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Online document host Docstoc on Wednesday is opening up an online store for publishers to sell their wares. The company is acting both as the host and the payment platform, as well as providing the viewing technology for the documents.

As part of the deal, publishers get “a majority” of the revenue, although actual figures are based on a sliding scale and depend on who they are and how Docstoc is promoting them.

In order to avoid serving up two versions of a paid document, such as a preview and full version, Docstoc has updated its Adobe Flash-based viewer to limit viewing to several pages of a document. This lets potential buyers take a look before they buy, just as Amazon and competitor Scribd do.

Browsing documents for sale is just like browsing Docstoc's free, hosted documents, except that you can only view a preview until you pay for a content license.

(Credit: Docstoc)

As for payments, Docstoc is letting users pay via PayPal, Google Checkout, or with a credit card. There’s also a money-back guarantee policy that lets users get a refund if they’re dissatisfied. The policy gives users a week to make a return, with up to five returns a year. To keep any abuse from happening, the company is also tracking users’ IP addresses, to make sure they’re not just opening up new accounts and making returns beyond the five-time limit, although Docstoc CEO Jason Nazar told me he doesn’t anticipate too heavy a return rate, since the new viewer shows a multipage preview.

Documents purchased through Docstoc can be viewed on the Web or on portable devices like the Kindle and the iPhone. Rather than selling books, Docstoc is specializing in ready-made forms, presentations, and technical documents–what the company is calling “professional utility documents.” However, there are some publishers in Docstoc’s store, like WriteMyEssay.com, that cover topics outside of business. Nazar says that the store may continue to expand into other areas, but that it will keep “selectively picking the best, high-quality partners” from those that apply to be included in the store.

Competitor Scribd launched a similar offering back in May with a guaranteed 80 percent revenue share to publishers and pricing limits up to $5,000 per title. Docstoc is launching with its aforementioned sliding scale of revenue sharing, which I’m told has no limit on maximum pricing. It will also continue to offer its advertising service, which places Google Adsense ads next to documents that are offered for free.

Originally posted at Web Crawler

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Docstoc opens up a shop for publishers

The document sharing site Docstoc, now out of beta, is announcing that it will start splitting advertising revenue with users who upload content to the service, in a new program called DocCash.

Using the Google AdSense API, Docstoc will crawl through uploaded documents, put related ads alongside them, and send the person who uploaded a document half the Google revenue when users click through to ads that run next to it.

This change to Docstoc is part of the company’s new plan to help users monetize content, but CEO Jason Nazar harbors no illusion that it will make his users rich. Although he thinks a lot of people could make “$50 a month without too much effort, maybe more if they promote their docs on Twitter and Facebook.”

Future changes may increase user revenue more. Today’s new ads only show up on the Docstoc site itself, for example. An upcoming revision will let ads show up on embedded documents (embedding is a key feature for the service). Actually allowing users to sell access to documents is also coming. “It’s the direction we’re headed in. It’s a two-phase process,” Nazar says.

Docstoc will give uploaders half of its revenue from Google ads.

(Credit: Docstoc)

Few services built on user-generated content actually give users a share of revenue, and Docstoc’s new direction may indicate an interesting trend, even if most people won’t make much money from shared ad revenue. Worse, attaching dollars to user-generated content will likely cause a surge in the uploading of plagiarized or copyrighted material, which Docstoc staffers will have to work hard to stay ahead of.

However, it’s a milepost on the road to giving users something tangible in return for their uploads. And it’s a smart move for Docstoc, since it does give the company a financial leg up on competitors Slideshare and Scribd.

Nazar says he expects his company to become profitable this year. Docstoc first raised venture funds a year ago, and has taken in $4 million so far. The site gets about 4.8 million unique users a month. Nazar has produced a video walk-through of DocCash.

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Docstoc to share ad revenue with uploaders

Docstoc has a new service for site owners that makes Web documents more readily accessible. Called Docshots, it presents any linked document in a pop-up viewer that site visitors can read without leaving the page.

