Education & Knowledge Creation

Udemy systematically reduced instructor revenue shares from 25% to 20% in January 2024, further decreasing to 17.5% in January 2025, and to 15% by January 2026. Despite increasing its own gross profit by 17% in 2024, the platform paid instructors $30 million less. The top 1% of instructors capture over 50% of total earnings, while the bottom 50% share just 1%. The average instructor earns $3,306 per year, with 75% making less than $1,000 annually.

Adjunct professors earned an average of just $4,093 per three-credit course section in 2023-24, a 3.9% decrease from pre-pandemic levels. An adjunct teaching a full load of six courses annually earns approximately $24,558, well below the federal poverty guideline of $31,200 for a family of four. Contingent instructors comprise nearly 48.6% of the academic workforce, yet 25% earn less than $25,000 annually and approximately 38% rely on government assistance programs including SNAP and Medicaid.

Skillshare's repeated overhauls of its teacher payment model — shifting from a teacher fund to revenue share to watch-time-based calculations — have created chronic income instability for instructors. Teachers reported 50–70% earnings drops following payment model changes, with many seeing their monthly income halved overnight. Despite allocating roughly 20–30% of subscription revenue to teachers, the frequent restructuring makes it impossible for creators to forecast income or plan sustainable careers on the platform.

The median salary for curriculum designers decreased from $85,786 in 2023 to $85,617 in 2025, a stagnation that fails to keep pace with inflation. Entry-level instructional design positions range from $67,000 to $81,000, but many new professionals settle for significantly less — those earning under $50,000 are considered definitively underpaid. The field suffers from a persistent gap between the complexity of the work (designing learning architectures, assessments, and multimedia content) and the compensation offered, particularly in education and nonprofit sectors.

Wyzant retains a flat 25% platform fee on all tutor earnings, with a minimum hourly rate of just $10. While the platform once allowed tutors to progress to retaining 95% of their rate over time, the current fixed 25% commission offers no loyalty reward for long-term educators. Tutors must also compete in an increasingly crowded marketplace while bearing all costs of professional development, materials, and self-employment taxes (an additional 15.3% of net income), making effective take-home pay significantly lower than the posted rate.

Udemy's catalog expanded by 54,000 new courses in 2024, reaching a historical peak of over 250,000 courses, with AI tools accelerating course creation and a larger pool of instructors further diluting per-instructor revenue. Only 1% of instructors earn a full-time income (over $50,000/year), while the average revenue per course has fallen below $100. The platform's pivot to a subscription model has further deprioritized individual course discovery, burying independent creators under an ever-growing catalog.

The proposed FY 2026 federal budget would consolidate 18 formula and competitive grants currently funded at more than $6 billion annually, devastating arts education funding for the 2026-27 school year. The budget proposes eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts entirely, which has already canceled more than $27 million in grants, many supporting arts education programs. This defunding erodes the infrastructure that connects creative educators to institutions, reducing the number of paid positions available and forcing workshop leaders and teaching artists to compete for a shrinking pool of opportunities.

Telegram piracy led to an estimated Rs 2,000 crore (roughly $240+ million) in annual revenue loss for India's e-learning sector alone, with over 6,000 piracy groups on Telegram, of which 1,000+ groups have more than 10,000 viewers each. Pirated copies of entire video courses are circulated in groups with tens of thousands of students. Even a single pirated link shared in a Telegram group can reach thousands, destroying the revenue model for individual course creators who may have invested months building their material.