Course creators are watching their revenue crater, and the culprit isn’t a bad economy or a saturated market. It’s AI. According to Simon Willison, who highlighted a candid post from developer educator Josh W. Comeau (shared via Salma Alam-Naylor), the picture is stark: Comeau just launched his third course, Whimsical Animations, and it’s tracking to sell roughly one-third of what a typical launch pulls in.
His two existing courses tell the same story. Sales are down significantly year over year. And Comeau isn’t alone. “I’ve spoken to a few course creators now, and we’re all seeing the same trend. Revenue down 50%+,” he writes. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a business model buckling.
The double whammy
Comeau names two forces hitting educators at once, and they compound.
- Fear of the future. “Many people are wondering whether developer jobs will even exist in a few months, so they’re reluctant to spend time/money learning new dev skills.” When you’re unsure the career survives, you don’t invest in it.
- Free personalized tutoring. “Even if they do want to learn new dev skills, LLMs can provide personalized tutoring, so there’s less incentive to buy a paid course.” Why pay for a static video series when a chatbot answers your exact question at 2 a.m.?
There’s a third sting Comeau points to, and it’s the sharpest. LLMs “slurp up all of our work and regurgitate it, without consent or compensation.” The very content creators published to build an audience became training data that now competes with them. They fed the machine that’s eating their lunch.
Why this matters now
What stands out here is the target. Comeau’s audience is developers, arguably the most AI-fluent buyers on the planet. If the people building AI tools are the first to abandon paid learning for those same tools, that’s a leading indicator, not an edge case.
This is bigger than one niche. Any business whose product is packaged knowledge sits in the blast radius: technical courses, cooking tutorials, language apps, how-to YouTube, written guides. If the value you sell is “I’ll explain this to you,” an LLM now does a version of that for free, tuned to each person, on demand.
And the consent angle is heating up across the industry. Creators are done treating scraping as a cost of doing business. Expect more of them to block crawlers, wall off content behind logins, and push for licensing deals or lawsuits. The friction between AI labs and the people whose work trained the models is moving from grumbling to structural conflict.
What creators and businesses should do
The reflexive move is to compete with the LLM on information. Don’t. You’ll lose. Information is the commodity AI just made nearly free. Sell what a model can’t hand out.
- Sell outcomes, not explanations. Cohorts, accountability, feedback on real work, a deadline, a community that keeps people showing up. AI tutors you; it doesn’t push you to finish.
- Sell access and curation. Direct time with a credible expert, a vetted path through the noise, “here’s exactly what to skip.” Judgment is scarce. Content isn’t.
- Sell proof and belonging. Credentials people trust, a network worth joining, status inside a scene. Those live in relationships, not PDFs.
- Protect the moat. Gate premium material, watermark it, and decide deliberately what you publish free. Free content used to be marketing. Now some of it is unpaid R&D for your competitor.
The next 1-3 years
The raw-information course, the kind that just walks you through a topic, is on a path to near-zero market value. That format won’t fully vanish, but its pricing power is gone, and the creators who lean on it will keep watching revenue slide the way Comeau describes.
The survivors will look less like a video library and more like a gym membership: a place, a coach, a group, a reason to keep coming back. The ones who move now, while they still have an audience and a brand, get to redesign the offer on their own terms. The ones who wait will be doing it in a panic.
Comeau’s numbers are an early tremor, not the whole quake. More details are in Simon Willison’s original write-up, and it’s worth reading if you sell anything built on knowledge.