Evergreen courses & memberships rising

Skillshare pays teachers from a monthly Teacher Fund that allocates most payments by minutes-watched, and beginning January 1, 2026 it added a 50-follower minimum alongside the longstanding 75-minutes-watched threshold to qualify for royalties. (help.skillshare.com) Udemy has shifted instructor economics on subscription content, cutting the instructor share to 20% in January 2024, 17.5% in January 2025 and to 15% in January 2026 for Udemy Business/subscription revenue. (teach.udemy.com) CreativeLive — once a major outlet for multi-day photography workshops that paid instructors a share of class download revenue — shut down its platform operations on December 31, 2025, removing one route for licensing longer workshops to an established marketplace. (geekwire.com) Market data places the broader photo-editing/presets market at about $823.5 million in 2023 with a projection to roughly $1.2 billion by 2025, and creator-side reports estimating active preset sellers can earn from roughly $2,000 up to $75,000 per month depending on niche and reach. (rickyspears.com) Direct-to-consumer preset sales remain concentrated on platforms like Gumroad, Sellfy, Etsy, Payhip and self‑hosted Shopify stores, while product‑level analytics vendors (e.g., Gumtrends) track 250,000+ Gumroad products to surface high-revenue presets and template patterns. (sellfy.com) Membership and paid-drop tactics benefit from membership conversion benchmarks: visitor-to-member conversion rates on membership platforms commonly run about 1%–5%, a metric creators use to price tiered preset drops and monthly bundles. (skillademia.com) Brands increasingly source creators through influencer/creator marketplaces that aggregate talent—these platforms estimate a creator universe measured in the tens of millions and are used to scale sponsored UGC, product partnerships and recurring creator programs for niches like wedding and gear-focused photography. (influencermarketinghub.com)