Scribd Acquires Professional Content Sharing Platform ‘Linkedin SlideShare’

Scribd, an American e-book and audiobook subscription service, has acquired the professional content sharing platform SlideShare from LinkedIn with a price that is still undisclosed. 

“Scribd has accumulated a unique collection of user-generated and professional content that we make available to our readers via personalized recommendations, and the addition of presentations from the SlideShare community advances our vision. It allows us to continue diversifying our offering while driving even more readers to the books, audiobooks, magazines, and other professionally published works in our digital library,” said Trip Adler, co-founder, and CEO of Scribd.

Slide Share which was earlier acquired in the year 2012 got itself rebranded as LinkedIn SlideShare. The platform was founded by Amit Ranjan, John Wilson, Jonathan Boutelle, and Rashmi Sinha in 2012. As soon as the news of the acquisition was out in the media one of its co-founders took to twitter and wrote that SlideShare had become a pale avatar of its former self as LinkedIn had stopped investing in the platform’s growth. LinkedIn back in 2016 was acquired by US tech giant Microsoft. 

“Back in the early days of SlideShare, we used to track Scribd as a strong competitor until the two products veered off in slightly divergent directions – ebooks v/s presentations. Cut out to 2020 the internet is a much bigger playground now, and it offers the opportunity of imagining a combined future that again reshapes digital content in this new age,” Ranjan wrote on Twitter. 

In a remark made by Ranjan on LinkedIn, he said that the company’s record as an acquirer was now “severely jolted. Analyzing the situation, they couldn’t “get” the social nature of SlideShare’s content community. It wouldn’t be a stretch to compare them to Yahoo on the M&A front (think Flickr, Tumblr)!”

SlideShare’s content will continue to be live for the users in Slideshare.net, on top of that users will get the facility to upload presentations on SlideShare without subscribing to Scribd. Scribd on its platform brings to its people Netflix-like subscription service e-books and audiobooks. It is priced for Rs.199/month for Indian users.