Skillshare is a creators’ learning community. You can hop onto the platform to take a course, create a project, watch a video lesson, or teach a class.
The platform was founded in 2011 to bridge the professional skills gap and let people access high-quality learning universally. Skillshare lets you acquire skills relevant to tomorrow’s world. It empowers you to advance your career, improve your life, and commit to the work you love.
As a student, you can engage with fellow students and teachers via project-based classes where you’ll understand the process behind creating something. In other words, you learn by doing, allowing you to acquire new skills and broaden your creativity.
On the other hand, as a teacher, you can teach others what you are passionate about and earn income while at it.
As of 2023, Skillshare has 34,000+ classes, 11,000+ teachers, and 800,000+ members.
All this persuaded me to find out more about Skillshare. I researched how Skillshare has generated revenue and how its user base has grown over the years. I discovered statistics that explain why this eLearning platform is a success today.
Let’s get started with the revenue part first.
Skillshare Revenue
Here are important stats on how Skillshare generates and distributes revenue.
Funding from Investors
What could a company do with hundreds of millions of dollars from 26 investors? A lot, right?
You know an eLearning platform has a bright future when it gets the attention of some of the world’s serious investors.
And the reason is simple: investors can analyze a business from its infancy stages and forecast its future revenue with utmost accuracy.
When I looked at who invested in Skillshare and how much they put into the company, I’d bet they knew it would succeed or at least wanted to help it succeed.
In May 2011, just one month after its launch, Skillshare got $550,000 from SV Angel, Founder Collective, Collaborative Fund, Scott Heiferman, and David Tisch.
Skillshare worked hard to provide exceptional services to its users for the nine years that followed before getting the attention of another powerful investor.
While 2020 was disastrous for most businesses globally, it was Skillshare’s luckiest year.
In August 2020, Skillshare raised $66 million in a Series D fund led by Adobe. The funding was to help the company start creating localized content for their international users and get more tools to help teachers create courses on the site.
Besides, the funding helped Skillshare expand its subscription plan to businesses.
But the funding didn’t end there.
Skillshare received its most recent funding in November 2020 from NewSpring; the amount wasn’t disclosed.
I couldn’t find specific information on how much each investor gave to Skillshare. However, I learned that the company had received $136.8 million from 11 rounds of funding.
Skillshare has 26 investors with six lead investors, including OMERS Growth Equity, Union Square Ventures, VTF Capital, Amasia, and Spark Capital.
Creating a membership pricing model was a brilliant strategy for increasing the company’s revenue, especially from its growing users.
Skillshare adopted the membership model in 2014; members paid $9.95/month to access courses.
As of 2023, Skillshare allows users unlimited access to all the courses via Skillshare Premium.
According to PrivCo, the eLearning giant has a post-money valuation ranging between $100 million and $500 million.
Teachers’ Royalty Pool
The company sets aside 30% of its monthly membership revenue towards the instructors’ royalty pool.
The distribution of the royalty pool depends on the number of premium minutes watched each month. For example, if an instructor’s audience gets 5% of all the minutes Premium members watch, the instructor gets 5% of the royalty pool.
Teacher Fund
At the start of each month, Skillshare sets aside a Teacher Fund to pay their instructors. May 2023’s Skillshare Teacher Fund will be paid on June 16 and will be $950,000.
The company forecasts this fund to be the same for the entire 2023. If the sales don’t align with their predictions, the fund may decrease or increase accordingly.
From 2017 to 2020, the instructors’ earnings increased 3.2 times, and the number of instructors getting more than $200 per month rose by 2.9%.
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60% Referral Earnings
As a teacher, a new class you publish has a specific class referral link you can send to followers outside the platform. Besides, when you become an instructor on Skillshare, you automatically get a channel referral link, allowing you to market your classes via your profile page.
When you promote your class or channel on your blog, social media, email, etc., you earn each time a user signs up on Skillshare using your referral link.
When a student subscribes to Skillshare membership for the first time, you’ll earn 60% of their first payment.
Skillshare calculates the exact amount based on the user’s membership fees, which vary from country to country.
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Skillshare User Statistics
The statistics below highlight how different users interact with Skillshare and where they come from.
Subscribers Are from 150+ Countries
The platform’s subscribers originate from over 150 countries. Besides, over 60% of all new members come from outside the U.S.
The United States is the Greatest Traffic Source, contributing 26.5% of All Website Traffic
Skillshare gets a bigger percentage of its traffic from the United States, possibly because it was founded in New York. Also, its subscription cost is affordable in the United States.
With subscription plans running well below $30, it isn’t surprising that in 2022’s last quarter, the platform got 7.3 million visits from the United States. These views form 26.5% of all visits.
Other regions that access Skillshare the most include:
The United Kingdom has 16.3% of the entire visits, India brings in 6.6% of the visits, and Germany forms 3.6%.
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42% of People in the United States Know Skillshare, but Only 9% Take Courses on This Platform
Statista’s 2022 survey shows the country in which Skillshare is popular. The results showed that while 42% of the United States population knows about the platform, only 9% often enroll in a course.
Young People Aged 25 to 34 Years Form 35.12% of Skillshare’s Visitors
Millennials consist of the major workforce in 2023. Keeping that in mind, given an increase in demand for professionals with core skills, it’s unsurprising that millennials make up a greater percentage of the platform’s users.
