Is selling online courses still profitable?

Short answer: yes, but not the way the ads describe it. The average course instructor earns a few hundred dollars a month; the top earners make five figures. The difference is almost entirely distribution — having someone to sell to — not course quality.

A few years ago, selling online courses looked like the perfect business: record once, sell forever, keep nearly everything. The ads showed ordinary people replacing their salaries with a single course. Some of that was true, once, for some people. Then everyone made a course, the marketplaces filled up, and the economics settled into something less exciting and more honest.

Here is where the money actually is now.

The Udemy reality

Udemy is where most beginners start, because it is free to join and brings its own traffic. That traffic comes at a price — several prices, actually.

If a student buys your course through your own promotion — your coupon link, your audience — you keep about 97% of the revenue. If Udemy brings the student through its marketplace, you keep around 37 to 50%, depending on the sale type. And Udemy discounts aggressively: courses listed at $89 routinely sell for $12 to $15 during promotions, which is most of the time. Your revenue share is a percentage of the discounted price, not the list price.

The averages tell the story. Typical Udemy instructors earn roughly $1 to $10 per student, and the average instructor makes somewhere around $245 to $450 a month. Top instructors — the ones with many courses, strong reviews, and their own marketing — can clear $5,000 a month or more. But most courses never get close to those numbers, because most courses have no audience behind them and no marketing beyond Udemy's algorithm.

Udemy also owns the customer relationship. Students are Udemy's customers, not yours. You cannot email them, you cannot upsell them, and Udemy can change the revenue terms whenever it wants. It is a good place to validate a course idea and earn while you learn. It is a bad place to build a business you control.

The Teachable path: your course, your rules

Teachable, Thinkific, and similar platforms flip the model: instead of a marketplace cut, you pay a monthly subscription and keep most of what you earn. Basic plans run around $29 to $39 a month with small transaction fees; higher tiers remove the fees entirely. You set your own prices — $99, $299, $997, whatever the market bears — run your own promotions, own your student list, and build your own brand.

The trade-off is total: you get control, and you get all of the marketing work. There is no marketplace sending you students. If you have no audience and no traffic strategy, a Teachable school earns exactly zero, no matter how good the course is.

The numbers reflect this split. Paid-plan course sellers on Thinkific average around $1,200 a month; top Teachable schools report around $2,500 a month; the ceiling for established creators with real audiences runs into five figures monthly and beyond. But the floor is $0 minus the subscription fee, and plenty of people live on that floor.

The pattern that works best is the hybrid: start on Udemy to validate the course and collect reviews with minimal risk, then migrate your winners to your own platform where you keep the margin and own the customers. Beginners often do it backwards — building on Teachable first with no audience — and wonder why nothing sells. The course was never the hard part. The audience was.

Why most courses earn nothing

Strip away the platform debate and the uncomfortable truth is simple: most online courses fail for the same reason most products fail. Nobody knows they exist.

Course creation marketplaces are full of well-made courses with twelve students. The instructor did the hard work — outlining, recording, editing — and skipped the harder work: finding the people with the problem the course solves. A course is not a business. A course plus distribution is a business, and distribution is 80% of the work.

This is why the "make money with courses" advice that focuses on recording quality and curriculum design misses the point. Students do not buy production value; they buy outcomes. "Learn Python" is a commodity with ten thousand competitors. "Automate your agency's client reporting with Python in 30 days" is a product with a buyer. The courses that still sell well share one trait: they promise a specific transformation to a specific person, and they are sold where that person already pays attention.

Saturation is real but misunderstood. General topics — productivity, beginner coding, "how to start a business" — are brutally competitive, and a new entrant there is fighting established courses with thousands of reviews. But niches are not saturated; they are underserved. The narrower and more outcome-specific the course, the less competition and the higher the price it can command. The market is not full of courses. It is full of generic courses.

Pricing: the race to the bottom is optional

Course pricing is where beginners leave the most money on the table, usually by copying Udemy's discount culture.

On marketplaces, you have limited control — Udemy's promotions will sell your $89 course for $14 whether you like it or not, and your revenue share follows the sale price down. This is the hidden cost of marketplace distribution: you are competing in an environment that trains buyers to never pay full price.

On your own platform, pricing is a strategic choice, and the honest data favors charging more, not less. A $29 course needs hundreds of buyers to matter; a $299 course needs dozens. Higher prices also select for committed students — the ones who finish, get results, and leave the reviews that sell the next hundred copies. Cheap courses attract bargain hunters who never open them.

The most profitable structure for most creators is tiered: a low-priced entry product or free lead magnet that builds trust, a core course at a real price ($99 to $499), and a premium tier — cohort, coaching, certification — at $1,000 plus. The tiers do two jobs: they capture different willingness to pay, and they make the middle tier look reasonable. Almost nobody buys the top tier, and that is fine. It is there to make the middle tier the obvious choice.

What still works in 2026

So where is the actual opportunity, now that the gold rush is over?

First, courses tied to outcomes, not topics. "Excel for finance interviews" beats "Excel basics." Buyers pay for the result — the job, the promotion, the solved problem — and outcome-based courses justify premium prices because the buyer can do the ROI math.

Second, courses for professionals, sold to employers or expensed by employees. B2B course buyers are less price-sensitive than consumers and churn less. A course that helps a team do its job is a business expense, not a personal purchase, and business expenses have bigger budgets.

Third, the cohort and community layer. Recorded video is a commodity; live cohorts, feedback, and peer groups are not. Creators who wrap their course in a time-bound cohort with real interaction can charge multiples of the self-paced price, because what they are really selling is accountability and access.

Fourth, updating. Most courses die slowly as their content goes stale — software changes, tactics expire, screenshots age. The creators who treat their course as a living product, updating it yearly, compound reviews and rankings while competitors' courses quietly rot. Maintenance is unglamorous and it is the moat.

When not to make a course

There is a question the course industry never asks, so let us ask it: when should you not make a course at all?

If you have no audience, no traffic source, and no plan to build either — do not make a course. Make content first, or find someone else's audience to borrow: guest posts, podcast appearances, partnerships with people who already have the buyers. A course with no distribution is a product in a warehouse with no road leading to it.

If the outcome you teach takes years, not weeks — do not promise it in a course. Courses sell transformations buyers can imagine completing. "Become a data scientist" is a career change wearing a course costume; it will refund at brutal rates because no video series delivers a career. Sell the first step, honestly framed, or sell nothing.

And if you are making the course primarily because someone sold you the dream of passive income — pause. The passive part comes after the very active part: validating, building an audience, marketing for months, updating for years. The people earning passively from courses are the ones who worked non-passively for a long time first. There is no shortcut around that sequence, only expensive attempts to skip it.

Knowing when not to build is its own kind of business skill. It is certainly cheaper than learning it from a failed launch.

The honest bottom line

Selling online courses is still profitable the way most real businesses are profitable: for people who understand the actual game being played.

The game is not "make a course." It is "find people with an expensive problem, earn their trust, and sell them the transformation." The course is the product; the audience is the business. Everyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a course about selling courses — which, come to think of it, tells you everything about where the real money in this market has always been.

Start where the students are, validate before you build big, own your customer list as soon as the math allows, and price for the outcome, not the hours of video. The gold rush ended. What is left is better: a real market, with real rules, where doing the unglamorous work still gets paid.