I have had a lot of people ask me why I am not putting my online classes into PluralSight. The answer is quite simple, their business model does not align well with the type of content being discussed, I have had these discussions with them before.
The pluralsight default royalty model is setup upon a fractional payment payment system based upon views % during a period. This works wonderful for commoditized trainings such as “learn C# quickly” especially if its primarily screencasts. It makes just next to no sense to put up 4 days worth of content.
Think about your viewing habits. Are you going to watch one episode at a time over the course of 12 months or are you going to spend a weekend/week during gym time etc and watch all of the content? So let’s just imagine that the way it worked was based upon viewing % during the month the royalties would end up being +- $10/viewer on average. Factor in 15k-20keu in order to film/edit 20-25 hours of content and you are saying that maybe you hope to break even at 2500 people viewing.
For a short commoditized class such as “Introduction to iOS programming” things would make total sense, wide audience and low production cost, high relevance. For something like a 3 day class + extra material it makes almost no sense.
That said they do now say that “things are open for negotiation” so maybe its worth talking to them.
5 Comments
Greg, this makes 100% sense and I agree that multi-day courses ‘as is’ would not get a lot of viewers. However, I am sure if you really wanted to you could break your multi-day course in to MANY 3 hour courses. Each course with a given focal point. This would be worth it and viewers would be interested in this.
for some stuff yes it could be pulled out for other stuff not so easily. some topics go well ovrr time (and overall they are connected together)
For multi-day courses which get thousands of viewers (and 20% of accomplishment at most) we have Coursera, Udacity, Edx experiences. But Pluralsight should have to make a move for something like that.
Greg, Why not a MOOC?
Greg, I’d be happy to chat with you about our model and the possibilities in more detail. You might be surprised how well it could work for you.
sure drop me an email.