Will people pay to learn things they could otherwise learn for free?

[Rarehelge]

I have a few ideas of a course i could make, but this is a skill that is easy to learn completely for free.
Will people pay you for something you could otherwise find free on youtube, facebook, etc?

I would never pay for a course which i could get for free, but i see there is a rising demand in this subject. Most of the competirors who were selling courses, were genuinly pretty bad nad old school.

 

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[Maxkaz]

I have a few ideas of a course i could make, but this is a skill that is easy to learn completely for free.
Will people pay you for something you could otherwise find free on youtube, facebook, etc?

I would never pay for a course which i could get for free, but i see there is a rising demand in this subject. Most of the competirors who were selling courses, were genuinly pretty bad nad old school.

Went and looked through all the 50+ courses I bought on Udemy with one question - could I learn this for free on YouTube? In each instance the answer was yes. But I still bought them.

Unless you host in-person practical sessions there is no way you can make a course so unique that everyone will want to buy it. But people still buy them. Go figure why. For me it is convenience and size/structure. On YouTube you rarely see 30 hours of content that is convenient to consume and structured. No-one on YouTube wants to upload low-performing videos, so every educating content there usually degrades to bullet-like "follow me doing this" tutorials.

 

[SnowLava]

I have a few ideas of a course i could make, but this is a skill that is easy to learn completely for free.
Will people pay you for something you could otherwise find free on youtube, facebook, etc?

I would never pay for a course which i could get for free, but i see there is a rising demand in this subject. Most of the competirors who were selling courses, were genuinly pretty bad nad old school.

If people didnt consume paid courses, platforms like Udemy wouldn't exist.

Here are the primary reasons that I believe people buy courses-
1. Structure (as explained by @Maxkaz )
2. It gives a person more motivation to complete the course because one has actually bought it with their own money.
3. Gives a person the 'environment' to learn. It allows you to ask questions directly to the instructor, and most courses have some form of forum to communicate with other learners as well.
4. Projects, personalized feedbacks etc.


Although what I see is that in the platforms in which you can sell courses, only the top-quality courses get 90% of the sales. This includes the top 3-5 courses in a niche. You can see this yourself. So if you plan on making a paid course, your quality needs to be really good. Plus if you have some form of social proof, like if you can show your works, projects in the niche, then the people would be more likely to buy.

But at the end, just swing the bat man. Even if you end up making 0 sales you would learn valuable skills in the process. Dont spend a lot of time overanalysing imo.

 

[OverByte]

I usually look for products that are paid, including with learning.

"Free" usually means I'm just paying with more time or more irritation (ie ad supported) and is often a red flag for me that what's on offer isn't that valuable. I do appreciate free trials though.

For paid learning specifically I need to see
1 - coherent structure
2 - a clear reason why i should trust the teacher(s)
3 - i need to see a sample of the content, if the teacher is hard to understand or i find them slow or annoying then i pass. I like people to get to the point.

You get both of those I'll pay if its something i want to learn.

I'm personally not interested in assignments and having access to direct feedback isn't a deal breaker but this is a big value add and would increase the perceived value of the course a lot.

Courses I've bough have been on Udemy and I used to have a Coursera subscription. In each case i followed 1,2,3 above. I've also purchased Udemy courses for my team related to improving specific skills. Not all are business related either, ive purchased courses on Udemy related to drawing which is something I just like to do and wanted to get better at. I could definitely find these on Youtube but there is so much noise and it's unclearly organized so i just found some Udemy courses.

 

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[Andy Black]

Some people value their time more than their money. They often don't trust or want free.

 

[DonyaSze]

People equate cost with value. If this course is teaching something that I can learn for free somewhere else, it must be better than the free course then right? The answer is usually yes.

 

[Trismigistus]

College lol

 

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[Stargazer]

People will always pay for an effective way to learn anything. eg Driving lessons they could just figure out themselves, art classes, language classes, dance classes and University as mentioned above.

Companies pay huge amounts of money to put staff on training programmes.

Look at this for example. £4800 + VAT for 2 x half day sessions, so approx 8 hours of live learning plus access to a library of pre-recorded videos.

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www.hemsleyfraser.com

15 people per course = £72,000 + VAT and there's no real way to assess if the course delivers anything tangible to the companies that send staff to them. Vodafone being one of them.

Dan

 

[MJ DeMarco]

You can always sell things that people can otherwise find for free, just add a few tweaks (value skews) here or there.

Brain.fm comes to mind -- a lot of the stuff on there you can find on YouTube or Spotify.