Scribd Marks One Million Subscribers

Scribd, the online reading community and subscription service, announced that it has more than one million paying subscribers to its digital inventory of books, audiobooks, magazines and newspaper content.

Launched in 2007, Scribd was founded as a digital subscription service offering unlimited access to library of content for a monthly fee of $8.99. In the years since its launch, Scribd has adjusted its business model, adding and redesigning services as the digital reading market developed.

After launching as an e-book focused service, Scribd moved to add the popular audiobooks category to its inventory in 2014, later in 2015 it dropped the comics and graphic novels category and restricted access to romance titles; before adding newspapers and magazines in 2017. After abandoning unlimited access in 2016, Scribd returned to its original unlimited access model ($8.99/month) last year.

Scribd CEO Trip Adler called registering a million subscribers "an exciting milestone." He said that since the service returned to the unlimited access model, Scribd has “grown our subscriptions over 40% (YOY), and more people are listening to audiobooks than ever before (a +100% increase in audio users over the course of 2018).” Indeed, Scribd reports that the top two most popular reads on the site are audiobooks, led by Michelle Obama’s Becoming at #1 and Rachel Hollis’s Girl Wash Your Face at #2.

Adler said credited Scribd’s success to “making the written word more accessible” and driving “incremental revenue to the publishing industry. 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.”