Document Hosting Service Scribd.com Bans Adult Content

SAN FRANCISCO — Adult webmasters, take notice: Online document hosting and sharing service Scribd.com wants all adult content off its servers.

The company made the announcement on its blog last week that they're updating its terms of service to ban adult content.

Scribd gave users a grace period to remove all adult content. That ends May 21.

"It's become clear that adult content is limiting Scribd's usefulness to educators, parents, students, and publishers — exactly the types of users that benefit the most from our site and services," Scribd officials wrote.

Scribd has gained a reputation in the Web 2.0 marketplace as the "YouTube of documents," offering free upload, hosting and embeddable sharing for files. The site also offers networking features and group functionality common to Web 2.0 sites.

As of today, adult content remains on the site in huge amounts, including at least 20,000 documents and more than 1,500 members.

Online guru Brandon Shalton told XBIZ he doubted Scribd's ban would inconvenience many adult professionals because the site doesn't focus on hosting videos or images.

"You could make the case that erotic literature should be allowed on [Scribd]," said Shalton, who founded the traffic analysis service T3Report.com. "But if they have their terms to not allow that, that just opens the opportunity for some entrepreneur to come along and do the same model, but for adult text only."

Scribd's competitors include Edocr.com and DocStoc.com, neither of which allows adult content.

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