Skillshare

Skillshare is a New York City-based company which offers a library of instructional and educational video content. The company generates revenue by charging consumers a monthly or annual subscription fee. The company makes some of its video library available for free.

Founded in 2010 by Michael Karnjanaprakorn and Malcom Ong, the company has over 12 million registered users, 8,000 teachers, and 30,000 classes on the platform as of August 2020. Matt Cooper, the company's current CEO, took over the role from Karnjanaprakorn in November 2017. Karnjanaprakorn is the company's chairperson.

The company is venture-backed and has raised from investors including SV Angel, Spark Capital, Founder Collective, Box Group, and OMERS Growth Equity across multiple rounds of venture capital funding.

Skillshare has tens of thousands of courses in its catalog. The company differentiates itself by focusing primarily on content covering creative skills and business fundamentals. Courses are typically taught by experienced practitioners of the skill, craft, or type of work covered by the online class.

In June 2018, the company launched Skillshare Originals, which are online courses produced by an in-house video production team.

Instructors who teach courses hosted on Skillshare earn royalties on their content; as of August 2020, teachers are paid out based on their share of the minutes watch by Premium students across the platform each month.

The company explains the revenue split:

If 5% of all minutes watched on Skillshare by Premium students happened in a teacher’s class(es), then that teacher would receive 5% of the revenue allocated to the teacher royalty pool that month.