What are the negatives of Skillshare? Skillshare Review

• Account B: Joined October 23, 2018. I had two month free trial, cancelled it and was given an additional month for free. This time I didn’t renew. I was being charged $167.88 to rejoin the membership. This is a $68.88 dollar increase.

• Account C: Joined April 10th, 2023. Curiously, I needed to find out what would happen if I tried an open a new account right now. I decided to not opt in for the month free trial, instead just do their 7 day trial. I was being charged $165 for their yearly, with no option to join the platform monthly, either.

Why the inconsistency in pricing? To be honest, I don’t know. My initial thought was the earlier you joined Skillshare, the least it was going to be because they were cheaper back then. That they were graciously honoring the same pricing for any future membership? This isn’t the case. As you can see above, account “B” joined in 2018 and its pricing for the Skillshare yearly membership was higher than all three of them at $167.88 to join.

I’m sure if you contacted Skillshare, they might honor the pricing, but my point in all of this is if you didn’t find this out on your own with either research or, in my case, having multiple accounts, you might be overpaying.

So which is it? $99 or $165 a year for the Skillshare membership? Considering the new account gave me the $165 price tag, I’m sticking to that being the official price, which makes it $13.75 monthly if you’re willing to spend that much money up front.

$13 doesn’t seem too bad if you’re looking at it from a monthly perspective. However, most of us don’t have $165 to pay up front to get access to the course platform.

I am curious to find out why they took out their monthly $32 pricing model and wonder if they are still offering it if you contact their support team. As of right now, it’s no longer available on their website upon signing up.

While I find it relatively easy to cancel Skillshare by just going into your account settings, if you’re forgetful, you might end up getting charged for a year.

They luckily provide a one time refund when you contact them, but you have to make sure you check if it’s cancelled afterwards because if you forget they will not extend that gratitude again.

Skillshare in 2017 used to be around $15 dollars a month before they started heavily pushing YouTubers to create courses with their team on their platform. The price then skyrocketed to $32 before they cancelled the monthly payment model entirely. This before made the only somewhat good option being to pay up front for their yearly plan as you get a good discount for it, now it’s the only option.

Caution:

You should cancel immediately before accidentally being charged. It claims you have a 30 day trial but they charge you within 2 weeks of signing up.

Looking for courses

Searching for courses can be unreliable due to the fact that sometimes it’ll show you results that have nothing to do with what you’re looking for in the first place.

When looking to make my first website with WordPress I was baffled at the fact the same person posting a Skillshare course on that platform had the same exact video and more videos on YouTube that was 2+ hours long for free.

I also got more knowledge from a YouTuber called Ferdy Korpershoek who guided me step by step on a 4 hour long video on affiliate marketing with no catches.

When going on Skillshare, you get a few outdated Elementor Pro courses and again one tutorial copy and pasted from YouTube themselves. It just shows the lack of quality control on this platform that’s charging a premium.

One thing I will give praise to is a section called “Learning Paths.” They essentially take a few courses selected by the Skillshare staff from beginner to expert levels and put it in a start to finish curriculum in order of completion. The category selection right now is very small, with a total of 69 Learning Paths, but I’m sure in the future more will be added to that catalogue.

They offer a Learning Paths mostly for productivity and drawing along with design, but there’s a couple that are unique such as learning how to play guitar beginner to expert and learning how to be a DJ.

Skillshare Affiliate Program

At the time of writing this, I tried to sign up for their affiliate program to get more information on their current pricing structure, but it’s been almost a week and they haven’t gotten back to me. So the following information I’m providing is found by doing research on not only their website but other content creators that are affiliated with them.

Their affiliate program is not very good if you are a small creator or business owner. You only get paid once per new user sign up. (If what I read on their website is something I’m interpreting correctly.) On Their website it states you can earn 40% up to $67 for every new person you refer. It isn’t bad until you look at the fact that maybe that said person you are referring is then having a yearly reoccurring charge of $165 dollars that you aren’t getting commissioned on.

So Skillshare gives you just a onetime payment for a person who might keep a subscription for Skillshare for who knows how long.

The Skillshare Affiliate, like I stated above, is only for new users, which is understandable.

How much money do Skillshare teachers make?

If you’ve decided that you wanted to still go with Skillshare as your platform of choice to host your course, you’re probably curious about how much you’re going to get paid.

Maybe the whole signing up issue isn’t a big thing because you’re not planning on watching the courses you just want to upload one and hopefully make some passive income.

However, Skillshare keeps a whopping 70% of your revenue. While websites like Patreon keep less than 12%, Skillshare is over here keeping $70 dollars out of your $100 dollar earnings. Might not sound like a lot until you get into the thousands and you only keep $300 while they keep $700.

YouTube takes about 45% which is still a better deal for a platform you can post unlimited content on, is available for free and offers different forms of videos like Shorts to promote your main long form content. They also offer services like a Join button where your viewers can support you individually monetarily through a monthly subscription.

You can choose how many ads you want on your video which will determine how much money you will earn. It’s also widely accessible to everyone. Did I forget to mention? It’s free. Skillshare taking a 70% cut for a paid platform is essentially theft.

While I’m certain bigger content creators negotiate a better deal, a lot of smaller creators get screwed over because they get persuaded into thinking Skillshare is this premium platform. They get persuaded from a YouTuber getting paid to promote the platform with a script they wrote that has to get pre-approved by the Skillshare team before the video goes live.

Teachers get paid in terms of watch time per course. About 5 cents per minute watched. This means that for an hour long course video they are receiving about $3 dollars.

Now, even though teachers get paid per minute watched, it seems to be a small catch with even that.

Skillshare has a thing called a teacher fund, and it’s described as the following:

“Teachers are paid each month from the Skillshare Teacher Fund, which is set at the start of each month. The Skillshare Teacher Fund for April 2023 (to be paid out on May 16) will be 950,000 USD”.

It’s essentially a pot of money that gets distributed by all the teachers on the platform who have watch time on their courses.

So my brain immediately went to, well Skillshare is being heavily pushed out by content creators not only as a way to learn but also to have another source of revenue. What happens when the platform has more teachers than the money in that said fund? A few content creators who made a video on how much they earned on Skillshare answered my question.

Their income, sadly, fluctuates month to month, which is expected. But the thing is, some have noticed that for the amount of watch time minutes, they aren’t earning as much as they usually do and it isn’t consistent every time. Amounts being paid are actually a lot lower than they were before.

This wasn’t always the pricing model, in fact, apparently with this new pricing model they implemented a teacher whose course I love named Lindsay Marsh claimed she went from making “$30k to $9k in monthly Skillshare income in what feels like overnight.”

To look further into this, I watched and read a lot of “How much Skillshare paid me” videos to get more insight into how they accurately got paid.

I learned a few things about how Skillshare teachers get paid:

• Watch time/Royalties
• Referrals
• Random bonuses (If you get large enough engagement and are enrolled in their Top Teacher or Teach Corp program. On the website, it states it’s about $250 for top creators and $100 for the rest.) They also will be eligible to earn a free year of Skillshare Premium.

The confusing part about the way watch time works is that the pay isn’t always as accurate as 5 cents per minute watched, like the Skillshare official blog post stated. It may be the estimate, but it certainly can be lower or higher depending on the number of teachers on the platform whose courses were being watched that month.

For instance, if a greater number of teachers joined Skillshare and published their classes, and received the same amount of watch time as other creators, the pot of money would not increase that month. This means that the revenue received isn’t always going to be the same monthly for watch time and you might end up getting screwed over if the platform gets too saturated.

Skillshare also states on their website that they also consider if the student that enrolls into your course is a free trial or a paid member so while they are being fair on this account, I think for the pay cut they are already receiving this is just adding salt into the wound.

For referrals, thankfully, they increased the amount of revenue split from 60% to 90% which is great because I felt like 60% for just new students without a recurring percentage monthly was incredibly low.

This was thought to have been done to ease the blow of the pay cut. This would require the teacher to become an affiliate marketer for the platform in order to generate a more reliable income.

The old way of them allocating money to teachers, to me, made a bit more sense, even though it was equally complicated. Essentially, they took a portion of the money made from Skillshare premium subscribers and allocated the funds to pay the teachers. I think this new model, while they are hyping it up, and make it seem like it gives teachers more benefits, it doesn’t. It’s really just a way for them to pay for more marketing and increase their pocketed revenue.

