Everybody’s Making a Course (But Who’s Actually Earning?)

Is it just me, or has everyone suddenly decided to launch an online course?

Your neighbour, your cousin, probably even the fruit-and-veg guy down the street. (Honestly, I’d sign up for his before half the ones in my feed - at least I’d finally learn how to pick a decent avocado.)

Now, I don’t mean to sound like a salty bitch here (although I probably do), but I’ve been in the online teaching game since 2018, and lately it feels like… maybe we’ve gone a bit overboard?

Offer Meets Demand

Basic economics: if there’s too much supply, prices and perceived value drop. Right now, courses are everywhere. They’re starting to feel like the tote bags of the internet - everyone has one, and nobody’s excited anymore.

Cue the chorus: But, Memo, the internet is infinite! Everyone can have their own niche! The 1,000 true fans rule!

Yes, yes - I’ve read the think-pieces too. But let’s do some quick math.

The Numbers Nobody Likes to Run

Say you’ve built a decent audience and somehow wrangled 1,000 people onto your course waitlist. Not easy, but we’ll pretend.

Industry average: 3% of those actually buy. That’s 30 people.

Your course is €199 (but really €147, or €99 for early birds). Best-case scenario, you make around €3,000 gross.

Now I can already hear the rebuttal: But Memo, you don’t have to rely just on organic waitlist sales - you can run ads!

Sure. But ads cost money. Yes, you’ll probably sell more, but you’ll also be paying to acquire those sales. More revenue, more expenses… and your profit margin may not actually move much at all.

And don’t forget: you’re still subtracting hosting and payment fees, maybe a platform cut, taxes (around 30%), and the weeks of work you spent scripting, recording, editing, and launching.

Suddenly, you’re lucky if you keep around €1,000 net. Which is nice, but also about the same as one solid freelance job. And unlike client work, you don’t get to invoice again next month unless you re-launch, run more ads, or burn your audience out with constant “early bird” emails.

Who’s Winning This Game?

Here’s the awkward truth: the only ones reliably making bank are the platforms.

They take a cut of everyone’s effort, run the numbers at scale, and come out smiling whether your course sells or flops.

Ironically, a screenshot from my latest free talk, recorded for the TwoTap Artist Summit 2025, where I talk about how you can ‘beat the algorithm’ on Instagram

Meanwhile, creators? Unless you’ve got:

• a big following,

• highly specific skills,

• and marketing chops worthy of a startup founder,

…it’s not the gold rush people think it is.

And students? Half of them are sitting on unopened classes already (guilty—I still have a Schoolism course on colour gathering dust in my downloads folder). There’s just too much content and not enough time.

So what we’ve got is this: everybody teaching, nobody learning.

The Covid Gold Rush

To be fair, there was a moment when online courses felt like striking oil. Remember lockdown? Everyone was stuck at home, sourdough starters bubbling on the counter, and what else was there to do but binge Skillshare classes?

For creators, that period was pure gold. Royalties were high because people actually had the time to watch. I’d check my payouts and think: “Wow, maybe this whole passive-income-dream thing is real after all.”

But once the world opened back up, screen time shifted. People got busier, attention spans shrank, and suddenly we were all drowning in unopened courses. Offer kept growing, but demand didn’t. The supply curve just sprinted way past the demand curve, and now… here we are.

I rest my case

The Bubble We Don’t Want to Admit

I don’t think online teaching is bad—in fact, it can be amazing. I just think the hype has convinced a lot of us that “launching a course” is a guaranteed win, when in reality it’s a lot of work for not as much return as people imagine.

At some point, the bubble will pop. The platforms will be fine. The rest of us… Maybe we’ll be taking that fruit-and-veg course after all.

PS: Please buy my course.

No, seriously, the waitlist link is here.