Simon Willison’s Weblog

I just launched my third course, Whimsical Animations, and so far, it’s on track to sell roughly ⅓ as many copies as a typical course launch.

It’s a similar story with my two existing courses. Sales are down significantly from last year.

There are likely a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest is AI. There’s sort of a double whammy with AI:

1. 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.
2. 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.

[...] I’ve spoken to a few course creators now, and we’re all seeing the same trend. Revenue down 50%+. Fewer people engaging with our content. People switching to LLMs, which slurp up all of our work and regurgitate it, without consent or compensation.

— Josh W. Comeau, via Salma Alam-Naylor