If you’ve ever seen the pop-up thumbnail previews from Snap.com, the idea behind Docshots is the same. You simply hover your mouse over the link and the viewer pops up. Presumably the people visiting your page won’t leave and forget to come back if they can read it right there. It also cuts down on any embedded Docstoc Flash viewers that can slow page load times.

To install Docshots, site owners must drop in special code into the body of their site’s template. Once it’s been added, the tool goes live on all your pages, both new and old. Like Snap’s previews, links that have been given the Docshots treatment get a little orange page logo beside them to let you know it’s not a normal URL.

While convenient, this new service isn’t something I’d put on my own blog. I find Snap’s preview service distracting, and with Docshots it’s not just a site thumbnail–it’s an entire document. I will give a nod to its simplicity though. It’s a noble attempt at trying to rid Web pages of embedded Flash documents–something that unlike videos, are hard to enjoy when not viewed in full-screen.

Here’s a demo of how it works:

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Docstoc releases Docshots: A pop-up document viewer

Online document-hosting service Docstoc on Thursday is introducing a useful new tool for PCs and Macs that will automatically back up and sync documents from your hard drive to your Docstoc account.

Considering the growing trend of Netbooks with relatively little built-in storage, users with this desktop application installed with be able to offload whatever they created without having worry about running out of room.

By default, the syncing application goes for your documents folder, though you can set it to sync up with other folders on your hard drive or folders within your home network. Documents that are automatically updated get set as private, so others will not be able to see them, but you can set specific folders as public too.

To help manage all these files, the document home screen has also been given an overhaul that the company is calling MyDocs. It offers a little bit more than the documents folder on your computer, with simple thumbnail views, as well as a quick preview mode that lets you open up documents of any size and nearly any file type in about a second.

If you’re a Mac user running Leopard, you’ve been able to do this with the proper quick-look plug-ins, but this is all on the Web.

Docstoc creator and CEO Jason Lawrence Nazar tells me that future versions of the syncing tool will include bidirectional syncing, meaning that changes made to documents in the cloud can be pushed back to your local machine. This should be coming in “weeks.”

In the meantime, a company called Dropbox (review) has been offering something similar. It also requires special desktop software to get the job done.

Related: New Microsoft Office competition from Zoho, Zooos

Docstoc now offers a bird's-eye view of your Web documents, complete with live previews and editing. Using the new utility, you can also have it sync up all the documents from your hard drive.

(Credit: Docstoc)

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Docstoc offers simple sync with your hard drive

File host Docstoc is releasing a solution on Wednesday for sending large attachments to friends, family, and co-workers. Called OneClick, the small application must be installed on your machine to enable right-click contextual menus that let you simply click any file on your hard drive and send it either publicly or securely to others.

Once the file’s been transferred, you’ll get a link to the Docstoc-hosted document inserted into a new e-mail message that your recipient can open and read without needing to install anything.

Like Scribd’s solution, which launched last week, OneClick has been designed to entice business and casual users to start simply uploading their documents instead of e-mailing them for the sake of compatibility and size.

Not everyone has Gmail or Office 2007, which offer popular file compatibility. Nor have all users implemented the small software tweak on older versions of Office that will let you read those .Docx files with ease. Instead, solutions like Scribd and Docstoc are taking office software out of the equation entirely.

It’s also a pretty simple way to get users uploading more of their documents from a local machine. Instead of having to go through Docstoc’s Web uploader (which is simple and easy to use), you can get them uploaded with just two clicks whenever you come across something you’d like to upload.

The small application is PC-only for now, but I’m told a Mac version will be on its way soon. To see a video of the tool in action, click the link below.

Right-click on documents to upload them to Docstoc directly, then pop them conveniently into e-mails.

(Credit: Docstoc )

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Docstoc launches simple e-mail attachment replacement