THE DARK SIDE OF SKILLSHARE: YouTubers sold out.
Basically every infotainment video on YouTube pitches Skillshare as some sort of godly resource.
Do you want to learn how to code? Skillshare. Do you want to learn how to animate? Skillshare. Do
you want to just learn how to learn? Skillshare. At this point, Skillshare isn’t even seen as
a learning platform. It’s seen as the thing productive people do. Clearly, Skillshare has
done a phenomenal job when it comes to branding, marketing, and positioning. But, the same cannot
be said about the platform itself. Skillshare is not only a mediocre platform, it’s a negative
platform, and that’s not my opinion. That’s the overwhelming opinion of everyone who ended up
using the platform. On Trust Pilot, for example, Skillshare has a horrendous average rating of 1.7
stars with 32% of reviews being 1 star ratings. And that’s despite a massive upward skew from
YouTubers. For example, let’s say I’m watching Ali Abdaal, who is an exceptional YouTuber, and I hear
him pitch his Skillshare course. If I go checkout his Skillshare course, I’ll probably get exactly
what I’m looking for which may lead to a glowing 5 star review. But, this isn’t really a testament
as to how good Skillshare is as a platform. It’s really just a review of Ali Abdaal or Nathaniel
Drew or Marques Brownlee. If it weren’t for these select YouTubers, Skillshare’s average rating
would probably be closer to that of PayPal. But, why are people so upset in the first place? Well,
aside from a history of slimy sales practices, Skillshare simply doesn’t offer the value that
YouTubers say it does. At the end of the day, it’s really just a worse version of YouTube
that costs $32 per month or a $168 per year. Instead of getting the monthly subscription,
you can get a YouTube premium family plan for 6 people and have $9 per month to spare. Or,
you could get a Premium Netflix subscription for 4 people and still save $12 per month to spare. So,
here’s the truth about Skillshare and why it doesn’t live up to all the social media hype.
WORSE THAN YOUTUBE: Likely the biggest complaint
about Skillshare is that it’s not actually better than YouTube. At best, it’s able to match YouTube,
and this is true for basically any topic that you want to learn about. Take Swift coding for
example. If you’re not familiar with Swift, it’s the coding language that you have to use for
native iOS development, so it’s a pretty relevant skill. Yet, if you search up Swift on Skillshare,
you don’t get much more than 50 results. And out of these results, only 3 of them are actual
courses on Swift that last 30 plus hours. Most of the results are just introduction or
feature videos. And the remaining results? Well, they often don’t even have anything to do with
Swift. We have a video about the principles of remote work, a video about organizing your life,
a video about captivation marketing, and a video about Adobe illustrator. In fact,
26 out of the 54 results, didn’t have anything to do about Swift or iOS development at all. But,
at least there’s three good courses right. Those alone should be worth a subscription right? Well,
that’s what you might think until you take a look at what YouTube has to offer. CodeWithChris alone
has 536 videos all about iOS development and many of these are over 3 hours long. And his videos
don’t just teach you how to write a function or class either. They teach you how to make
a feature completely functional from beginning to end. How to make a custom login page using Google
Authentication. How to link up your iOS app to a cloud database. How to make API requests to
implement external functionaily into your apps. CodeWithChris’ channel literally has more content
about Swift than the entirety of Skillshare. And he’s just one channel. There’s dozens more like
iOS Academy. iOS Academy has a total of 703 videos covering everything that Chris covers,
but he takes it even one step further. He has these massive series where he builds full on
apps from beginning to end. For example, he’s currently making a Rick & Morty app completely
from scratch that has a total of 45 parts. This series alone has over 10 hours of content. We also
have Sean Allen, Paul Hudson, Code Pro, Rebeloper, Lets Build That App, and so many more in just the
little niche of Swift. This same argument can be made for learning Javascript or animation or
motion graphics or cooking or basically any skill you can think of. But none of this is
really surprising. YouTube is the biggest video hosting platform in the world. On Skillshare,
there’s a total of 30,000 courses. On YouTube, there’s 30,000 hours of content being uploaded
every single hour. So, naturally, YouTube will have to most indepth, most comprehensive videos on
any niche. And ironically, this is true for even the YouTubers that pitch Skillshare. Ali Abdaal,
for example has a total of maybe 30 hours of content on Skillshare. Meanwhile, on YouTube,
he has hundreds of hours worth of content. We should also note that Skillshare doesn’t have any
sort of vetting process in terms of who can post content. So, basically anyone can post content
on Skillshare just like on YouTube meaning that the content on Skillshare isn’t necessarily more
credible, valuable, or informative. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of extraordinarily talented
teachers on YouTube itself. Most of the coding channels, for example, or run by former or even
current FAANG software engineers. So, even if we take the cost of Skillshare out of the equation,
you’re still better off using YouTube. Not only does Skillshare lack any sort of distinguishing
factor, but YouTube destroys Skillshare in terms of the amount and depth of content.
