TeachStreet’s growing quickly — and transitioning more to revenue-generation

The last few weeks have been pretty darn exciting for TeachStreet’s teachers and classes — long-term efforts we’ve made have started to pay dividends, as TeachStreet’s organic search traffic has continued to surge, and conversions for teachers (leads, enrollments, contacts) have continued to climb.  Needless to say, it makes it easier to get up and fight-the-good-fight every day:

And last night, we made an exciting announcement, and one that we didn’t make lightly — in the next few weeks, we’ll be implementing another element of our long-term business model, as we start charging modest $3 listing fees for Basic class listings (I explain more about the fee change on the TeachStreet Blog).

Obviously, charging listing fees carries risks, with the biggest being that some teachers will not want to pay, and we’ll lose their classes (and selection, which negatively impacts students looking for hard-to-find classes, and great teachers)

But we learned long ago with Amazon Auctions (and eBay paved the way here) that listing fees have other benefits (beyond the revenue implications, of course). They help to increase the overall quality of listings, and the commitment of those who list items (classes, auction items, etc).  And, while we’ll miss the departing teachers and classes, those who remain will get even more exposure, and hopefully will be even that much more ecstatic about (and involved with) what we’re building.

This change in fees also allows us to be even more open to directly connecting students with teachers — in the past, we thought we could make all of our money on transaction fees (for payments made via TeachStreet Payments), but the market told us very quickly that many students and teachers prefer to pay in various ways (cash, check, etc), and when the transactions happened off of TeachStreet, there was no way for us to be compensated for bringing them together (which is, of course, a big part of the value/service we provide).

As I’ve said, we’re truly excited about the change — the increased revenue will help us to continue to build value for teachers and students over the long-term, and the site should become that much more vibrant, with increasing numbers of amazing local and online classes — I invite you to check them out (and go enroll in a class while you’re at it 🙂 ).

Again, read more about the TeachStreet fee changes on our blog.

Onward,

Dave