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Comment by dhawalhs | Hacker News Reader

If anybody is interested, last year I wrote a detailed report [1] on Coursera's monetization journey. I describe the steps and experiments the company did to go from zero to $100+ million in revenues (and potentially over $200 million this year).

In my opinion, of all the online education providers Coursera grew the most during the pandemic. They also reacted well by offering free certificates and giving free access to their catalog to college students [2].

My company Class Central [3], a Tripadvisor for online education grew a lot during the pandemic. In the second half of March, we received 5 million visitors, almost a 20x increase. Though no longer the peak, we are still at 2.5X of what we were before.

1. https://www.classcentral.com/report/coursera-monetization-re...

2. https://www.classcentral.com/report/mooc-providers-response-...

3. https://www.classcentral.com/

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> $100+ million in revenues (and potentially over $200 million this year).

Are they profitable?

I think their B2C business is profitable, but online degrees and B2B isn't.

I have a friend who's an employee there. From what I gather both the B2C and B2B models are profitable.

Good to know.

Makes sense since B2B is an extension of their B2C catalog. But they seem to be hiring a lot of sales people, so I was not sure if they are profitable or not.

In my experience, large sales team = pushing hard into B2B

Not a huge fan of ads, but I would accept non-obtrusive ads in lieu of paying the certification fee if they wanted a traditional publisher revenue stream.

I wonder if you could support a traditional in-person university education with employer and vendor adverts at the start of each lecture!

Sure, if you had ten thousand students per lecture.

The idea of watching ads in order to get an education seems like the start of some dystopia nightmare. Seeing kids in school buses emblazoned with McDonalds ads is bad enough.

Can you imagine wanting to check your answers to the work you just did and having to watch a commercial to do that. Probably reach a point where they'll require camera access to track your eyes to make sure you're paying attention.

Does Coursera provide an education?

I don’t mean to be a blowhard.

But if you’re going to argue that it does, that you’d send your kids to CourseraU, you are conflating the aesthetic experience of learning with actual learning.

Much like many video games, quite successful ones actually, reenact the aesthetics of work but are in no way shape or form actual work. This may be important for why they are an appealing product but don’t go and argue (as hardly anyone does) that League of Legends is work. That’s why it would also sound absurd to say Coursera is learning.

The University of Phoenix people are total shitbags. Charging for some shit certificate is a complete shitbag move. Just because it’s online doesn’t make it special.

In that sense, yes, expect that ads will happen. I think you’re onto something.

I had a really good experience with Coursera... In fact it's where I learned to code.

I don't think I understand the comparison to video games. Yes, sometimes games will simulate work, but that's not at all like online education simulating education.

It has its issues, but motivated students can and do learn online.

I like Coursera and I'm quite experienced. Their courses don't enforce the rigor of a college course; practically anyone could pass them without reviewing the content through sheer brute force. So I feel like the certificates themselves are worthless, but the actual content is good enough to learn from if you put forth the effort.

Huh...? Coursera provides video courses, readings, and quizzes. Is your assertion that it is impossible to learn from written material or videotaped lectures?

It all depends on alternative. $100 is a lot of money for a kid in India, if the same kid can earn the degree while watching ads I think it does a great service to poor people because the alternative is not learning.

Alternative to a problematic suboptimal (according to you) school experience is not a perfect school experience but no-school experience.

American public schooling system has become a jobs program for adults.

If $100 is a lot for someone then they surely won’t be valued much as ad audience.

Spotify do regional pricing, the cost in India is about a tenth of what it costs in the United States. I don't know if Coursera do the same but I don't see why they couldn't.

Coursera has a financial aid program for this, and it is easy to avail if one is a student from developing countries or low income households. edX has a similar program as well, where the price will get reduced to around 1/10th of original cost. In Coursera, the price is completely discounted and you can do the course for free. See: https://learner.coursera.help/hc/en-us/articles/209819033-Ap...

Hello, I wanted to let you know that your HN account is probably banned as most of your comments are dead and the only reason I can reply to this one is that a mod undeleted it.

I don't see how that could bring in anywhere close the different prices for certifications.

Yeah, the service is roughly $50/mo. There's no way ads could touch that. It might work in the future to monetize the older, "long-tail" content that is less relevant than it used to be. But even then, they'd probably have to cut the content, especially for cloud-related certifications, because A) the feature may have changed, B) I bet those labs get expensive.

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