Scribd acquires presentation-sharing platform SlideShare

E-book subscription company Scribd has acquired presentation-sharing platform SlideShare from LinkedIn for an undisclosed amount. Today, we're excited to add over 40 million presentations to our reading ecosystem," said Scribd. CEO Trip Adler added, "We have a lot of experience with a product like this, we're in a good position to make SlideShare really successful.

Trip Adler,CEO, Scribd said that, the companies have very similar roots, both launching in 2006/2007 with stories on TechCrunch, and both of them focused on content- and document-sharing.“The two products always had kind of similar missions,” Adler said. “The difference was, [SlideShare] focused on more on PowerPoint presentations and business users, while we focused more on PDFs and Word docs and long-form written content, more on the more general consumer.”

Over time, the companies diverged even further, with SlideShare acquired by LinkedIn in 2012, and LinkedIn itself acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Scribd, meanwhile, launching a Netflix-style subscription service for e-books and audiobooks, but Adler said that both the “user-generated side” and the “premium side” remain important to the business.