Myngle is bigger than Apple and Facebook – according to Shop Commission

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That is if you take into account that both Apple and Facebook are taking “only” a 30% cut for products sold on their platforms and Myngle is taking 40% for content sold by teachers on the Myngle Shop.

Normal reactions on taking 30% are moaning that it is quite a hefty chunk but saying on the other hand “Hey, it’s Apple and Facebook. They have a huge market share and offer me access to a huge potential client base so I will bite the bullet.”

According to Myngle’s market share we can state that the company is heading towards member (account) number 100.000. The lucky one will even receive two tickets from Myngle’s partner KLM.

I won’t compare this number to Apple or Facebook but compared to one of the smaller language learning communities: this is a fifth of the members (accounts) of busuu which just reached 500.000.

Well, I think you get my point. Taking 40% commission from content creators who do all the work without having the power to say: “If you don’t sell here you are missing the biggest target group for your product” is cocky. The general 18% Myngle is taking for live lessons would be perfectly ok. And there is no argument for 40%. Even if Myngle was hosting the files it would be even cheaper for them as traffic only comes when the file is downloaded, hence when a purchase is done.

Anyway. I am pretty sure that most teachers will be very happy to pay those 40% for the chance to upload their files on the Myngle Shop. I am just a voice crying in the wilderness.

Back to business: Yesterday teachers of the Myngle platform received some detailed instructions on how to upload content to the shop, how to set the pricing etc.

When sending you material you can indicate the following:

  • Supplier Image File: (210×210 pixels)
  • Products Category:
  • Products Name:
  • Products Price:
  • Products Image File: (210×210 pixels)
  • Products Description:

Teachers are free to set the price but Myngle suggests to shape the price according to the live lesson price and comparable material on Amazon or eBay. Makes sense. Material that is either sold too cheap or two expensive Myngle will contact the teacher for repricing and also keeps the right to deny material that does not fit the quality standards of the (Apple Store) Myngle Shop.

There are four categories for material on the Myngle Shop

  • Audio: for any type of podcasts and mp3s
  • Videos : for any videos and clips you record.
  • Lesson Notes: for pdf or similar files of lecture notes, exercises, tests, conversations etc.
  • Study material package: for any sort of combination of the above.

All content uploaded and verified by Myngle can then also be embedded in the regular course listings and sold as extra learning material.

As I said in my first write up on this I think it is a good idea in general. But I am not at all happy with the cut Myngle aims to take. It is absolutely disproportional to the work / value Myngle is adding to the process. It’s static content, it costs Myngle nothing in production and hosting so 18% would be totally sufficient and I think they should give it a second thought.

If you are looking for alternatives you should check out Sclipo which lets you build your own online academy with multiple ways of selling your own content, Udemy which will launch their payment platform in the coming months, WiZiQ which is also planning to launch a payment option for asynchronous learning material and Sparkeo which lets you monetize video content. I am also pretty sure that italki will open its marketplace to individual educators soon. It’s a trend that is taking off at the moment. And all of the above take lower commissions ;) . 

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  • ChinaMike

    Pricing is a real tricky subject. There are so many approaches you can use to set and justify prices. One of the biggest issues with pricing is deciding what your audience is willing to pay. As you pointed out Myngle probably isn't going to meet much resistance at 40% so you could say that they are doing what all good businesses do- maximizing their revenue.

    But is this short-sighted in the short term? Time will tell. I think a lot of it depends on what value Myngle intends to add during the material development and publication process. If the past is any guide, this “help” won't amount to much.

    My own inclination would be to argue for a two-tiered pricing scheme. In scenario A, I would allow teachers who price their materials at a certain minimum price to publish on Myngle platform for free. In scenario B I would ask people who plan to charge more than the minimum price for their materials to pay the Myngle fee.

    Now you could satisfy two different groups of teachers; those that want to produce materials for a good price (B) and those that want to publish materials to just cover their own costs (A). I think you would find that most teachers would probably fall into these two groups neatly.

    My guess is that in the end the people who would benefit best from this scheme would be the students. The goal of this approach would be keep the price of low cost materials low (benefiting students) but make it possible for those producing professional materials to make even more money if their materials have high production value (again benefiting students).

    In scenario B Myngle could position themselves more like a publisher and in scenario A as a friend to teacher and student.

    • http://kirstenwinkler.com KirstenWinkler

      I doubt that many teacher will produce material at all. :)

      It's the Da Vinci Code in online education.

      And I think in your scenario everyone would price their material as low as possible. You know what happened when teachers did not have a minimum fee for live teaching.

      To me this commission model is either not thought through or simply greedy.

      • ChinaMike

        Great, another opportunity to discuss this in more detail!

        I agree most teachers won't produce materials. But, let's say 25-35% do. If they price their materials low (let's say 5 Euros per 10 week course) and Myngle doesn't take a commission then the students will benefit greatly. If, on the other hand a teacher prices her materials high, it wouldn't make much sense to price around the 5 Euro mark. It makes more more sense to go much higher so that Myngle's commission doesn't bite too much. In that case they would need to do a more professional job of producing materials to justify the extra cost.

        In this way Myngle could set a higher bar for pricier materials. I think for Myngle the goal should be to make money and encourage people to produce great materials. In this way Myngle could also become a publishing option for external material writers. You see, while in comparison to Apple Myngle sounds pricy, in comparison to a traditional publisher Myngle pricing is attractive and it could offer an interesting gateway to aspiring material writers.

        • http://kirstenwinkler.com KirstenWinkler

          But producing great material means that you actually have to take a break from teaching. A full 10 week course of own material will take at least one or even two month of preparation even if it's only text based, not talking about multimedia content.

          Content is long tail and that is something most teachers are not interested in. Why invest time and effort in something that will pay off over time when I can make money right now, e.g. teach live?

          What we now see most of the time is that a teacher starts something, uploads two or three parts of a course and that's it. Why should a student buy the beginning of a course without knowing if the rest will ever arrive?

          I agree that if Myngle would be a publishing platform they might take up to 40% but then we still not know how many of those 100.000 accounts are teacher, how many are active and how many actually ever paid for a lesson hence a number of potential clients (after 3 years in business) that would justify this cut.

          • chinamike

            As they say, the enemy of good is perfection.

            One can create some darn good materials in the 10-20 hour range that can be used again and again. Especially listening materials. And these materials need not be finished… they can be sold in a perpetual Beta stage especially if the price of the materials is very low. With each new student you can refine it until you reach the nirvana of near perfection.

            I would think that most teachers do this kind of iteration with their materials all the time and very few actually work full time on a single set of materials or stop teaching to produce materials.

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