SNAKEOIL SALESMEN: Given Skillshare’s glowing reputation
on YouTube, you would think that they’re experts at public relations and branding. And in terms of
customer acquisition they are, but if we take a look at customer experience, it’s a wholenother
story. Honestly, this is pretty surprising. Though I don’t think that Skillshare is worth the money,
I would’ve expected Skillshare to be on top of their game when it comes to customer satisfaction,
but reading through these trust pilot reviews, that doesn’t seem to be the case. You know how
YouTubers always pitch Skillshare as this risk free service. You can just try it for 30 days
and cancel with no strings attached. This idea is plastered all over their website as well. Well,
in reality, the trial process isn’t what it seems. D Stevens, for example, claims that
he was charged for a one year subscription after just 2 weeks of trial. At first, Skillshare didn’t
even reply to any of his messages. But, even when they did reply, all they had to say was:
“you have 14 days to cancel from the day you sign up!” This likely seems confusing at first glance,
but when you read the fine print, it all makes sense. Basically, you do indeed get one month
for free. But, you get charged for the following 12 month period before the trial month even ends.
This is of course stated in the fine print. Cancel before the trial ends to avoid being charged,
but if we’re being honest, this is rather misleading. The average user probably hears
about Skillshare as this godly learning platform on YouTube that you can try for one month,
completely for free. Then, they come to this page, and they see all this advertising about
the one free month. So, they decide to give it a shot only to be charged $168 two weeks later.
And this doesn’t seem to be an honest marketing mistake either. Given the number of complaints
on TrustPilot, I’m sure their help center has been overloaded with confused customers. Yet,
they stick to the same slimy sales tactic. Worse, it doesn’t seem like they try to make it up to
customers either. Sam, for example, missed the refund window for an annual subscription
by just 4 days and he was refused any sort of refund. Even if you do get a refund though,
you’re not out of the woods just yet because you could be charged one year later. Take Roberta’s
daughter for instance. One year ago, she signed up for a free trial. She too was
surprised when she was suddenly charged an annual subscription. Fortunately, she was able to contact
customer support and get a refund and cancel her membership. But, one year later, she was
charged for a renewal. When she contacted customer support again, they told her that they can’t issue
a refund because they have a 1 refund policy which she had already cashed in on. They even sent her
a quote from her original email thread showing that they had issued a refund. The funny part
was that this quote also contained evidence that she had asked to cancel one year ago. But, when
this was pointed out to them, they simply stopped replying. All of this is truly quite a shame for a
company that’s so good customer acquisition, but this is simply the harsh reality of Skillshare.
CONTENT CREATOR PAY: If all of that wasn’t
already bad enough, well it gets even worse. Skillshare
not only has subpar content that costs a fortune, but they’re also preying on
YouTubers’ most loyal audience. When it comes to Skillshare, I bet that a significant portion
of people who sign up aren’t even trying to learn. They simply want to support a creator
and see more content from said creator similar to something like Patreon. But, unlike Patreon,
most of the subscription fee doesn’t even end up going to the creators. Patreon only keeps
5 to 12% of the fees. Skillshare, on the other hand, keeps wait for it 70%. This is completely
unacceptable when you consider that YouTube itself only takes 45%, and they’re content is available
to end users for free. Meanwhile, Skillshare is charging their users a $168 per year which
is again even more than YouTube premium. Yet, they’re only sharing 30% of it with the actual
creators. This is stark contrast to virtually everyone else in the space. Take Teachable,
for example. These guys have become the go to place for hosting courses, and guess what? They
have a free plan for creators that supports unlimited students. This does come along with
a 10% fee per sale, but creators can get this per sale fee down to 0 by upgrading tiers. Even
Netflix, who people seem to hate, is extremely generous with their revenue sharing. Much of the
main Stranger Things cast for example was paid a quarter million per episode. If all of these
other businesses are able to stay afloat without taking anywhere close to 70% of the revenue,
there’s no reason for Skillshare to be taking 70%. It appears to me that Skillshare figured out
that many YouTubers have extremely loyal audiences that are willing to pay up large amounts of money
to get more content and theoretically support their favorite creators. Instead of creating
a smooth platform to enable such support though, Skillshare has decided to cash in for themselves.
THE TRUTH ABOUT SKILLSHARE: In the end, YouTube is filled with glowing
endorsements of Skillshare, but much of this is just due to Skillshare’s smart positioning and
branding. Behind the scenes though, Skillshare doesn’t accomplish anything notably great.
In fact, they have multiple notable negative attributes. They have pretty shady free trial,
renewal, and cancellation policies, and they only share 30% of their revenue with creators. But,
even putting those attributes aside, the bottom line is that Skillshare just
isn’t worth it. You’re basically getting a discount version of YouTube that you have
to pay exorbitant fees for. If any other company was offering this same service,
they would’ve gotten shredded by the community. But, because Skillshare is such a big player
within the sponsorship scene, no YouTuber wants to speak out against them. And audiences are led
to believe that Skillshare truly is some sort of exceptional service that’s worth a premium price,
when in reality that’s just not the case. But, that’s just what I think. Have you
ever used Skillshare? Comment that down below. Also, drop a like if you appreciate the honest
take on Skillshare. And of course, consider checking out our discord community to suggest
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