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Scribd acquires presentation-sharing service SlideShare from LinkedIn
SlideShare has a new owner, with LinkedIn selling the presentation-sharing service to Scribd for an undisclosed price.
According to LinkedIn, Scribd will take over operation of the SlideShare business on September 24.
Scribd CEO Trip Adler argued that the two companies have very similar roots, both launching in 2006/2007 with stories on TechCrunch, and both of them focused on content- and document-sharing.
“The two products always had kind of similar missions,” Adler said. “The difference was, [SlideShare] focused on more on PowerPoint presentations and business users, while we focused more on PDFs and Word docs and long-form written content, more on the general consumer.”
Over time, the companies diverged even further, with SlideShare acquired by LinkedIn in 2012, and LinkedIn itself acquired by Microsoft in 2016.
Scribd, meanwhile, launched a Netflix-style subscription service for e-books and audiobooks, but Adler said that both the “user-generated side” and the “premium side” remain important to the business.
“We get people who come in looking for documents, then sign up for our premium content,” he said. “But they do continue to read documents, too.”
So when Microsoft and LinkedIn approached Scribd about acquiring SlideShare, Adler saw an opportunity to expand the document side of the product dramatically, incorporating SlideShare’s content library of 40 million presentations and its audience of 100 million unique monthly visitors.
The deal, Adler said, is fundamentally about tapping into SlideShare’s “content and audience,” though he said there may be aspects of the service’s technology that Scribd could incorporate as well. Scribd isn’t taking on any new employees as part of the deal; instead, its existing team is taking responsibility for SlideShare’s operation.
He added that SlideShare will continue to operate as a standalone service, separate from Scribd, and that he’s hopeful it will continue to be well-integrated with LinkedIn.
“Nothing will change in the initial months,” Adler said. “We have a lot of experience with a product like this, both the technology stack and with users uploading content. We’re in a good position make SlideShare really successful.”
Meanwhile, a statement from LinkedIn Vice President of Engineering Chris Pruett highlighted the work that the company has done on SlideShare since the acquisition:
LinkedIn acquired SlideShare in May 2012 at a time when it was becoming clear that professionals were using LinkedIn for more than making professional connections. Over the last eight years, the SlideShare team, product, and community has helped shape the content experience on LinkedIn. We’ve incorporated the ability to upload, share, and discuss documents on LinkedIn.
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Scribd announces a perks program, giving its subscribers access to Pandora Plus, TuneIn Premium and more
E-book and audiobook subscription service Scribd has been actively embracing and experimenting with bundling over the past couple of years, creating joint offers with The New York Times and with Spotify and Hulu.
Today it announced a slightly different take on the idea with Scribd Perks. These perks give Scribd’s paying subscribers (the service costs $8.99 per month) access to a number of additional services at no extra change.
The initial lineup includes Pandora Plus (ad-free music and podcasts), TuneIn Premium (live sports, news, music and podcasts), Peak (brain training), CuriosityStream (documentaries and series), CONtv + Comics (movies and digital comics), FarFaria (illustrated children’s books that are read aloud) and MUBI (hand-picked films).
Many of these services are relatively niche — at least compared to Scribd’s previous bundling partners — but they all normally cost between $2.99 and $10.99 per month, so there are some real savings here. It’s an extra incentive for someone to sign up for Scribd, and for existing subscribers to stick around. Meanwhile, these partners presumably get new users and additional revenue.
In a statement, Scribd CEO Trip Adler said:
With millions of people around the world continuing to shelter in place, having access to different forms of enrichment is more important than ever before. We’re thrilled to be partnering with leading consumer brands to offer a more accessible way for consumers to easily stay informed, entertained, and connected. Scribd is designed to help people explore the world’s best content, and now, with the launch of our new Scribd Perks platform, there is even more premium content to discover.
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Scribd has more than 1M paying subscribers
Subscription e-book and audiobook service Scribd says it’s grown to more than 1 million subscribers.
It still has a long way to go before reaching the heights of Netflix (nearly 150 million subscribers) or Spotify (87 million paying subscribers), but the announcement should help put any lingering doubts to rest around whether there’s a sizable audience willing to pay an $8.99 subscription fee for books.
