It's the current modern equivalent of those yellow "... for Dummies" books. It gives a nicely presented introductory content, but these days the stuff you lear

It's the current modern equivalent of those yellow "... for Dummies" books. It gives a nicely presented introductory content, but these days the stuff you learn off CodeAcademy is the equivalent of an office worker mastering Microsoft Office VB scripting. Which is to say, it's an absolute necessity to stay competitive considering the majority of modern office work, and in turn people, are replaceable by an Excel spreadsheet script. This is the case especially when you go to somewhere like Google where outside the engineering roles it's just a bunch of highly accredited people being overpaid and overstimulated creating and babysitting automated processes. That culture will slowly creep over to every other industry at the inverse rate of a that industry's keeping around a fax machine. The gameification is only good for entertainment purposes, considering every credible higher education institution don't recognize online classes as credible crediting. So how can CodeAcademy get beyond being a fad? Distribution and then vertical integration. They probably already know that. Reach as many kids as soon and as early as possible then start going deeper with the content, the more highly specific the knowledge the more you can charge for it. They're really in the disruption of tech publishers, like O'Reilly or Safari or Apress. When they have a full library charging for a monthly subscription will keep them going for quite awhile.