E-book and audiobook service platform, Scribd, announced that it has grown to more than 1 million paid subscribers. The company also announced that it has been profitable since early 2017, and is currently roping in $100 million in annual recurring revenues.
Scribd first launched as a document sharing platform. In 2013, the company signed its first deal with HarperCollins and has since added other big publishers and moved beyond older “backlist” titles. Last year, HarperCollins released the latest book from “Divergent” author Veronica Roth on Scribd, on launch day.
“We started out by offering documents, then e-books, and then audiobooks, magazines and sheet music,” Scribd CEO and co-founder Trip Adler said. “We’re just getting started. There’s going to be a lot more new types of content in the coming years.”
“We have continued to learn and adapt together,” Chantal Restivo-Alessi, Chief Digital Officer of HarperCollins 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.”
To date, Scribd has raised a total of $47.8 million in funding. Its 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.”
“Scribd has been at the forefront of the digital reading evolution over the last decade, driving incremental revenue to the publishing industry while making the written word more accessible than ever before,” Adler said. “As we celebrate this milestone, we’re grateful to our partners for trusting us with their content and believing in our mission to change the way the world reads.”
Scribd membership starts at $8.99 per month, with access via desktop and mobile apps.
