You ever wondered why every tech YouTuber tries to sell you a course? In this post, I will tell you exactly why—with real stats.
For context, I have created coding content on my channel chaoocharles for over 5 years. Within this period, I have created both short-form videos and long FullStack Courses. All my courses are free on YouTube, and I have always wanted it that way, since when I was learning to code, I struggled a lot to get useful FullStack courses for free on YouTube. Such courses were only found on paid platforms such as Udemy. I didn’t have any money to purchase even a $20 course. And yes, it was that bad! But after creating free courses for so long, I now understand why even big channels with over 500k subs will try to sell you a course at some point. And the answer is pretty obvious: MONEY!
The thing is, creating a big course takes a lot of time and effort. Personally, if I were to create a 10-hour FullStack course, it would take me about 2 months to complete, dedicating 2–3 hours daily. And there are three main production steps for every course:
- Preparing the Course – This involves research, preparing presentation slides, scripts, and coding the actual project(s).
- Recording the Course – Here, you simply recreate the project(s) while you teach/record.
- Editing the Course – Removing silent spaces/errors; add nice visuals/animations.
All three steps take a crazy amount of time to complete. And although these long courses get a good number of views, they surprisingly make pennies. When we compare the amount of work and what creators get from ad revenue, you’ll realize that we, as creators, just sacrifice our effort to offer such courses for free. Below are real stats from my channel.
These are the stats for the best-performing long-form course on my channel: Build and Deploy a Full-Stack E-Commerce. Let’s analyze the stats together. I published this course over 1 year ago. It took me about 3 months to create. Since it was published, the course has gotten about 150K views, and it has made only about $260 from ad revenue.
So simply, for 3 months of work, I got paid $260. An amount I could have easily made in a day or two if I was working full-time at a job or freelance project. If I had decided to sell this course at the time and priced it at $50, and after struggling to advertise it I get just 100 sales, it would have easily made $5,000. Now, is it starting to make sense why creators sell courses? And we can’t blame them but rather support them. $260 would barely pay anyone’s 3 months’ bills, but $5,000 would do for most people. And notice how we limited sales to just 100.
I have been wondering why these long videos make so little despite having midroll ads, but I have two main guesses:
- Tech guys block ads – They simply use an extension to block ads or use a browser that does so. I won’t blame them—I also hate watching YouTube ads, lol!
- Most download the long courses and watch locally on their machines, therefore creators don’t really benefit from ad revenue.
Right now, I am in the middle of creating a long FullStack Course in Next.js 15: Next15 FullStack Blog Platform . It will be around 15–20 hours, and I am already 3 months in. It is free on my channel (currently uploading in chapters), but from previous stats, this might be the last long-form course that I will make on my channel.
I think these kind of course are very educational but they generally hurt creators; they take long to upload, making the channel a bit inactive, and even after uploading, most people just download them, which hurts the creator’s ad revenue.
Anyway, I hope I answered your question! Creators sell courses to boost their revenue. Small channels like mine barely get good sponsorships (most are just scammers), and that is why most coding channels fall off even before they start. It needs creators to pour their heart and soul into it to keep going. And even after that they would still get mean comments on their videos.
If you would like to support free education, I have a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/chaoocharles. If I get 100 paid members, that will motivate me to continue creating long-form courses for free on YouTube 🌚 You can join for as low as $3 per month. Thank you!
