How Much do EdTech Websites Earn?

Urban Moon recently helped an EdTech start-up with their website and I was amazed at how fast they started earning a decent revenue through the website. So, I thought it may be worthwhile to write an article about how much do EdTech websites make.

How much do edtech websites earn?

The annual revenue of top EdTech websites is as high as $200M for chegg.com and $115M for Coursera. But for small EdTech websites, it can take years of focused growth to reach there. For most, the earnings depend on factors like their modes of monetization, the quality of their content, and how aggressive is their sales strategy.

Most EdTech start-ups fail because they look at these big players in the EdTech industry and try to replicate their business models. They are in hope that they can get a piece of their revenue. However, there are a lot of factors that decide how much your EdTech website will actually make, and where will it stand compared to the market standards. Making your roadmap solely based on other EdTech businesses without understanding these factors in depth can be fatal for your business.

What decides your EdTech website’s actual earnings?

When we look at the most successful EdTech websites out there, their growth stories can look rather fascinating. Education is the main driver of the development of our civilization. These EdTech websites are playing a key role in the progress and thus make revenue in the proportion to the value that they create. Beyond just offering some pre-recorded courses, these websites have been true partners for those willing to learn and grow. And that’s the reason for their immense success.

For example, Chegg came up with the innovative idea of providing homework services for students. While Kahoot stands out by providing a fun game-like learning environment. Let’s see what are the annual revenues of these top EdTech providers out there.

But these top players have survived and grown over 10-15 years in the industry before they could make that kind of revenue. For most smaller EdTech websites, it may be a pipe dream. However, with the right user acquisition strategy, most start-up EdTech websites can quickly start generating decent revenue in a matter of a few months. But their survival, in the long run, is a different question altogether.
The most common method of acquiring students through these EdTech websites is via social media advertising and driving traffic through a sales funnel. They generate leads by offering a free product or a free webinar in return for the contact info. And then they pitch their courses or membership during the webinar or through email marketing. This technique is very effective if they use the right ad and funnel-building strategy. Once their funnels started clicking, they can quickly escalate the revenue by pouring more money into the ads.
Another effective sales technique is getting into collaborations with educational institutions or corporate offices. And then pitching your platform through direct reach outs. Most EdTech start-ups that succeed and start making good revenue in the initial few months use a very aggressive sales strategy.
Once you have the initial enrolments and start making revenue, what matters the most is the quality of content and programs that you offer. This is the core of your business. Your content speaks for itself. After the initial rounds of users acquired through aggressive marketing, word-of-mouth should start picking up and your service should do the marketing for you.
If your programs are poor in quality, your revenue will start dwindling after that initial pump. Negative word of mouth will spread and, in this era, no one buys anything without looking up online reviews.
Thus, content is the king and you may be able to push a good to a mediocre product with aggressive marketing, but not a poor product. The right mix of sales strategy and valuable programs should be enough to get your business off the ground.

EdTech revenue through a course fee

This is the simplest way to earn revenue from your EdTech website. You charge your users to be enrolled in individual courses. You can give access to the course for a limited period or for an unlimited period once enrolled. Also, you can allow them to go through the course once or multiple times. You can offer a certificate upon completion of the course and the clearance of the tests/assignments.

EdTech earnings through a subscription model

This is among the most common monetization model for EdTech websites. This can be offered in addition to the course fee model discussed above. You can offer a subscription to your website for a fixed period in return for a fee. During the subscription period, your subscribers have access to your entire website and all your courses and content.
You can also offer multiple levels, like Silver, Gold, and Platinum versions of subscription. For example, out of 25 courses on your site, the silver plan gives a subscription of 5 courses for a period of six months. The gold plan gives 15 and the platinum plan gives subscriptions for all 25 courses and so on.

EdTech earnings through a subscription model

You might look to collaborate with educational institutions or companies to offer training and courses to their students or employees. You can change the organization for that and they can charge their students in turn, or they can pay you from their employee training fund.
This can be an effective way to get enrolments because instead of putting efforts into reaching out to individual students, you are getting enrolments in bulk. The downside is that the decision-makers are not the same as those who take the courses, so there may be a lack of genuine interest. This may impact your business in the long run if not handled correctly.

Free courses with ad revenue

You can make your course available to all website visitors through a free subscription to your website. You can drive traffic through Search Engines or advertisements. When there are enough people subscribed to your platform, you can run ads and get paid by the ad platforms.
With good-quality traffic, there are a lot of other ways to generate revenue. Like you can sell affiliate products related to your courses and earn an affiliate commission. For example, if you have a course on photography, you can add an affiliate link to photographic equipment like filters, tripods, light kits, and reflectors as recommended products. If the students purchase the products using your affiliate link, you make an affiliate commission.

Free courses with an ‘upgrade’ model

Is EdTech business profitable?

There are lots of challenges that EdTech businesses face today, like cut-throat competition, and friction between the traditional methods of education and the tech-savvy methods. The primary focus of the EdTech websites should be creating real value which makes you stand out. Education is a noble cause, and profitability should be looked as the by-product of creating value.

Is EdTech business profitable?

Transformation is the very nature of our society and traditional education will slowly give way to EdTech, which will gradually become the mainstream. EdTech definitely has a lot of opportunities in the future and those offering the best value and the most cutting-edge platforms will win the game.