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Yeah, I think so. The players in the industry that went after enterprises are doing well, the players that stuck to selling mostly to individual customers are
by thomasmeeks 7y ago
Yeah, I think so.
The players in the industry that went after enterprises are doing well, the players that stuck to selling mostly to individual customers are having a rough go of it. Udacity definitely had some big enterprise deals with their specific nanodegrees, but it never looked like they became an enterprise sales company from the outside.
I believe most marketing departments (along with people trying to make a name for themselves) have massively cranked up the amount of free content they pump out in the last few years. It is making it terribly difficult to become big in the education space while selling to the masses.
Enterprises, on the other hand, _really_ want to lower their salary expenditures through training and will happily throw money at a company like Pluralsight to train up new employees. For what its worth, I think they're correct that training can drive down payroll costs. But the company I worked for was acquired by Pluralsight, so there's some bias.
- christudor 7y agoSomething else that makes the B2C market difficult is the fact that the sign of a great educational video is one that you only need to watch once.
- povertyworld 7y agoThe point of Udacity is the projects, not the videos. You can skip all the videos, and just go straight to the projects if you want.
- ghaff 7y agoWell, yeah, but there's always another video you can watch. The problem is more the overall devaluing of content prices by consumers generally. Especially absent much in the way of certification value for most people, that places a real ceiling on how much you can charge. I might pay something in the neighborhood of book pricing for an online course (or I may take one of the numerous free alternatives). But I'm unlikely to pay triple digits and I certainly won't pay thousands of dollars.
- nkozyra 7y ago> The players in the industry that went after enterprises are doing well, the players that stuck to selling mostly to individual customers are having a rough go of it. Keep in mind they had a deal with Georgia Tech's OMSCS, but something went awry there too.
- cgearhart 7y agoThe ink wasn’t even dry on the OMSCS deal when Udacity did their “pivot” to Nanodegrees. They lived up to the letter of the agreement with GT—in fact Udacity is still the classroom platform for OMSCS classes—but they went in a completely different direction as a company with a product that effectively competes with OMSCS. It’s not hard to see why: GT said recently that through 5 years of operation the OMSCS has made $14M for the school. That’s wonderful from their perspective, but that’s a total disaster for a VC-funded unicorn company.