The company also says it’s been profitable since early in 2017, and that it’s currently bringing in $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
Scribd started as a document-sharing service before moving into the subscription e-book business in 2013, when it signed its first deal with a major publisher — namely, HarperCollins. Since then, the service has added other big publishers and moved beyond older “backlist” titles. In fact, last year HarperCollins released the latest book from “Divergent” author Veronica Roth on Scribd, on launch day.
Chantal Restivo-Alessi has been chief digital officer at HarperCollins for the duration of the Scribd partnership. Via email, she praised the company’s “willingness to monitor, analyze, learn and adjust – something that clearly it has been doing in the past years.”
“We have continued to learn and adapt together,” Restivo-Alessi said. “We expected the digital ebook market to be a bigger part of our and their business now, and we have been positively surprised by the uptake in digital audio. We have continued to calibrate our catalog offer in line with the evolution of Scribd’s platform and customer base. And we continue to be pleasantly surprised by the depth of exposure that the platform provides to our backlist.”
Trip Adler
The adjustments to which Restivo-Alessi alludes include Scribd’s pricing model — it initially offered subscribers unlimited access to its library, then capped them at three e-books and one audiobook per month, then went back to a modified version of its unlimited plan last year. (Apparently the most voracious readers and listeners might still encounter a cap.)
Asked whether we can expect the Scribd offering to continue changing, co-founder and CEO Trip Adler said, “I don’t think there will be any big changes. We’re always optimizing … We’re constantly improving the way we find the right balance for readers and for publishers.”
Adler credited audiobooks as a key ingredient to the service’s growth, with engagement growing 100 percent year over year. Surprisingly, he also said Scribd’s old document-sharing business continues to be crucial, because it helps the service attract between 100 million and 200 million visitors each month (mostly from search engines), who can then be converted into paying subscribers.
“That’s kind of the key thing we’ve figured out,” Adler said. “We use the [user-generated content] to attract users and use premium content to retain them.”
Scribd has raised a total of $47.8 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.
Investors include Khosla Ventures, with Khosla’s Keith Rabois on the Scribd board. In an emailed statement, Rabois said, “Scribd has one of the largest libraries of content in the world — which reaches millions of readers every month, giving the company exceptional data and the unique ability to help readers discover content uniquely suited to them. Scribd hitting one million subscribers is just the beginning of Scribd transforming how we choose what books to read and how we read them.”
And now that Scribd has reached the 1 million subscriber milestone, Adler said he’s already thinking about how it can get to 10 million. His plans include further international expansion in markets like Latin America, Europe and India (apparently half of Scribd’s subscriber base is already outside the United States), working with publishers and authors to create original content, and continuing to add new formats.
“We started out by offering documents, then e-books, and then audiobooks, magazines and sheet music,” he said. “We’re just getting started. There’s going to be a lot more new types of content in the coming years.”
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Sources: YC Alums Club Together For Crystal Towers, A $100M VC Fund For Promising YC Startups
Y Combinator has helped over 800 startups come to market that are today worth a collective $30 billion (and possibly even more very soon). Now it looks like a new VC is emerging out of it that will be dedicated to help the most promising of these grow. TechCrunch has learned of a new VC fund called Crystal Towers. Backed by several YC founders, it will start out with between $90 million… Read More
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Scribd Adds Comics From Marvel, IDW, And Others To Its Subscription E-Book Service
In case getting unlimited access to an enormous library of e-books and audiobooks for $8.99 a month wasn’t enough for you, Scribd is announcing today that it’s expanding into comic books.
Specifically, Scribd is adding more than 10,000 comics and graphic novels from publishers including Marvel, Archie, Boom! Studios, Dynamite, IDW/Top Shelf, and Valiant. Read More
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Scribd Raises $22M For Its Subscription E-Book Service
Scribd, a startup offering unlimited access to half a million e-books for $8.99 a month, is announcing that it has Raised $22 million in additional funding. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with Khosla partner Keith Rabois (previously an executive at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide, and Square) joining the company’s board as an observer. In an email, Rabois compared Scribd’s… Read More
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Scribd Expands Its Subscription E-Book Service With 30K Audiobooks
It was just over a year ago that Scribd officially unveiled a Netflix-style subscription e-book service. As of today, subscribers will have access to 30,000 audiobooks, too. Co-founder and CEO Trip Adler said that this isn’t just about attracting audiobook fans to Scribd, but also introducing readers who aren’t audiobook fans to the format. After all, he noted that the… Read More
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