Scribd CEO Trip Adler interview on New York Times subscriptions

Scribd CEO Trip Adler
Scibd

• Scribd is the Netflix of the publishing world — offering
  readers unlimited access to a library of more than 1 million
  books and audiobooks, magazines, and other documents for a
  monthly fee of $9.
• On Wednesday, Scribd announced a brand new service, bundling
  a Scribd subscription with a subscription to The New York Times
  for $13/month.
• Scribd’s CEO Trip Adler says the company “kind of got into
  books a little bit accidentally,” but it is on a mission to
  “change the way the world reads.”
• After eleven years and multiple pivots, Adler is confident in
  Scribd’s current path and believes his team can build a
  subscriber base of similar scale to Netflix and Spotify. 

Scribd’s mission is “to change the way the world reads,” but its
CEO Trip Adler says that mission came about by chance. 

“We kind of got into books a little bit accidentally,” Adler told
us. 

Initially, Adler and his co-founder Jared Friedman set out to
help Adler’s father publish an academic paper online — a
process that took upwards of 18 months before the first iteration
of Scribd was built. At the time, there were blogs for publishing
a few paragraphs of text, Adler explains, but blogs didn’t
work for publishing a 10-page acedemic thesis or scientific
paper. And so, Scribd was born as a place to put longer documents
on the web. 

“We were good for taking things that were already written and
getting them on the web,” Adler said. 

Quickly, people other than Adler’s father started uploading
content via Scribd, which attracted more readers. Those readers
then started uploading content of their own. 

“We got a nice viral loop started, and pretty soon we had tens of
millions of users,” Adler tells us. 

That was 2007. 

Eleven years and a few pivots later, Scribd considers itself the
Netflix of the publishing world — offering readers unlimited
access to a library of more than 1 million books and audiobooks,
magazines, and other documents for an $8.99 monthly fee. 

On Wednesday, Scribd announced a brand new service, bundling a
Scribd subscription and with a subscription to The New York Times
for one monthly fee of $12.99. For context, a subscription to The
New York Times alone costs $15.99 per month after introductory
rates, a Times spokesperson told us. 

“It’s a great step forward for readers and a great step forward
for our industry,” Adler says of partnership, which is the first
time his company has provided readers full-access to a news
publisher. 

Those interested in the bundle package will sign up through the
Scribd app — where they can access the Scribd library — but will
be provided separate login credentials to The New York
Times. 

Correcting the course

Though Wednesday marks a significant milestone for Scribd, the
past eleven years haven’t been easy for Adler, who says he’s
averaged 90 hour work weeks since co-founding the company. 

“There’s been a few moments when things weren’t going well —
where we were burning a lot of money, or the team was really
unhappy, or we weren’t growing fast, or the board wasn’t
happy — there’s plenty of moments like that where it gets
kind of frustrating,” he explains. “But I think if you do this
stuff for a while, you learn that this is just how it goes and
there’s always challenges, and you just learn to enjoy being
challenged.” 

One of those moments came in early 2016, three years after the
company had first launched its subscription model, according to a
report by
Fast Company. The team realized it was losing too much money
on subscribers who were voraciously reading 100 books per
month, mostly in the mystery and romance genre. It was also
taking a major hit on those accessing scientific and technical
books that cost Scribd $50 to $100 in licensing fees per read. In
February 2016, to keep the company from financially going under,
Adler and his team cut off unlimited access to their library and
limited readers to three e-books and one audiobook per
month. 

In February 2018,
Scribd re-launched its subscription offering with new content
and a new model to curb the consumption that cost the company the
most. Readers now have unlimited access to Scribd’s content
library until they reach the upper limits in a given month, at
which point they will be given a narrowed offering of titles to
choose from for the rest of that month. 

Adler is confident in his company’s current approach, and is
especially bullish on the subscription model for books, given the
success of other content subscription services like Netflix which
has over
130 million subscribers and Spotify with over 80
million subscribers. 

“In the reading space, I think we can build a subscriber base of
similar scale,” Adler tells us. “And if we do, that really is
going to have a lot of secondary and tertiary effects in terms of
how people read. You’ll have a whole new audience, reading in a
totally new way. It’ll also just create a lot more subscription
revenue to give back to the industry and grow the
industry.” 

The next chapter

Today, Scribd has 800,000 monthly subscribers, growing at 50% per
year.

Through the company’s evolution, Adler says he’s relied heavily
on the people around him, taking a page out of Jim Collins’
classic business book, “Good to Great.” 

“In ‘Good to Great,’ they talk about all these strategy success
stories, and every single success story started with getting the
team together first, and then the strategy came from the team,”
Adler says. “If you have a really good team in place, really good
ideas will naturally emerge from that.” 

As for what his favorite recent book, Adler doesn’t stray far
from the Silicon Valley zeitgeist — “Sapiens: A
Brief History of Humankind,” a popular book with the tech
intelligentsia, would be his choice.

And, as he points out, it’s available on Scribd.