A recent interview with the CEO of Scribd revealed that by ditching Flash in favor of HTML 5, they didn’t gain any users. They did, however, increase the time that visitors stayed on their site by 300 percent.
TechCrunch is trying to say that this is another loss for Flash, however it really points to the new design of Scribd’s reader. The new Scribd features more than HTML5–it includes new social networking tools, such as “Readcasting,” which enables users to share what they are reading with their own social networks.
HTML 5 couldn’t hurt the site, for sure, but all the other updates point to the fact that it is more likely a combination of these updates that they can attribute to their success, rather than just the benefits of ditching Flash.