Proving that the initial positive response wasn't just a passing trend

Jun 21, 2010 13:02 GMT  ·  By
Users spend three times as much time on Scribd than they did three months ago
   Users spend three times as much time on Scribd than they did three months ago

The ‘crusade’ against Flash is in full swing, spearheaded by Apple, and, though Flash’s flaws may be a bit blown out of proportion by HTML5 converts, it looks like at least some defectors are finding the move highly successful. Scribd had already boasted about how positive the move to HTML5 had been for the site and now it’s bringing some updated stats to show that it wasn’t just a passing trend.

Scribd is now saying that engagement to the site has tripled in the last three months driven by three factors. The Apple iPad has had a positive effect on how much time users spend on the site, like it has had for plenty of publishers or sites dealing with written content.

The second factor that drove engagement up was the Facebook integration. As a testament to the social network’s new tools for third-parties, it seems that the social features have spurred users to spend more time on Scribd, but also to engage in more social activities, for example automatically broadcasting the titles a user may be reading.

Traditionally, a lot of traffic was sent to Scribd by the search engines. With tens of millions of text documents, it’s a gold mine for the likes of Google and Bing. But Scribd is seeing increased traffic from Facebook, though it still represents a small portion of the overall figure.

But the biggest driver for user engagement has been the switch to HTML5 for the document viewer. It looks like the new viewer proves to be much less annoying and doesn’t get in the way as much, making for a better experience.

The document-sharing site had already said that the initial signs of the switch were overwhelmingly positive. Just a couple of weeks after the HTML5 viewer debuted, users were already spending two times as much time on the documents that had been converted as opposed to the time spent on the ones still displayed with the Flash viewer.