last post, you said:
> The responses like "embed," or "ease of upload," or "read statistics" are actually useful!
However, in your reply to ilamont, you said:
> Embed: Who really needs embedded PDF? What for? To have it harder to read? Just give me the plain link, thank you.
Now, maybe your intention wasn't to be dismissive. Unfortunately, what you said here is dismissive. So, forgive me if I seem like I'm trying to 'make a conflict', but going by your replies, you did seem to start off that way.
Next, you originally said:
> You can upload them on your free web account (like, Google Sites)?
This was again in response to ilamont.
My reply, which basically was in response to this particular part, was
> To be fair, that's what he did at the time. This account also had some added features he valued.
This was in response to your comment regarding ilamont, as well as the original poster, and encompassed both users. Basically, that Scribd provided both of these people with features they liked, and features you were seemed to dismiss as unimportant.
Anyways, my remark was merely to state that they did, in fact, use a free service to upload their documents too. Your suggestion of using another free service is missing the point: they had already done that. It's fairly circular: A free hosting service did something you don't like? Maybe you should have tried a free hosting service.
Our replies quickly degenerated until we reach now, where you are assuming I'm trying to create a conflict. I assure you, I am not.
Now, I want to address this:
> The argument that you can post to scribd and worry less that it will become inaccessible compared to when you upload it to some other site is what scribd themselves already proved to be false.
In hindsight this is true. However, prior to this "proof", it wasn't true.
And maybe this is where our confusion came about. I was speaking within the context of the original poster, as well as the parent commenter. It seemed you were only looking forward, though, this wasn't far from clear in your original reply.
Regardless, it's a silly debate. I apologize if I seemed to be trying to start and argument with you. That was not my intention. However, what you said doesn't follow logically. I can only assume this is because what you wrote and what you meant aren't the same. I blame the internet, and it's failings to communicate effectively.
That being said, if you are a native born English speaker, you're probably nothing more than an obtuse troll.
What you failed to recognize was that the nature of the scribd service and the web hosting services I suggested was always fundamentally different and that was visible even then when you claim that they were "the same."
There's no free web hosting service that demands visitors to register to deliver them the web content(!) Scribd always immediately made your original material inaccessible and counted on visitors to sign up just to deliver it to them! So scribd was so obviously worse from the start. After the current development everybody sees that (you write "In hindsight this is true. However, prior to this "proof", it wasn't true.") but even if you wasn't able to see the difference "in context of the original poster" that doesn't give you the rights to behave how you did.
I don't blame the interent, I blame you for making insults instead of trying to argument, but I still won't call you names, even if you deserve it for continuing to do what you do in the post I reply. No, I am not the native speaker but I still believe that's irrelevant to your bad behavior, except if you claim that subtle hints to somebody not being native speaker additionally annoy you, that still doesn't show you in better light.