After Six Years, Time To End My Online Courses

Photo by Matt Botsford

Back in 2014, when I started this blog, my goal was to get enough passive income to pay for a Tesla. That goal, of course, changed, but passive income is still a great thing to have and to strive for.

One of my passive income streams has been from teaching online courses. These are courses I created and recorded, uploaded to a couple instructional sites, and then collect money from each month from students who enroll. It's a pretty sweet deal.

Sadly, I think it's time to end those courses. The courses are getting a bit long in the tooth. I made four of them, all about a database product from Microsoft called SQL Server. That's what I've built my career on and what I know, so it made sense to teach others about it.

Why I'm Taking Them Down

Like all technology products, SQL Server is evolving and changing. My courses were made with the latest version of SQL Server at the time - SQL Server 2012. Since then, versions 2014, 2016, and 2017 have been released. SQL 2019 is due to be released soon. While the information in my courses is still applicable, the graphical interface has changed and new features have been added. In short, someone watching my courses today would think the videos are old. And they are. The first one was made 6 years ago.

I've seen my sales start to drop off. The last couple of months have only seen 10 - 15 new students per month. New reviews are rare - maybe 1 or 2 per month. I've come to the conclusion that I need to either make new courses with updated content and using the latest software version or take the old courses down before people start leaving bad reviews because the software shown is old.

Making the courses was a lot of work. Hours and hours writing the scripts, creating demos, then a couple of weekends recording it all. I'm not really looking forward to doing that again and, truthfully, I don't have the burning desire to any more. I already have my Tesla. My wife and I are in a much better place financially than we were six years ago. My passive income stream is now mainly from stock dividends.

Another (small) factor that contributed to my decision to take the courses down was paperwork. Neither of the sites that sell my courses provide tax forms at the end of the year. This means I have to manually track all the payments they make to report them on my taxes. Further, the IRS considers this self-employment income, meaning I also have to pay the employer share of Social Security and Medicare taxes as well as my own share. For a while, I was also making quarterly estimated tax payments. When I was making $200 to $400 per month, I was fine with this. Now however, the amounts are so small, it's more trouble than it's worth. I've got too many other demands for my time.

My courses were available on two platforms: Udemy.com and Skillshare.com. Udemy provides lifetime access for students who have purchased courses, so I can't actually delete my courses there. Instead, I'm setting my courses to private. This means they will no longer show up in any search results. The only way new students can enroll is if I give them a link.

Udemy Almost Final Results

So how much money did these courses make for me? Was it worth it?  Without a doubt, yes.

As I have pointed out before, my total initial investment was a $149 high quality microphone (which is even cheaper now). All the other tools I used, video editing software, graphics programs, etc. were free. I either used freeware products or program such as PowerPoint, which I already owned.

From that initial $149 investment, on Udemy, I have earned over $11,000!

My total figure should go up another $120 or so because there are still two months Udemy has not paid me for yet. (They pay one month behind because they offer students a 30 day money back guarantee.) So all in all, I'll have made about $11,500. Not too shabby.

As the above graphic shows, I had almost two thousand students and my average rating was 4.4 out of 5 stars. I've helped students in 81 different countries:

That's something I'm proud of.

SkillShare Almost Final Results

I earn money differently on SkillShare. Whereas a student on Udemy pays for each course and a portion of each student's purchase price goes to me, a SkillShare student pays a monthly subscription fee and I am paid for each minute of my courses a student views. So on Udemy, earning money is all about recruiting new students. On SkillShare, it's all about getting students to actually watch your courses.

Based on this income model, I'm going to leave my courses up on SkillShare since I don't have to rely on attracting new students to earn money. Because students pay a monthly fee for all content on the site, I don't think any students would leave a bad review if my courses seem out of date. After all, it's more or less free to them with their monthly subscription. In fact, user reviews seems unimportant on SkillShare. As you can see below, I've only had one review out of almost 300 students.

I've talked with SkillShare's tech support and it is unclear to me that they will actually pay out minutes viewed once I deactivate my account. So I don't really see a downside to just letting the courses stay up.

My courses have not been on SkillShare as long as they have on Udemy. I think I first posted them in November 2017 and I've made $633 so far.

SkillShare was never meant to replace or outperform Udemy. It was simply a new platform I heard about and, since I already had all the courses created, I just thought I'd put them up there as well and try to get some more money from them. More money for zero extra work.

The End Of An Era

I'm somewhat sad to be taking these courses down. It was crazy fun getting money each month for doing basically nothing. I remember sitting on a beach in Hawaii four years ago and getting email notifications of money coming in. It's a great feeling :-)

I'm still not sure if I'll make new courses. If I do, they most likely won't be about computer-related topics. I've pondered making some financial-related ones, but can't seem to come up with any good ideas. Does anyone have any suggestions?