Scribd experiences a decline in traffic. I wonder why

Attention, anyone who happens to be a fan of  Scribd (also called YouTube for documents), then you will not be happy to hear this news. Scribd has been experiencing a decline in its traffic. Since June, Scribd has seen a decline in its global traffic of about 48 percent. In June, it had around 58.3 million monthly visitors which has dropped to 30.1 million visitors.

TechCrunch communicated with Trip Adler who happens to be the CEO of Scribd regarding this matter. Adler said that currently scribd was undergoing SEO efforts and were removing pirated content. He says this decline in traffic is due to the summer season. His exact words were:

We made some changes that will have a short-term impact on traffic. Primarily: 1) improving our copyright filter, which keeps unauthorized content off the site and 2) reducing the aggressiveness of our SEO, which reduces total traffic in the near term but increases the relevancy of Scribd links in search engine results 3) trending down typical in the summer time — we experienced this last year at this time and other major sites (YouTube , Google Books ) are experiencing the same.

The CEO said, that his team was not worried about this recent decline and were hopeful of things getting back to track.

We’re not concerned about the dip – we expect traffic to go back up quickly. The metrics we care about at Scribd are active members of our community and uploads of unique, authorized works. As long as these numbers keep growing, we are positioned very well for long-term growth in unique visitors.

He shared the fact that these changes are all part of the long term strategy. The long term strategy focuses on two things : user experience and quality content.

These product changes are part of a long-term strategy to focus on user experience and quality content. We call it a “controlled growth strategy”, similar to what Facebook did a few years ago. We have a lot product changes planned in the next few months that will increase quality / relevance / stickiness of the site.

Let us see what are the major changes that Scribd will bring for us. I am sure that they will be pretty cool.