Users Spend Twice as Long on HTML5 Scribd

There’s been a lot of talk about HTML5 replacing Adobe Flash for online video, but there are plenty of other applications where the emerging standard could be used instead of the proprietary Flash platform. One website that has, very successfully it seems, adopted HTML5 is Scribd. The document-sharing site started converting its inventory to HTML5 a couple of weeks back and it’s already reaping the benefits. Scribd says that it has already noticed a change in behaviour, specifically, users spend twice as much time on the HTML5 pages than they did on the old Flash pages.

That’s a great metric any way you look at it and, for an ad revenue-driven company, it’s very good news. Scribd says that much of its inventory, which counts millions of documents, be them books, magazines, research papers and so on, has already been converted.

Using HTML5 over Flash has some very big advantages for Scribd in particular. With HTML5, the documents become part of the page and behave just like any other web content out there. The text is rendered using actual web fonts. You can select it, copy it, do all the things you’d expect. The graphics in the documents are also just plain images.

Of course, this is the way most of the web has been for years, so it’s strange that, in 2010, people would get excited over this. There are other advantages of using HTML5 as well, like the fact that it makes the site accessible from a wider range of devices. HTML5-capable browsers are common now, even on mobile devices.

Apple may be exaggerating in its crusade against Flash, but it does have a point. On mobile devices processing power is at a premium and battery life is a big concern. There’s no need to run the very taxing Flash player for things that can be accomplished by using simple vector graphics and HTML5. In any case, Scribd is now even more sure that it made the right decision and is advocating the technology to others.