At some point in the last few years, a specific offer became inescapable. Someone you follow online, perhaps a fitness trainer, a copywriter, a former middle manager who left their job to travel, or a person who makes sourdough, started selling a course. Not a degree. Not a certificate from a recognizable institution. A course they made themselves, packaged into a landing page, and priced somewhere between $97 and $997. The pitch is almost always the same: they figured something out, and now you can too.
This is not a niche phenomenon. The global e-learning market was valued at roughly $342 billion in 2024 and is projected to surpass $1 trillion by 2032. On Kajabi alone, a platform built specifically for selling digital knowledge products, creators have collectively earned more than $9 billion since it launched in 2010. Udemy hosts over 220,000 courses by more than 75,000 instructors. Someone, right now, is launching a course about how to launch a course.
The Economics Make a Specific Kind of Sense
The appeal of selling a course is not mysterious. You create the thing once and sell it many times. There is no inventory, no manufacturing, no shipping. Platforms like Teachable, Thinkific, and Kajabi handle the infrastructure, which means the barrier to entry is genuinely low. Kajabi reports that its creators earn an average of $37,000 per year from their digital products, and 70% of six-figure creators in its ecosystem cite course sales as their primary revenue stream.
What makes this moment different from previous eras of information selling is the collapse of the gatekeeping apparatus that used to separate expert from audience. A publishing house once decided whether your knowledge was worth packaging. A university once decided whether your expertise was worth teaching. Both decisions were slow, expensive, and often wrong. Their monopoly on legitimacy weakened, and a direct line from knowing something to selling that knowledge became technically trivial to build.
The economics also reflect something real about the labor market. Gig work expanded significantly in the decade after the 2008 financial crisis, as jobs that once implied stability stopped implying it. A 2025 analysis found that around 70 million Americans now do some form of freelance work. Income diversification stopped being a choice and became, for many, a structural necessity. Selling a course looks like entrepreneurship from one angle, and from another, like what people do when employer loyalty stopped being a reasonable bet.
The Completion Rate Nobody Mentions
The part of the course economy that gets less attention is what happens after the purchase. Research on MOOC completion rates has consistently found that fewer than 5% of people who enroll in a free massive open online course actually finish it. A University of Pennsylvania study put the figure at 4%, and MIT and Harvard's joint edX analysis found approximately 5%. These are free courses from elite institutions, which raises the question of what completion looks like when the course costs $297 and was made by someone with 40,000 Instagram followers.
There is an honest version of this and a dishonest one. The honest version is that most people who buy an online course are purchasing access and optionality rather than transformation. They are buying the feeling that they could learn this thing if they wanted to, which has its own genuine value. The dishonest version is when course marketing promises a specific outcome, and the completion data and actual results are never disclosed. The FTC requires that earnings testimonials in advertising reflect typical results, but enforcement in the creator economy is uneven, and the gap between the exceptional case study in the sales video and the median buyer outcome is often significant.
What the Course Is Actually Selling
Courses persist and proliferate because they package something the market has always valued: the perception of an accelerated path. The premise of every course, stated or implied, is that the creator took years to learn something and you can shortcut that timeline for a fee. Some courses deliver on that. Many deliver something adjacent: motivation, community, a framework for thinking about a problem, permission to take seriously something you were previously embarrassed about wanting.
The World Economic Forum estimated that 44% of workers' core skills will need to change within five years, driven by automation and structural shifts in the economy. Whether online courses are the right vehicle for that reskilling is contested. What is not contested is that the anxiety about falling behind professionally, about being made redundant by a technology you don't understand or a credential you don't have, is real and widespread. Courses sell into that anxiety efficiently.
The person selling the sourdough course is not usually running a scam. They learned something, found an audience that wanted to learn it, and built a small business around the transaction. The creator economy made that possible at a scale previous generations never had access to. What has changed is not the existence of people who know things and want to share them. What has changed is the infrastructure that turned sharing into selling, and the economic pressure that turned a side project into a survival strategy.
