In my view, social publishing is not the same as the "web". Scribd, in my view, represents the emergence of a new wave of article-based content publishers.
Recently, there's been a new wave of text-based content sites that are on the rise:
* Scribd
* HubPages (where I work)
* Squidoo
* InfoBarrel
* Helium
As far as Quantcast/Alexa, scribd is still on top in terms of global unique visitors.
I guess that's sort of my point. "Article-based content publishers"? Sounds like, well, most of the internet! Guess I just don't see the value added but hey, to each his own.
To you, there probably is no value added. To someone not so much "in the loop", there probably is.
Anyone could upload a video they made on their own site, even before Youtube. Plenty of people did. Yet, Youtube changed a lot of things for a lot of people.
To be clear, my point is that people are flocking to these article-based web sites so there must be something there beyond just being text on the web.
The traffic has been growing. At HubPages, we were at 8 million unique visitors in Nov, 2008 and now we are approaching 14 million unique visitors in Aug, 2009.
I would argue that these article-based sites are popular because of the web tools available on them, the community of writers and readers to interact with, and the growing traffic. People want these types of places to add their information.
Sure, they could open a blog account by itself or write anonymously on Wikipedia but it's not the same.
Scribd seemed to be the first of these sites to go mainstream. That was my main point to your question. If there's nothing there, what accounted for Scribd's popularity?
It took me a long time to understand why Twitter was an improvement over RSS. Sometimes, these trends are not obvious until you have the experience of participating with the web site that is growing in popularity.
