Top 4 Online Learning Platform’s Payment Models Explained

Whether you are just getting started or a veteran online teacher with tons of class content, figuring out how payments work across different online learning platforms can be complicated.

At Skillshare, we value how much of your time goes into creating amazing educational content and our payment model strives to compensate you accordingly, but we know that there are other places to teach online.  We’ve broken down our payment model along with that of Udemy, YouTube, and Teachable – so that you can pick the online learning platform that works best for you.

Takeaways:

1. Teachable and Udemy are great options if you have a big online following. With these platforms, you have to market the classes yourself (or in the case of Udemy, the price goes down), but you are able to take almost all of your referred students’ payments.
2. YouTube is a great option if you think your class can attract millions of views. YouTube pays very little per view, but it has billions of users, so this is the place to put content you think can go viral.
3. Skillshare is the best place to teach if you are looking for a place to get started and grow your brand or business. Because we don’t charge for marketing and have 2 million users, this is the place to come if you are looking to find students and to grow a paid online following.

How Skillshare Can Work For You: 

Let’s say you have a 1.5 hour class and that you can refer 10 students from your own network, but that’s it. If you hosted the class yourself, you would earn 10x the price of the class (minus any hosting fees). Here's how it would work on Skillshare: 

1. You would earn ~$150 for your referrals ($10 per referral + ~$50 for your network’s minutes watched) and those 10 enrollments would help jumpstart your success and marketing on the platform. For example, if you got another 500 students from the Skillshare community, you could expect to earn an additional $3,000. 

Now that you have this background, you can pick the platform that’s best for you. What are you waiting for? Time to start creating your class!

Have questions? Email us at teach@skillshare.com -- we'd love to hear from you!

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