Content Sharing sites have seen a boom not only since the Youtube mega-deal.

The basic economics work like that:

- We build a feature rich site where users can upload A, B, C
- We add social networking
- We let users include contents in their blogs or own social networking sites
- We make some marketing
- We optimize SEO
- We put Google (and other ads) in the pages

and wait until it catches steam.

OK maybe it's not that simple :)

Tal Siach, the founder of Docstoc.com recently mailed me with his impressive credentials:

1) 50,000+ free legal forms, business documents, excel templates, free real estate forms, sample business plans.
2) backed by the co-founders/investors of MySpace, Baidu, Mp3.com, and Lowwermybills.com.
3) launched just over a month ago (October 30th) and have 17,000 registered members and ranked by Alexa.com in the top 25,000 most visited sites.




Another start-up that follow the model is Scribd backed by Redpoint ventures. It also looks pretty cool. I shudder when I see the quality of the site - not because it's flawed, because it's so good and I know development costs of good web sites and the maintenance required :)

I'm pretty sure that the model will work in general. The question is how well you can get the contents of documents in search engines and rank above what Google usually does with documents. Also if enough users try it out it could get critical mass.

if you have some docs to share try it out and glance at some of the featured/ most popular content at these sites.