According to SimilarWeb, young people between 25 and 34 comprise 35.12% of Skillshare’s visitors.
Additionally, we have other groups with an interest in learning technical skills. They are:
- Young adults aged 18 and 24 comprise 29.51% of the platform’s users.
- Adults aged 35 and 44 make up 17.35%
- Adults aged 45 and 54 make up 9.64%
- Adults aged 55 and 64 make up 5.31%
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57.57% of the Platform’s Users are Male
SimilarWeb reveals that 57.57% of Skillshare’s web traffic is male. However, women are also among the community of students accessing over 34,000 courses on this platform. That said, the female users on Skillshare form 43.43% of all traffic.
Over 115,000 Students have Enrolled in Digital Illustration
With an emphasis on affordable and project-based courses, Skillshare is now the go-to platform for people interested in learning new skills and progressing in their careers.
But what are some of the most popular courses? Students seem to be interested in areas associated with arts and web design.
According to data by Upskillwise, Digital Illustration is among Skillshare’s popular courses, specifically how to use Procreate.
The website states that, in 2023, over 115,000 students have registered for the course. And over 50% of students left reviews that say the Digital Illustration course exceeded their expectations.
55% of Skillshare Traffic Originates from the Desktop
Although the online marketplace expanded to $50 billion in 2022, most (55%) of those interested in Skillshare courses access the platform from desktops, according to a report by Semrush.
On the other hand, 45% of the remaining traffic emanates from mobile phones. A possible reason is Skillshare provides a mobile application for students to learn on the go.
They also offer a premium membership plan with many extra features, such as personalized recommendations and offline viewing.
At Least 30% of the Most Searched Categories Are Related to the Use of Tech Tools
Thinkific conducted a market study that showed an increased interest in courses associated with computer science. The study showed a 3600% uptick in this interest between 2019 and 2021.
To date, Skillshare has many courses across different categories, such as photography, marketing, design, technology, and writing.
However, data from SimilarWeb shows the most popularly searched categories on the platform are closely related to technology tools. The research shows the distribution of various technological topics on Skillshare as follows:
- Web design and multimedia graphics: 11.73%
- Software development and programming: 8.59%
- Computers, technology, and electronics: 8.14%
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79.09% of Skillshare’s Social Media Traffic on Desktop Comes from YouTube
Data from SimilarWeb shows that 29 social networks drive traffic to Skillshare on desktop devices. The top among these networks includes YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Here’s the traffic distribution from the social networks:
- YouTube: 79.09%
- Facebook: 6.17%
- LinkedIn: 3.08%
- Instagram: 2.13%
- Pinterest: 2.09%
- Other networks: 7.46%
8.2 Million Desktop and Mobile Users Visited Skillshare in March 2023
According to data from SimilarWeb, Skillshare received 8.2 million users from mobile and desktop devices in March 2023.
The traffic increased by 12.99% from February 2023, which saw 7.3 million users visit the website. January had the highest traffic in the first quarter of 2023, where 8.7 million people visited the platform.
The same data shows that a user spends an average of 3 minutes and 38 seconds on the website on 3.59 pages per visit.
Besides, 48.72% of the visitors view a single page before exiting the platform.
User Growth During the Pandemic
When the pandemic hit the world in 2020, most people had to stay home, which meant learning new skills to work from home.
Consequently, eLearning platforms saw a surge in users interested in various courses. Skillshare wasn’t left behind.
During the first two quarters of 2020, the platform doubled its average engagement rate and sales. In other words, many people subscribed and dedicated their time to mastering different skills.
That’s why the daily views and duration spent on the platform more than tripled in the same year.
Instructors began making a killing from the increased subscribers, as well.
For example, in April 2020, the eLearning platform’s top instructor made $68,000 from a course related to Adobe software.
The demand didn’t stop there. By May 2020, the number of paying subscribers had reached 500,000.
In October 2020, it got even crazier when the number of registered users on Skillshare increased to over 12 million.
Customer Statistics
People express their interest in a skill by paying for it and investing their time to learn it.
On Skillshare, lessons on side hustles captivated the attention of most users in 2022.
In fact, according to the Skillshare Trendshare Report of 2023, the platform’s subscribers watched over 380,000 minutes of lessons related to side hustles in 2022.
But that’s not all.
90% of respondents in this report said their side hustle helped them get an income higher or similar to the previous year’s.
Incredible, isn’t it?
And not just students benefited the most from this platform; over 2,000 new instructors joined Skillshare and published their first course in 2022.
Skillshare’s top 500 instructors earn an average of approximately $2,000 a month in passive income. Earning four figures from an online course isn’t too shabby, given existing competition from similar platforms, right?
Here’s another interesting fact about Skillshare:
40% of the platform’s subscribers and 20% of top instructors are from outside the United States.
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Conclusion
In an economy that’s constantly changing, Skillshare provides an opportunity for everyone to get an in-demand skill or teach one.
The platform attracts users from the United States and other countries and offers subscription memberships with several categories to select from.
The most popular categories are those related to technological tools. The subscription plans are affordable, and you can access the platform on mobile or desktop.
Skillshare has something for everyone, whether young or old. It attracted the attention of serious investors from the early years and has continued to grow in leaps and bounds.
If you are serious about learning a new skill to impact the world or simply teaching others what you love, consider giving Skillshare a shot.
