Scribd – YouTube or Flickr for documents

Cute startup – this report from TechCrunch:

We reported on the launch of Scribd, the “YouTube For Documents” a little over two weeks ago. The site drew a significant amount of traffic at launch. Unlike most startups, though, that traffic didn’t just vaporize after a day or two.

100,000 or so unique visitors come the site daily. 12,000 documents have been uploaded to 8,600 unique accounts (35% anonymous). The team says the site’s traffic has been about an even split between U.S. and non-U.S. visitors (and about half of the documents are non-English). One prolific member, Builder (Bill Allin), has 113 documents to his account. One of these, “Why Intelligent People Tend To Be Unhappy”, was so popular that it got on Digg and was mentioned on Adam Corolla’s morning show.

In this other article by them, we can see the startup dollar figures:

Scribd, a site for sharing documents, is coming out of private beta this morning with a fresh Angel investment of $300K on top of their original Y Combinator nest egg of $12,000. Scribd is most easily described as a text version of YouTube. It is a social network that lets you tag, share, and comment on uploaded documents (.doc, .pdf, .txt, .ppt, .xls, .ps, .lit).

I’ve written before about angel investors and early VCs being in trouble because they keep looking at investments for over 5 million dollars, preferably closer to 20 million, instead ofmaking a motza from a low cost startup? The Next Garage Band of Entrepreneurs was one, blog post. If Scribd is successful – and it very well maybe, the “create .pdf” is waaay cool – it just goes to show what pocket change can do, now the web 2.0 infrastructure is in place.