Educreators are leaving money on the table.
Serving fans alone won't get educreators to a $100k/y business. What will?
Patreon took creators from earning $100/m from ads to earning $1000/m through patronage. This decade, educational creators will come out making $10,000/m.
To get there, educreators ought to diversify away from content and offer outcome-oriented services to their audience. Where are they stuck at? Let’s take a look.
Patreon helped creators monetize.
From 2006 to 2013, Jack Conte worked on building his career as a musician on YouTube. The efforts paid off when his band Pomplamoose started raking in 1M views a month. For this, they received a YouTube ad payout for a grand total of $166. This highlighted the struggle that online-first creators faced while monetizing their fan following. Triggered by this, Jack went on to start Patreon in 2013 — a platform for creatives to offer monthly subscriptions to their fans. Pomplamoose now makes $15k/m through Patreon. And oh, Patreon itself is worth well above $500M.
Patreon did normalize a new paradigm of monetization for creators. Delivering a 10x bump to the online incomes of creators is no easy feat. Patreon’s offerings are focused around 3 business models :
Exclusives: Behind the scenes content, digital media, Creator posts
Community: Discussions on Patreon, Discord servers, Discourse forums
Access: Pre-release content, draft copies, AMAs with creators, 1:1 calls
Our understanding is that these models work best for entertainment-oriented content.
But not all creators are created equal.
Educreators need a better model.
Benjamin Grubbs, the ex-Director of Creator Partnerships at YouTube classified the creator class into following verticals :
Promoters
Entrepreneurs
Artists and Storytellers
Educators
Opinion and Information Leaders
If YouTube were to be classified as an educational institution, it’d knock all universities out of the park when it comes to the outcomes that it has delivered. Educator-creators on YouTube (or educreators as we like to call them) who have created this value have failed to capture the value and channelize it to deliver superior online learning experiences.*
And Patreon’s offerings (as discussed above) have not really been helpful.
The bottom tiers across the popular creators commonly start in the $1/m - $5/m range. Putting together creators types who can potentially generate different levels of value has had an unintended effect. Most educreators anchor their prices to these low levels and deliver value accordingly, rather than working out the pricing based on the value they can deliver.
The result? Vertical-specific education markets going untapped!
Our research over a thousand educreators has revealed that they make ~$3.5/patron. Let’s take a look at one of my favorite educreators to check out how his Patreon tiers work and why I believe that there’s little to no value delivered to me for being a patron.
Economics Explained
Personal Context: My formal education was in theoretical physics. I’ve always longed to study economics in a structured fashion but never got the chance to do so. I find intro textbooks to be heavy and MOOCs to be monotonous. I regularly watch Economics Explained over lunch and enjoy the deep dives into economic phenomena, country breakdowns as well as finance. 15 minutes of fun! My desired outcome is to be conversant with economics and appreciate it in the world around me. I’d love to be a part of a tight-knit bunch of amateurs who I can nerd with^. I’m likely not alone in this.
Economics Explained has ~500K subscribers, ~5k Discord members, and ~500 patrons.
I’m interested in gaining knowledge, not vanity perks such as having my name being broadcasted to viewers like me. Let’s get this out of the way - the $200/m tier is a bit too expensive for a casual pursuit. The $3/m is optimal for knowledge seeking patrons because the other tiers don’t help. See the money on the table?
The Discord server has no barrier to entry. More often than not, is noisy and filled with irrelevant posts. Barely moderated. Anonymity is meh.
The creator is only making ~$2000/m at $4/patron ($0.004/m per subscriber). Upgrading 10% of his existing base to ~$50/mo will get his income to double. There’s value to be created on all ends.
You can observe the same patterns repeating on other well-performing channels. Pricing anchored against access and exclusive content cap their revenues.
Business Casual [Business]: YouTube, Patreon (874k YT subs, $138/mo Patreon)
Academy of Ideas [History, Philosophy]: YouTube, Membership Site
Educreators need to go beyond Patreon’s models. It is time for them to tap into their audience to unlock new revenue streams.
Welcome to the Seeker Economy
YouTube educreator channels that have 50k+ subscribers end up being default hangouts on the internet for relevant enthusiasts and learners. A fat chunk of subscribers would look at the content as infotainment — we’ll call them fans. However, there will likely be a niche audience that is interested in active learning — seekers.
Seekers want more than just content to consume. They crave experiences and people who will help them grow in their professional and personal lives. The smaller the niche is, the more valuable it is to its seekers. This growing market will give rise to the Seeker economy.
Educreators will move to integrate paid learning communities, live course cohorts as well as career services to serve the seekers. This will result in a significant rise in the educreators’ earnings. The few creators who have already made the shift can serve as good examples of what’s to come. Earlier this year, Abhinav Chikara (10k subscribers) set up 10kdesigners.com, an online design school. He stacks a live learning cohort of 30 ($999 for 3 months) on top of a broader community around learning design ($99/y). This demonstrates that earning $10k/m is already a viable option in a few disciplines.
We’re shifting to a world where educreators can make a living online. What does this do for the future of learning on the internet? Will universities find their match online? Will this give rise to new credentials? How will people network in a such a world? Let us know what you think!
Coming up next: How the seekers and the educreators will give birth to indie-universities.
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Thanks to John Danner, Aditya Behere, Anisha Bajaj, Ankit Kumar, and Sonal Saldanha for their feedback on the piece.
At Questo, we help educreators build profitable online learning communities. If you are looking to join a thriving learning community around topics you are excited about, reach out to us on our Twitter.
* We are not suggesting that educreators ought to paywall or gate all their content. That’ll be both a loss for them as well as society as a whole. The trick is in putting out free content that helps learners while offering serious folks a high-value close-knit learning experience. These premium learning experiences allow the educreator to focus full time on creating better free-content to set the flywheel into motion.
^ econ nerds, my DMs are open!
Also, there are many startups coming up which have a result-based fee structure. Eg, if you land a job with salary greater than equal to X, only then you need to pay Y% of your salary for next Z months.
Do you think platforms like Skillshare can close this gap that you talk about in the post?