Skillshare in 2023: This is how much I have earned as a teacher
👋 Hello there! 2023 is the year when I’ve started a mission to explore even the strangest ways of making money online. I personally test these methods by myself and provide genuine, unfiltered reviews. No fluff, no deception, just raw HONESTY! If you appreciate my work, I’d be grateful if you could hit that subscribe button of my Medium blog. Every new follower motivates me moving forward. Thank you!
Quick note: This article will be constantly updated with my Skillshare earnings. So bookmark it! 👍 The last update: 2023 May.
Disclosure: I only recommend products and services I would use myself. This post may contain affiliate links so if you make a purchase, I may earn a small commission at absolutely no additional cost to you. Thanks for supporting! 🙏
So let’s get started! 🚀
Skillshare 2023 overview:
- How to make money on Skillshare?
- Is it a good idea to become a student in Skillshare in 2023?
- So is it a good idea to become a teacher on Skillshare in 2023?
- What is Skillshare?
- Skillshare Revenue model
- How teachers earn money from Skillshare?
- Skillshare updates in late 2022
- My personal results on Skillshare
- So how much did I earn?
- Skillshare VS YouTube VS Udemy
How to make money on Skillshare?
Briefly, this is the idea:
- You create a video course about some topic;
- Upload it to Skillshare;
- If it is approved, you will be paid for every minute that your course is watched by other Skillshare users (that have purchased a membership).
It is more or less passive income source, because Skillshare promotes your course on their platform and you can focus on just creating a video content. No additional marketing is needed. 👍
As a teacher, you also get a referral link and if a new user signs up using it, you will get 60% from it’s membership fee.
What is also important to mention — once you have created a video course, you can upload it to other similar platforms (like Udemy, for example). In other words you are are the owner of the course, and you are allowed to publish your course on other platforms as long as the course is not easily accessible for free. So for example, you can’t publish the same course on Skillshare and publicly on YouTube, but you can publish it on Skillshare and Udemy.
Want to know more? Keep reading. 😎
What is Skillshare?
So, Skillshare was founded in 2010 and it is a platform where users can learn some new skills by watching video tutorials.
There are more than 30k+ video courses out there, so you can imagine that topics are pretty wide: from cooking and drawing to becoming programmer and so on.
Majority of video courses on Skillshare are made by ordinary, everyday people like you and me. 😄
So anyone can create a video tutorial about some topic and upload it to this platform and become a TEACHER. 👨🏫
After the course submission, it gets reviewed by Skillshare team, and if it meets their quality guidelines, the course goes online and you can start earning money!
Quick update: Starting from May 1st, 2023 new, first-time Skillshare instructors have to fill-in a special form in order to create a course on the platform. I wrote about it here:
Skillshare Revenue model
Hip hip hooray! But hold on a second — how exactly does Skillshare generate revenue? Where does its income come from?
And the answer is pretty obvious — it comes from paying Students.
When someone joins Skillshare as a student they get a free trial (usually 7 days) to try the platform and gets unlimited access to as much video courses as they want. And after the free-trial ends, they have to pay a yearly subscription fee to maintain the membership.
The subscription fee may vary from your location/region and other factors, but as far as I know it is always a yearly fee (not monthly or weekly).
Personally, I paid 71,94 €/year ( ~6 €/month ), but sometimes it can be something around $14 / month.
What is worth to mention, that as a teacher you don’t need to have a paid Skillshare membership — it is not required. You can start teaching without having a paid membership. (source)
Generally speaking, Skillshare’s monetization model makes it different from other similar platforms (such as Udemy), where users must purchase each course separately. With Skillshare, users pay only once a year and gain access to all the courses. This is the basic idea, and in my opinion, it is a huge advantage for students!
How do teachers earn money from Skillshare?
So every month Skillshare assigns a pool of money that they want to give to the teachers. It is called “The Skillshare Teacher Fund” and, for example, in April 2023 that sum was 950 000 USD.
Then they calculate the total number of minutes watched + engagement (likes/reviews) by all Skillshare users across the platform in a given month.
The exact formula is not disclosed, but roughly it is like that.
So based on how much watching minutes your courses accumulated through the month, you get a fraction of that “The Skillshare Teacher Fund”.
More info about that can be found here: https://help.skillshare.com/hc/en-us/articles/4415798406285-Earn-From-Your-Teaching
So in other words, as a teacher you are getting paid depending on how much watching minutes your courses got in a certain month.
⚠️ If the total number is lower than 75 minutes, you will not get paid at all.
Skillshare updates in late 2022
To tell you the truth, the formula somehow has changed in the end of 2022, and it was not in a favor of teachers — they are getting much less money then they used — some teachers are reporting 50% drop or even more.
😔 Here are some teachers on YouTube complaining about drop in revenue (and you can’t blame them for that):
As I understand the main change in formula was that previously Skillshare treated all minutes from all users the same, and now different users has different “weights”. This “weight” mainly depends on how much a certain user paid for a Skillshare subscription.
For example, if your course was watched by a user on a free trial, as a teacher you will not be paid anything. And if there are two users, for example user #1 paid 72 $/year using some discount code, and user #2 paid 168 $/year for the subscription without discount code, you will get more money if the second user watches your course.
