Influencers are creating million-dollar incomes selling their expertise via online courses

By Jessica Davies

Online learning has entered a new era, and it has higher production values. More and more digital creatives with large audiences — from YouTubers to bloggers to podcasters — are launching cohort-based group courses.

Intensive and influencer-led, the cohorts usually last four to six weeks. A place costs between $200 and $6,000 per person, and each new edition attracts 200+ learners from all over the world. They cover subjects like writing online, research and knowledge management, and getting started on YouTube. The most successful cohorts sell out in less than 24 hours, generating millions of dollars for the course creator.

David Perell teaches people how to write online and expand their professional network in his Write of Passage course. He markets primarily through Twitter, where he has an audience of 183,000 — built by sharing writing advice every day on the platform for years. Tiago Forte attracted his audience by blogging about personal knowledge management, leading to his cohort course Building a Second Brain. More than 40,000 people subscribe to each of these creators’ weekly newsletters.

There are no sponsorships or brand partnerships involved, and the courses aren’t hosted on intermediary platforms like Skillshare or Masterclass — though some creators use these subscription platforms for visibility and reach among online learners. Instead, creators use a stack of software products they own and control. Without a middleman, the creator shoulders more responsibility but also reaps more of the rewards.

Ali Abdaal is a productivity YouTuber with 1.5 million followers. His Part-Time YouTuber Academy cohort course teaches learners how to launch a YouTube channel as a side project, as he did. Delivery blends live lectures, Q&As, online communities and self-paced video content. He’s built a team to help him manage the courses and, together, they iterate relentlessly between cohorts to improve the product.

Last year, Abdaal’s maker business generated over $1.3 million in revenue. “If 400 people join a cohort, I can make a million dollars in just a few days. That’s a flabbergasting level of revenue compared to every other part of my business,” he said. “The course makes significantly more money than anything. I think that’s a marker of its value and impact.”

Influencers are, of course, masters of content creation. With many classes now online, university lectures exist just one browser tab away from them. “I studied medicine at Cambridge. Everybody I know used digital content to study for their degree,” said Abdaal. “Online learning through platforms like YouTube was already a big part of how students, even at prestigious universities, learned their course material and revised for exams before the pandemic.”

Online university courses had already risen in popularity before the pandemic. In its aftermath, a range of elite institutions from Princeton to Spelman College have created fully online offerings and slashed tuition fees. Following this disruption, could new cohort courses soon pose a challenge in preparing learners for the world of work and business?

Universities may struggle to compete with the production quality of creators’ …read more

Source:: Digiday