Why does Skillshare sponsor everyone? Here is the Truth
Skillshare is a US-based online learning platform that offers a variety of educational learning content. These courses are taught by experts, which helps you enhance your knowledge of different fields and skills.
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But the question is, why do they sponsor social media influencers to sell their courses? If you browse YouTube daily, then you must come across their YouTube affiliate sponsorship ad.
It may leave you with many questions, like why are they focusing so much on sponsorship? What do the influencers gain from these affiliate sponsorship programs? Are these programs worth joining?
Well, in this article we will try to answer all these questions with factual reasoning. You will have a better understanding of the skill share affiliate program after reading this article.
Skillshare sponsors its videos by hiring the creators because they get financial benefits. A lot of people, through these sponsored videos, learn about the platform and eventually enrol in their paid courses.
Before moving to the Skillshare sponsorship strategy, we will have to understand how YouTube sponsorship works. There is no set principle for YouTube contracts. Different sponsors pay different amounts of money to different influencers depending on their views, niche, target audience, and quality of content. It solely depends on sponsors and YouTube influencers.
Skillshare sponsors the creators, who advertise their courses in videos. It could be an entire video, dedicated to Skillshare’s advertisement or a 20-60 sec of the whole video. The advertisement timeframe could be different from one video to another.
Apart from that, Skillshare also uses the affiliate links method to advertise its platform and sponsor the creators. The creators endorse the Skillshare courses in their videos and urge the users to sign up through their affiliate link to get a discount.
This link is usually pinned in YouTube video descriptions or comments. Some chunks of money also go to the creator’s account when someone, enrols in their paid course by clicking the specified links. That’s how Skillshare sponsorship works. The creators get paid by Skillshare directly or by the means of affiliate links.
Now we have an idea of how YouTube sponsorships work. Let’s move to the next part, How does the Skillshare sponsorship methodology work? To understand this, we will have to dig deep and understand the process, through which Skillshare sponsors the creators.
Mainly, there are two ways of sponsorship that are offered by Skillshare. One is a referral method, which means anyone can refer a Skillshare program to another person with a link.
The second and most commonly used method is an advertisement with the help of influencers. Since influencers and creators have a massive audience, this method is more financially beneficial for both parties.
Now let’s discuss both methods in detail to get a clearer view. In the first method, a person simply refers to the Skillshare program to his or her family or friends by simply sharing a signup link. If the other person accepts and enrols in paid courses, then in return the sender gets most of the 10$ and two Skillshare premiums.
In the second method, there is a special link for influencers, and whenever someone signs up using that specific link, the influencers get 7$ and a one-month Skillshare premium subscription.
The number of sign-ups in this method would be quite higher. It means the influencer would also receive a good amount of money. Similarly, Skillshare would also benefit due to the increased number of signups.
Besides these methods, Skillshare also pays the creators independently for sponsored videos. These direct payments could be different for different creators according to their views. Because the sole factor that SkillShare’s direct payment criteria depend on is CPM (Cost per 1,000 impressions).
So it means that the direct payment is dependent on the sponsor’s video views. But the question is how to predict the views of a video that is yet to be published. Well, it depends on your average views of the past ten videos.
If they have like approximately 20000 views per video, then the direct payment will be according to 20000 views. As discussed earlier, the CPM could also vary from 10 to 100 or even above.
Skillshare considers the number of factors to set the CPM for a creator. It is mostly different for different creators. The creator’s niche and quality of content are major factors for a good CPM, for example, in the case of an Educational good quality content creator, the CPM would be defiantly higher.
Because the target audience is already in the same field and they are more likely to join the Skillshare platform. As a result, their turnover would be higher a result Skillshare would be get financially benefited.
It also depends on the time slot of add spot. The CPM would be higher for longer add spot and vice Vera
How much you can earn?
Suppose we are doing multiple videos, then CPM will be lower as compared to a single video. These are not official figures, but according to our calculations, creators receive approximately 10 to 1500 USD per video. The amount could be different. It means influencers get from 10 to 50k, on average one million. The amount could be more in some cases.
These earnings are apart from the affiliate sources, that we have mentioned earlier.
Now, you might have a question in mind what exactly is Skillshare gaining from this sponsorship?
Well, they are doing business and making a lot of money through this sponsorship. To make it clear and present a clear picture for you, we have stated this explanation below with some data and reasoning.
First of all, know, Skillshare charges approximately 20$ per month and they also have an annual package in which a user has to pay approximately 100 per year. The second is more economical, and most users generally go for this. That’s not the fixed price. There could be a little bit of change in the amount due to taxes.
If we compare both packages, we can see, that Skillshare is offering a huge discount on the yearly package as compared to a monthly subscription. It implies that most of the users would pay approximately $100 all in one go, rather than paying $20 every month.
So Skillshare is getting $100 per person from these sponsored videos. Not all the creator’s audience is joining the courses through affiliate links, but some of them do join and pay for the courses.
An Example
Now let’s suppose, the video gets one million views from them. Of the millions, there are 1000(0.1%) people who would be attracted to Skillshare advertisements. As a result, they would end up paying $100 upfront. According to these numbers, Skillshare earns approximately 100000.
In most cases, Skillshare pays up to 50,000 to creators for sponsored videos, and in return, they earn up to $10,000 from a single video.
But that’s not the complete picture, as we already discussed in this method of affiliate sponsorship, creators also receive per video. So 7k would be shifted to the creator’s account, leaving 43,000 for Skillshare.
To maintain the quality of courses and content, Skillshare pays a handsome amount to its teachers and creators. So almost 30K$ would be given to the tutor. After all that, Skillshare is still in profit of 13,000.
So, from a single sponsor video, they are earning up to 13k$ according to our calculation. These numbers are purely based on speculation. It is also very rare that Skillshare pays 50k$ to creators for sponsorship. The amount is usually up to 30k$, which makes their profit 33k$.
