I disagree. It's a cheap trick. The real aim is to get a bunch of SEO-optimizing people to link like crazy to scribd.com.

So how is that not marketing genius?

The "cheap trick" part is that the winner is determined by number of page views (which really is a factor of the spamming ability of the contestant) rather than any intrinsic "interesting"-ness of the submissions.

I'm not knocking it, the internet runs on this kind of "cheap trick", and it will generate a ton of traffic and new users. I don't know if it will generate much good will towards Scribd.

Playing it a little loose with the term "genius" don't you think?

It sounds more like a desperate trick to bring in irrelevant traffic.

The whole point of the site is to post and share documents, which is what this contest is encouraging people to do. In terms of SEO, inbound linking is never irrelevant.