Hosting your membership site on a third-party marketplace - like Udemy.com and SkillShare.com
On Udemy, it is free to create a course. And whatever price you end up charging for it, if you do the marketing and send buyers to your own course page on Udemy.com, and the visitor buys your course using a coupon that YOU have provided them with, then you keep 100% of the revenue from the sales. Of course, they deduct about 3% for processing fees, but still, that's 100% of the actual revenue.
If Udemy sends you customers via their own marketing efforts, then they get 50% of the sale. They have other service add-ons to help you with marketing, and opting in to those would net you less on each sale, but you can reach a wider audience because of the increased exposure your course would get from Udemy’s marketing efforts.
There are a number of other course-creation platforms, and each one has its own place in the industry. But probably the most popular one, that I myself have purchased a course from in the past, is Udemy.
Digital Sharecropping
Sharecropping, by definition, is "a system of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on their portion of land."
And building your business on a third-party platform, where they own the platform, they control the sales, and then they pay you a portion of the profits, is generally referred to as Digital Sharecropping.
It can work for many businesses – like my book SubscribeMeBook.com is being sold on Amazon Kindle and will probably make the most sales on that platform. However, that doesn’t stop me from selling this book on my own web site, or through other eBook platforms. And that is why my book sales will not get entirely shut down if Amazon decides to not allow my book to be sold there. It is not the end of the world. However, if you are building your membership business on a third-party platform, and something goes wrong with your account or your product, or the platform itself shuts down or gets bought out by another company that maybe absorbs the talent and shuts the business down, then all of your content, your members, their recurring billing profiles – everything disappears overnight.
That thought makes most membership site owners nervous, which is why a building your own self-hosted membership platform using WordPress and a membership plugin like DigitalAccessPass.com (DAP), is a great idea for most people.
All this and more in today's episode #16. Show notes available at http://SubscribeMe.fm/16/