Conclusion: different users = different earnings.
So, in theory, the income from Skillshare should not be very stable: it can vary a lot for different teachers and month-on-month basis also.
📒 Correct me if I am wrong in the comments.
My personal results on Skillshare
So in the beginning of 2023, I have decided to act and I have created my first Skillshare course.
I picked quite boring, but easy and evergreen topic that I know — domain names. The course was divided into 9 lessons, with a total length of 29 minutes. In my honest opinion, the course is pretty much informative, because in 29 minutes you learn a lot about domain names.
At first, I have used AI voiceovers using Clipchamp for the course, but my application was declined by Skillshare quality team. 😟
They replied me with this:
The only time when we are willing to make an exception is when a teacher has a certain medical condition like mutism e.g. when a person is not able to speak.
Since this is not the case with you, unfortunately, we will not be able to make an exception.So yeah, it seems that you can’t use AI voiceovers while creating video courses for Skillshare unless you have a certain medical condition.
So I have edited the course with my own voice, resubmitted the application and everything went well this time. The response time and overall communication with Skillshare staff was very good.
My course went online and I began my Skillshare journey! 🥳
Here is the link to my course: https://skl.sh/3G62pEf
So how much did I earn?
Drum rolls, please… 😄
So on the first month I have got 13 students and a total watch time of 206 minutes.
For a brand new teacher, it exceeded my expectations, because the topic (domain names) of the course is not very hot/trending and I was just hoping to get that minimum of 75 minutes.
And then… I have got the first payment:
So I have earned $5.40 for 206 minutes watching time. If we recalculate the numbers, this is my earnings stats:
- $0.026 per watch minute;
- $1.572 per watch hour;
- $2.621 per 100 watch minutes;
In other words, if I want to earn $1000 per month from Skillshare:
- I have to earn ~185 times more. That means creating 185 similar courses.
- I should be getting ~38,148 minutes per month or ~1,271 minutes per day (21.18 hours) in order to earn $1000 on similar circumstances. Quite crazy amount, huh? 😂
Latest update: 2023 April
Check it out! Here is my latest Skillshare earnings update:
Summary, conclusions and final thoughts
So is it a good idea to become a teacher on Skillshare in 2023?
Well if you think only about earnings, the answer is — completely NO!
Because to earn any significant amount of money you have to create 100 or even more courses.
And in my opinion, you will waste at least one year to create such amount of courses.
And even with those 100+ courses, earnings will not be stable or guaranteed, because it depends on too many factors that you simply can’t control. For example:
- Skillshare can change the teacher’s formula once again and earning can drop significantly.
- You can get a lot of watch minutes from free-trial students, which are not monetized at all.
- Skillshare’s algorithm can change and there is a possibility that your course will not be promoted as good as before.
- (…)
- A lot of variables that you can’t control!
👎 So overall, in my opinion, it is almost impossible to earn stable and significant income from Skillshare, if you are just starting out in 2023.
But…
But if you want to challenge yourself and learn new skills: like filming, video editing and audio recording, Skillshare is a good platform to start.
Skillshare VS YouTube VS Udemy
If you are brand new to this whole scene and want to learn how to make video courses then your best alternatives, in my opinion, are YouTube and Udemy. Let’s explore these in detail. 🤓
Starting a brand new and profitable YouTube channel with video courses in 2023 is extremely difficult due to the high level of competition and the algorithm’s reluctance to promote new channels. In other words, it’s hard to gain attention on YouTube if you’re just starting out.
Before you can monetize your YouTube channel, you need to gain at least 1000 subscribers and 4000 watching hours, which requires a tremendous amount of work. Therefore, I believe it simply won’t work for beginners due to the high competition. On the other hand, Skillshare offers an opportunity to earn money right away, even if it’s a small amount.
Similarly, Udemy’s competition is also very high, making it difficult for newcomers to attract attention and sell their courses.
So my advice would be to start with Skillshare just because you will learn how to create video courses and will be paid at least very small amount. And when you develop your new skills, you can move on and start using YouTube and Udemy to get more income.
Is it a good idea to become a student in Skillshare on 2023?
In my honest opinion — YES!
Because many courses are published on both platforms: Skillshare and Udemy.
For example take a look at this teacher:
https://www.skillshare.com/en/user/videoschoolonline https://www.udemy.com/user/philipebiner2/
And there are a lot of teachers, that do the same — they publish same courses on both learning platforms.
If I’m thinking of purchasing a course from Udemy, I always check if it’s also available on Skillshare. And many times the same courses exists on both platforms.
So in that way Skillshare is way cheaper than Udemy, because you only pay one subscription fee and get unlimited access, and on Udemy you have to pay separately for each course.
Here is the address where you can find if a certain instructor has a teacher profile on Skillshare: https://www.skillshare.com/en/teacher-directory/A
👉 And if you are considering to join Skillshare as a student, click here to use my referral link and you will get a free trial of 30 days, instead of 7 days. Thanks!
So this is it! 😊
This is my honest review of Skillshare in 2023.
🗨️ If you have any questions or want to share your opinion — feel free to leave a comment. I would be glad to respond.
Also, if you want to follow my Skillshare journey, feel free to subscribe to this Medium list, where I add new articles from time to time:
