Skillshare — Best Platform for Both Students and Teachers? (2024)

Hey there!

You’re probably interested in knowing the answers to these questions:

• Is Skillshare is a good fit for you or not? (Both as a student and a teacher)
• How does Skillshare work?
• How much does it cost?
• How much can you make as a beginner Skillshare teacher?
• What would your experience be when joining the platform? And should you consider alternatives?

If so, you’ve come to the right place!

This Skillshare review is about to commence.

Skillshare is an online learning platform with a huge library of courses and classes covering a wide spectrum of niches and expertise levels.

By "huge,” we mean the platform has more than 30,000 online courses viewed by over 12 million students.

Somewhere along the way, Skillshare dropped the ball and their professional reputation got hurt badly — they have a 1.8/5 rating on Trustpilot from 1300+ reviews.

(Plus, they rank the lowest in the Education Institution category as well)

So, what exactly does that mean for students looking to grow their skills and teachers wanting to offer their expertise on the platform?

To answer that question, we’ve gathered these pros and cons to give you an idea of the current state of Skillshare.

(Collected from platforms like Trustpilot and G2)

• Create online courses
• Publish courses on more platforms to gain extra reach
• Monetize a skill or expertise you have

Then you’d be glad to know that you can become a Skillshare teacher at no cost whatsoever.

There’s no application process, and no approval is required.

Simply click “Start a Class” on the teachers’ homepage to sign up, and then you’ll be prompted to choose a topic and define goals for your class.

(All classes must be approved by Skillshare before being published)

There are “Teacher Programs” you can apply for.

They’re basically training classes for beginner teachers with perks like Skillshare workshops, video editing support, and more.

Skillshare teachers need to adhere to some strict rules, such as:

• Upload a maximum of 1 class/course every 7 days
• Zero-tolerance policy for copyright violations (even if you own the content you’re publishing, you can’t publish classes you’re not directly teaching)
• If you’re a company or a group of teachers working as a single entity, the email account holder of the Skillshare profile is responsible for Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) regulation
• You should not imply or hint that your class was created with or by Skillshare, nor should you convey that you have an official relationship with Skillshare
• You shouldn’t direct students towards competing platforms
• You can’t upload classes that you offer for free elsewhere

And there are plenty more that you can find in the dedicated teachers’ help center at Skillshare.

You might find it hard to get what you’re looking for at first, but some rules are crucial for you to understand, like:

If you commit 3 violations within a 6-month period, your account will be terminated.

Next, the experience you’ll have as a beginner Skillshare teacher depends on this question:

Do you have a following and reach on other platforms?

If the answer is yes, then that’s neat!

You’ll have an easy time generating enough sales on your own to gain traction and climb the ranks on Skillshare to be featured on top of your category page, trending sections, and even the homepage.

If the answer is no, though, then that’s not so neat, and here’s why…

Skillshare tends to recommend and promote video classes/courses that are already generating sales and getting good reviews (which makes sense from a business standpoint).

But here’s the thing, with Skillshare, you simply don’t have real marketing tools to generate sales and get traction on the platform.

That’ll leave you with a slow process to grow your online learning community with a platform that makes it hard to do so.

All you get is a free access link to give users the ability to watch your courses for free, and a referral program for users to sign up for Skillshare.

(With the latter, you’re putting Skillshare above your online teaching career)

But don’t expect things like:

• Running your own affiliate program — to build a team of affiliates that would promote your courses
• Email marketing tools — to effectively promote your courses and classes to students
• Certificates of completion

(In a world where systeme.io exists and just by signing up for free you’d get all these tools and keep 100% of the profit, you start feeling like you’re missing out as a teacher)

And if you’re planning on just getting students organically through Skillshare, you’ll have to rely on a slow snowball effect where it may take years to bring in considerable income each month.

Speaking of which, here’s how you get paid as a Skillshare teacher:

• You’ll need to sign up for a Tipalti account—then select a payout method like PayPal, ACH transfers, and more.
• You’ll get paid on the 16th of each month after Skillshare calculates the net amount you’ve earned (after removing refunds from referrals, withholding taxes, etc)
• You’ll have to meet a 75-minute watch time requirement on your Skillshare classes in order to get paid (if you don’t meet the requirement, existing minutes will roll over to the next month)
• Only students with a premium membership would count for watch time (not free trials, or ones given free classes by your link, etc)

This is directly related to your total watch time, but you don’t earn an exact figure like $0.10 per minute, for example.

Rather, the system is set up in a way where 30% of all premium memberships — revenue from paying students — goes to teachers every month.

Each teacher’s watch time compared to the total watch time of all teachers would determine the percentage the teacher would get from that 30%.

When starting out, current reviews and data say that you should expect to earn $50 - $150/month.

That figure will grow with time as you’ll get more and more organic students — which is nice as a passive income, but will generally take a lot of months to compound into something considerable.

If you join the affiliate marketing program of Skillshare, you can earn a 40% commission of what students pay Skillshare when they first sign up.

(The commission is a one-time payment for each sign-up — not recurring)

Referrals get a free trial of 30 days before they’re automatically charged if they don’t cancel their account.

Lots to unpack here, so let’s get started right away.

With Skillshare, you have 3 categories that break into different niches:

1. Create category: The widest category, including animation, web development, film and video, photography, creative writing, and more

2. Build category: Including niches like freelance, entrepreneurship, leadership, and more

3. Thrive category: Only includes lifestyle and productivity niches

• Promoting passive income strategies
• About mathematics, physical and life science (i.e. mechanical engineering)
• About politics, religion, and spirituality
• About pet care (like training and grooming)
• About dating and relationships
• About dropshipping and multi-level marketing

So, as a student, you won’t find Skillshare courses about such topics, and as a teacher, you’ll need to make sure that you keep up with the guidelines to guarantee that your account is in good standing with Skillshare.

The nature of courses available on Skillshare has a general theme of being short — you’ll rarely find Skillshare courses that are 120 minutes or more — and to the point.

They also have a focus on growing the skill set of the student by doing rather than just being taught passively.

(Note: teachers are only allowed to promote themselves in the intro and conclusion sections of a course)

Switching things a bit to the viewing experience for students, they’ll have a video player with all of the class sections on the right in a clear format:

Students can watch the video lessons at their own pace.

What’s neat is that if students get bored or think a course isn’t a good fit for them, they can jump to the next course without worry as they only pay for the premium membership and get access to all courses rather than paying for each course.

Right under the course player, you can find 4 sections: about, reviews, discussions, and projects.

The latter 2 are pretty interesting as they represent a mini-community for that specific course and give students the ability to share their feedback in discussions and share their results in the projects tab.

The teacher of the course — and other registered teachers — can engage with their students and share feedback as well.

Skillshare users should keep an eye out for “Originals” — Skillshare premium classes crafted in partnership with Skillshare’s content team.

One last note to wrap up this section: not all Skillshare courses are high-quality courses — this is expected since anyone can teach on Skillshare for free.

• Starter: $159/year per user, up to 19 users
• Enterprise: custom pricing, for 20+ teams
• Revive: custom pricing, for 51+ teams

• 13% off Adobe Acrobat Pro
• 20% off Adobe Premiere Pro
• 15% off Adobe Creative Cloud
• 20% off annual subscription on Squarespace
• 20% off annual Canva Pro subscription
• 2-month free trial and 20% off for the next 6 months on FreshBooks

And more.

The idea behind these perks is to make the annual membership more appealing and give you more than what you were anticipating when signing up.

Granted, those perks won’t help you extract more value from all the online courses on the platform, but they’re definitely a nice touch.

Not too bad.

Let’s check out the Skillshare pricing page next.

Sike! There’s no normal pricing page on the Skillshare platform.

— What do you mean it doesn’t exist?

Remember when we said earlier that Skillshare's professional reputation got hurt?

Yeah, here’s how and why…

There was a time when a Skillshare free tier was available to students and provided access to a good number of free courses.

There were different monthly plans as well — and for the most part, things were flowing normally.

But then, something happened, and Skillshare decided to ditch all that.

Now, you can only sign up for a free trial first — where you must provide your card or PayPal info — which is followed by an annual subscription to the Skillshare Premium Membership plan.

Current info suggests the Premium Membership cost varies by region, but for the US and Canada, you can expect to pay $168/year which translates to $14/month.

Still, that doesn’t justify the bad ratings on Trustpilot, so what is it?

Well, if you combine the fact that you must provide your card info when signing up for the free trial with:

• Skillshare not making it easy for you to cancel your membership (users report they continuously get stalled for refunds until they’re no longer eligible for refunds or get charged again)
• The quality of some Skillshare courses is shaky (users report that a lot of Skillshare’s online classes can be learned on YouTube for free)
• When being a Skillshare teacher, you can easily break the guidelines without knowing and get your account removed (which means whatever Skillshare community you built is now gone for the most part since students prefer to stay on Skillshare)
• The fact that you can only sign up for the annual Skillshare Premium Membership which is recurring and you get no notice for renewal

You begin to understand why users are leaving such bad reviews.

So what do you do if you’re someone who:

• Is looking to start an online-course business
• Doesn’t want to sacrifice the ease of use that Skillshare provides
• Wants to control pricing, build an online learning community in an isolated safe space, and build a sustainable business
• Wants advanced marketing tools that’ll uplift their digital marketing efforts
• Doesn’t want to break the bank

• Website builder: Utilize top–quality templates with a drag-and-drop builder to create your online website in minutes (no code needed)
• Online courses: Upload, promote, and sell courses with all the features you want like quizzes, coupon codes, drip content, etc
• Email marketing: Tap into an industry that has an amazing ROI of $36 per $1 spent with the ability to send unlimited emails on all kinds of email campaigns targeting your students
• Affiliate program management: Gather a team of affiliates that’ll sell your products round the clock with your own affiliate program
• Ecommerce and memberships: Sell memberships, digital and physical products, and subscriptions
• Marketing automation: Deploy trigger-based actions and workflows to fully automate your online business

But why stop there?

Features like A/B testing, deadline funnels, evergreen webinars, and order bumps are all at your disposal.

Don’t just take our word for it — check out more than 1,000 reviews on Trustpilot with an amazing average rating of 4.9/5!

(If you have any questions, our amazing customer support team is ready to answer you 24/7 with an average response time of under 2 hours)

Our pricing is as clear as it gets, we have 4 scalable pricing plans:

• Free plan: $0/month

Free forever — get full access to the website builder and library of templates, a blog with unlimited blog posts, memberships, coupons, and run your own affiliate program.

Sell your first online course with 0% transaction fees.

Plus, get a free domain, a lifetime free SSL certificate, unlimited file storage, unlimited hosting, unlimited students, and the ability to send unlimited marketing emails.

• Startup plan: $27/month or $228/yearly (save 30%)
• Webinar plan: $47/month or $396/yearly (save 30%)
• Unlimited plan: $97/month or $828/yearly (save 30%)

The paid plans will give you raised limits on all the tools you have in the Free plan, and unlock new features like evergreen webinars.

Once you reach the Unlimited plan, you’ll have limitless access to our tools with no boundaries whatsoever — plus, hit the ground running with a 1-on-1 kickstart coaching session if you sign up for Unlimited.

You can also get a free migration for your entire online business — if you have one — when you sign up for the Unlimited plan or any annual billing plan.

If any of this sounds intriguing to you, go get your free account now and take our platform for a quick test run, we won’t ask for your card info!

Source: Giphy.com

Let’s have an honest view on things here.

If you’re planning on becoming a Skillshare teacher, here’s what you’ll experience:

• An easy process when signing up, smooth experience for launching courses/classes (as long you adhere to the guidelines), and get paid in a monthly cycle.
• As a beginner teacher, how many students watching your Skillshare classes will highly depend on your marketing efforts
• Joining the affiliate program of Skillshare is a near must as you’ll want to capitalize on the students you bring into the platform
• Little control over how much you get paid from your classes, and strict guidelines about their content
• You, as a Skillshare teacher, will hold the exclusive rights to your content and have the option to upload it elsewhere (just not for free)

At any point in time, you’ll have to deal with any changes in guidelines, pricing, payouts, and other aspects of Skillshare that you simply have no say in.

If you’re comfortable with such regulations, then go ahead and join Skillshare — but if not, then consider options like systeme.io, LearnWorlds, or the infamous Udemy before making the jump.

(You can always publish your courses on such platforms and then share them on Skillshare)

Now on the other side of the coin, if you want to become a Skillshare student, here’s what you can expect:

• You’re going to find some great classes, and you’re going to find not-so-great classes
• To pay once (annually) and get unlimited access to every Skillshare class available
• To engage with other Skillshare members in discussions and projects
• Courses with a focus on creative and practical skills
• Dealing with the poor billing practices of Skillshare as well as their lacking customer support
• Have 0 certificates for completing classes

Is Skillshare an accredited online learning platform?

What are chroma classes on Skillshare?

Is Skillshare worth it for teachers?

Does Skillshare offer free classes?

• Skillshare has a unique ecosystem that provides students and teachers with a different experience than most other online learning platforms.
• If you already have a following, then joining Skillshare as a teacher would be a solid chance to gain more income as it’s free to join
• On the flip side, if you’re just starting with no following, then joining Skillshare should resemble a way to earn some passive income (for the first year at least)
• If you’re a student, you’ll need to consider Skillshare’s poor billing practices before joining, make sure to carefully read everything on the billing page
• As a Skillshare student, you’ll have access to all classes and can learn at your own pace

And the cherry on top, if you’re interested in creating an online business (that resolves around courses or not), make sure to get your free systeme.io account today!

Cheerio!

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