Engagement also is factored in how much they get paid. This is annoying because I’m a student that prefers to just watch a course and take notes on my own time. I don’t enjoy participating in discussions or uploading class projects. Because I don’t do this now, it can mean that my favorite teacher potentially will earn less.

Does Skillshare look good on a job resume?

Skillshare isn’t accredited. You’d think people would know this because it says Skill and Sharing in the name with courses made by people just like you who wanted to share a skill. But yet some may still be under the impression you can earn a legitimate certification that you can put on your resume. That this would cause employers to recognize, be used to get better, higher paying jobs. You can’t, because it isn’t accredited and you don’t get a certification from completing a full course.

To be clear, I’m not stating that websites like these shouldn’t exist if they aren’t accredited. I’m all for Skillshares founder statement on how he wants education accessible to everyone.

It’s just that I can understand where the confusion lies. Skillshare markets itself as the one-stop shop for learning any skill taught by professionals and experts. However, this is not a genuine reflection of the platform. Not every course is taught by a professional or an expert.

I mean, on Skillshares’ own website, it talks about how these courses can help you professionally and to quote “Go from dabbler to master in a matter of hours”.

It even has a program for businesses who have teams. The picture below is straight from Skillshares’ own website as it advertises its use in a business setting.

“With inspiring classes on soft skills, business essentials, well‑being and more, your whole team will have deep knowledge and expertise at their fingertips.”

So if they are advertising this for businesses, why wouldn’t anyone think they are a legit learning platform? Something that’s just more than a random person making a video that’s cut up into little sections and posting it onto the platform?

They even have a section for “Scholarships” which is nothing more than an offer to give a discount to individuals who are in regular University.

They use terminology like this to make it seem way more than it is. This unfortunately makes it near impossible for people to stop, think and evaluate the content they are consuming.

With a regular video online, you tend to use critical thinking and research skills to make sure the content and information you are learning is accurate. This isn’t the case with Skillshare.

You are thrusted with a false sense of security that this platform is going to give you nothing but accurate information because, after all, businesses can use this for their employees, no?

In conclusion

For the money, Skillshare doesn’t provide the value that a website like YouTube does for free. You are getting the same quality courses you’d get for free on YouTube but locked behind the paywall. You are told differently because some YouTubers exclusively signed a deal with Skillshare to promote their courses on that platform or that courses on that platform is the best way to learn.

These same YouTubers that post their courses on Skillshare also give you the same advice and content for free on the google owned site just in smaller length spread across multiple videos. All they do is take the content they’ve already made, rewrite the script and make it into a longer form content with some projects or assignments to do every other lesson.

Teachers on the platform are just going to keep earning a lot less income every month because of excessive amounts of teachers signing up and having students go to their courses as well. This means that they are pocketing more money due to the fact they have a fixed Teacher fund that doesn’t increase that given month. They also punish teachers if the students like myself don’t provide engagement.

The big problem with Skillshare is that there is absolutely no quality control and no way of finding out if a course is good unless you watch it yourself and waste your time. A course that looks like crap may have valuable information but it’s too awful to stick around and watch, while a course that has a camera crew behind it might look good but you can easily find the information on the first few results on google if you take two minutes to search.

Sources:

Introducing a New Teacher Payment Model (September 2022)

• https://help.skillshare.com/hc/en-us/articles/8762294455565

Earn From Your Teaching at Skillshare

• https://help.skillshare.com/hc/en-us/articles/4415798406285

How Much Money Do Skillshare Teachers Make? (See the Revenue of 11 Teachers)

• https://instructor-academy.onlinecoursehost.com/how-much-do-skillshare-teachers-make/

Is teaching on Skillshare worth it anymore? (Important message to teachers): By Art by Louise

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xni0BDSIfXE&t=755&ab_channel=ArtbyLouise

YouTubers Sold Out To Skillshare. The Truth.: by LogicallyAnswered

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpDpiYmPcMM&ab_channel=LogicallyAnswered

What they DON’T tell you about Skillshare: by Rued Riis

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg8FJmWtWds&ab_channel=RuedRiis