Howdy, squiders. Happy Groundhog Day. Someday I should probably watch the movie, but today is apparently not that day.
(Here in Colorado we have Flatiron Freddy. He’s a taxidermied yellow-bellied marmot. The park rangers put a top hat on him.)
(He saw his shadow too, so six more weeks of winter. Which is fine! We need all the moisture we can get.)
(I guess he didn’t see his shadow. He’s dead.)
Anyway, let’s talk about SkillShare. As you guys probably know if you’ve been about for a while, I’ve been teaching on SkillShare since 2019. I put a couple writing classes up a year, and it’s been giving me a small amount of income every month, normally between $20 and $70.
Not amazing, for sure, especially since it does take quite a bit of work to get a class ready, between planning it out, creating it, editing the videos, and posting it, but enough that it’s generally been worth it. Plus I’ve been getting a fair amount of followers, who have come over onto other platforms from there.
Well, a few months ago, SkillShare decided they were going to start paying based on engagement (how many reviews, etc.) rather than number of minutes of class watched (which is how payment has traditionally been paid out). Between August and December, my income dropped by 75% despite the number of minutes being watched remaining the same.
And I got an email last week that they were closing three of my classes because they didn’t meet the new engagement requirements. Nothing I could do about it.
(And, annoyingly, two of those classes were actually doing really well for the month! And I feel bad, cuz what if people were in the middle of the classes when SkillShare closed them? I tried to warn people beforehand but I don’t know how many people actually saw my warning.)
You guys know how I feel about setting goals that rely on other people. No matter how many times I ask, I can’t make people leave reviews, or watch other classes, or recommend my classes to other people. To make payment and, indeed, if a class can even stay on the site, so dependent on what other people are doing is frustrating, to say the least.
(Yes, I realize that the payment based on minutes watched also relies on other people, but it was a they did, or they didn’t, sort of thing. Nobody was getting their classes closed off of that.)
What it really feels like is that they’re trying to drive the smaller and/or newer teachers off the website.
It was already pretty hard to be found by the algorithms if you weren’t one of the celebrity classes SkillShare pays for and advertises, or if you hadn’t been on the site forever and built up a major following. But I was/have been getting consistently good reviews, and it seems like people have found the classes helpful.
So, what now?
From what I understand, there’s nothing to stop me from just making a new version of the class and putting everything right back up. (I even emailed and asked, and all the dude said was that the new classes would be held to the same engagement standards.) Of course, the new class will lose any projects and reviews, and no doubt it will be removed from people’s courses, which means I can’t contact those people anymore.
Also, it will make the class EVEN HARDER to find through the algorithms.
Is it worth it?
I haven’t decided. Maybe. You get some leeway on engagement stuff for a bit before they would pull the class again. But in the four years that I’ve been on SkillShare, they’ve consistently revamped how pay works, and it’s always worse for the teachers. Is it worth it to stay on a site that so obviously does not want me?
I could move the classes to another platform, or even offer them here on the website. But they are geared toward SkillShare, so I would need to edit or even re-record some of them. And I would need to do research to figure where/how to do all that.
It’s all a major pain in the ass. Part of me just wants to give the whole thing up, but then I’d have to go in and edit the back matter in the Writers’ Motivation books and workbooks to remove the SkillShare link too.
There’s not really any good answers here.
What do you think, Squiders? Have any experience with teaching on the web?
