Pioneering an industry: the online course publishing house
Music bands of the early 1900s played under their bookers’ name, did you know, not their own. Such was supply and demand of distribution. It seems archaic, doesn’t it? ‘Welcome [agency].’ But it wasn’t until 1924 that bands began to claim centre stage.
This, as mad as it seems looking back, is parallel to the industry of online courses today. A cluster of ‘platforms’ duke it out for dominance, while ‘artists’ begrudgingly climb aboard as their only means of getting the word out.
A few months ago, Till, my business partner, and I met with somebody at a retail and advertising company who put it astutely: ‘Platforms are a lie’. What he meant is that unless you’re YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, iTunes or Facebook (or perhaps a favourite news outlet), nobody really cares about or checks in to see your latest offering. Instead, visitors flock almost exclusively because of one person they follow, because that’s the only place to find them.
We at Course Concierge think this a beleaguered system, and that ‘platforms’ in online education have gotten ahead of themselves as booking agents once did in music.
As two of our heroes, Brit Hadden and Henry Luce, pioneered the ‘news-magazine’ in founding Time, we look to bring forth the ‘online course publishing house’.
This is a term that to date hasn’t been used anywhere.
We partner with clients much in the way a book publisher does an author, with a focus exclusively on publishing. We put all of our efforts into production and marketing for clients, not building our own name or platform. (You could say we’re the ‘Random House of online courses’.)
We can’t compete with YouTube and Amazon — it’s silly to try. But we can forge relationships with course creators to help them go direct to consumer better than anyone. (We consider cutting out the middleman a great thing.)
And together with clients, we solve for the same problem Time did in the 1920s:
There’s much work to be done creatively, as the possibilities of an online course are infinite.
A magazine is a magazine. A book is a book. An online course is, well… anything you want it to be. Compared with today’s video games, things are still in the primitive stages; about as far evolved as Pong. While a breakthrough in its day, it’s now time for urgent development.
There’s a promise of the internet that’s yet to be delivered, and we’d like to be its bearer.
Our early works are supremely effective. The below is just one week following the release of a course we helped produce with Steve Ramsey, The Weekend Woodworker:
But how do we take action and completion rates through the roof with all of our courses?
One idea touted as a good thing by platforms is ‘lifetime access’ (at least from a marketing perspective to tip people over the fence to sign up). But is this really in a user’s best interest? Might scarcity, so effective in marketing to secure a purchase, be better for completion rates? We’re not yet certain, but it’s something we’re yearning to try.
In our marketing, we’ve put forth a new awards strategy.
We’re all familiar with plaques from record labels:
We’ve adopted them as our own.
We’re intentional about incentive structures as our competitors, when they come, will likely just copy us — that’s how new industries work. We want to make sure (this unlike the record industry) we’re passing on a fair and winning formula, in the best interest of clients, when they do.
In terms of units sold, here’s how things work in the music business:
There’s more variability in the pricing of online courses than records, and so rather than base ours on units sold, we’re to use client earnings.
In music, the first silver plaque was awarded in December 1937 to George Formby by Regal Zonophone (for sales of 100,000 copies). Again, following history, earlier this year we commenced the system presenting our very first client a silver plaque. Now we’re onto gold, platinum and — I wonder who will be first? — diamond.
The plaques are a small gesture, but something we hope will become treasured possessions. And they’re not trivial. Having spent the majority of their careers writing articles and papers, making a living creating YouTube videos and building social media followings, our clients, with us, are for the first time able to create a definitive resource to sell direct to their audience (and adapt their business model accordingly). They ought to have a physical representation to celebrate.
As a publisher, we remain in the background, never getting between a client and the footlights. It was musicians taking centre stage that brought the jazz age. It’s time for a roaring renaissance in digital publishing.
