Digital income
Online Courses
Recorded teaching sold once and delivered many times, direct or through a marketplace.
How the money actually reaches you
Either a student buys from you directly — your checkout, your processor, your audience — or a course marketplace sells it, sets or discounts the price, keeps a share that varies with who brought the student, and pays out monthly in arrears. The two are different businesses wearing the same clothes: direct sales pay far more per student and require you to find every one of them, while a marketplace brings buyers and takes both margin and pricing control. Cohort-based courses add a third shape, where the payment is for scheduled live access and the delivery is not passive at all.
The customer, directly. A payment processor or a marketplace stands between you and the money and takes a fee for it; an app store or platform takes a commission set in its developer terms. What you actually sell may be a file, a licence, access, a physical parcel someone else ships, or the right to call an interface.
Fastest of the three. Card money typically settles to the processor within days and is paid out on a rolling schedule, minus a reserve on new or high-risk accounts. Marketplaces and app stores pay monthly, in arrears, after their own hold period.
Read the payer, the intermediary and the schedule before anything else. Who pays, who sits in the middle taking a share, and how long after the work the money arrives explain most of the difference between these fourteen businesses.
The structural facts
Six lines, in two halves. The first three are what the model takes — money up front, waiting time, and the rhythm of work it never stops needing. The last three are what happens once it earns: how the income fades if nothing new is added, what stops it growing past a point, and what, if anything, stops the next person copying it. A model with no answer to the last two can still pay; it just does not compound.
- Capital to start
- Low to moderate: recording equipment, editing, hosting or platform fees, and a large amount of preparation time before anything is sellable.
- Time to first dollar
- Weeks to months to produce, then immediate if an audience already exists and indefinite if it does not.
- Ongoing effort
- Periodic but real: content goes out of date, students ask questions, refunds are processed, and the marketing never stops if you sell directly.
- How it decays
- Subject-dependent and often brutal. A course about a specific tool or platform can be obsolete within a year; a course about a durable skill ages far more slowly.
- What caps it
- Audience reach and topic depth. Distribution is the binding constraint — the marginal cost of another student is nearly zero, so nothing but reach limits it.
- What stops a copycat
- Demonstrable expertise, results students can point to, and a brand that makes the course the obvious one. Curriculum alone is copied constantly, and free video competes with everything.
What it costs to run
- Recording and editing: microphone, screen capture, editor
- Course hosting platform or marketplace fees
- Payment processing and refunds
- Marketing, affiliates or paid acquisition
- Periodic re-recording as the subject changes
How it typically fails
- It is built before anyone has been asked whether they would pay for it.
- The subject moves and the course is quietly wrong.
- Marketplace discounting trains buyers to wait for a sale, and the price never recovers.
- Refund rates run high because the sales page promised an outcome the course cannot deliver.
- The creator has no audience and no plan to build one, so a good course reaches nobody.
Does it sell?
Whether a business can be sold is the plainest test of whether it is an asset or a job. A buyer pays for income that continues without the person who built it, which means verifiable revenue, a customer relationship that transfers, and a distribution channel that does not walk out of the door with the founder. This section describes whether that market exists for this model — not what anything is worth, which no honest public source can give.
Courses sell as part of a business rather than on their own — the buyer is really acquiring the audience, the funnel and the brand that sells the course. Standalone course files with no distribution attached rarely trade at all, which is a useful signal about where the value actually sits.
Where people look
A storefront for selling digital files, courses and memberships, handling checkout, file delivery and sales tax on the seller's behalf.
Fee is taken per sale rather than as a monthly subscription
Visit Gumroad ↗A publishing platform for email newsletters with paid subscriptions, payment processing and a subscriber list built in.
Takes a percentage of paid subscription revenue plus card processing
Visit Substack ↗Amazon's self-publishing service for ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks, which pays the author a royalty on each sale.
Royalty rate depends on list price band and file delivery size
Visit Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing ↗Hosted software for building and selling online courses, including payments, student accounts and drip release of lessons.
Visit Teachable ↗Sponsored links are labelled. Listing a service is not an endorsement of it, and nothing on this page is advice.
Frequently asked
Direct sales or a course marketplace?
How often does a course need updating?
Can a course promise a specific income outcome?
Others running on the same engine
Subscription Websites and Membership Sites
Gated content or a community that members pay for monthly or annually.
Paid Newsletters
Writing delivered to an inbox, paid for by subscribers, sponsors, or both.
Mobile Apps
Software distributed through app stores, paid for by users, subscriptions or advertising.
SaaS Businesses
Software run as a service, billed monthly or annually to the people using it.
Digital Templates and Downloads
Files sold repeatedly — templates, presets, fonts, printables, plugins, spreadsheets.
Stock Photography Portfolios
Images, video clips and audio licensed repeatedly through agencies, paid per download.
E-Commerce With Outsourced Fulfilment
Selling physical goods someone else stores and ships — third-party logistics, print-on-demand, or dropshipping.
Domain-Name Portfolios
Holding registered domain names for lease, parking revenue or eventual resale.
Data and API Licensing
Selling access to a dataset or an interface, priced by seat, by call, or by contract.
Research only. This page describes how a business model works, what it costs and how it fails. It does not recommend starting one, does not estimate what anyone earns, and is not investment, tax or legal advice.