For a long time I did not cover all the new partnerships that were made in the education 2.0 sector. One reason for this is the huge amount of new companies which enter the game.
Really exciting times but nevertheless lets have a look at the “grown up” rebels. You will see that there is lots going on, too. Especially building alliances with the established top dogs in education.
First company to mention is Babbel.com. After getting a “high commended” at the first European TechCrunch Awards in July for their Design Babbel launched a Full English Grammar Online Course in partnership with the renomated publisher Collins.
Quoting the Babbel blog:
[...] we at Babbel.com have perhaps done the impossible: we’ve made learning English grammar fun. Based on tried-and-true materials by the respected British publisher Collins, we’ve created a full, interactive online course that is not only modern and effective, but virtually pain-free. “English Grammar: Practise the Basics” uses our unique, intuitive and entertaining approach to help those still in the early stages to build their skills and confidence – at their own pace, without the expected hair-tearing or embarrassment. [...]
I already liked the Spanish course Babbel built around the material of the German publisher Hueber. One of the strenghts of Babbel is definitely the good design. Eye candy is very important in our digital age.
Second company is Myngle.com and they got quite partnership frantic in the past couple of months. I already mentioned the partnership with the Spanish Instituto Cervantes and the Latvian Social Network ONE.lv. The next partnership was announced in September. This time Myngle partnered with the Indian TV station NDTV (New Dheli TV). Myngle is providing the language learning section of the elearning portal NDTVTutor.com. Last but not least Myngle has a partnership with the professional social network Xing.com.
But wait, that’s not all! There are a couple of other smaller partnerships. Myngle gives companies the possibility to add an Academy to their website. This Academy is basically the same offer like on NDTV, just a bit smaller. There are partnerships with ELJ English Language Jobs and Energy Translations announced in the Myngle blog.
And last but not least you could also add the new Myngle Shop and the Affiliate Program to this list.
The goal of all those partnerships is of course to drive traffic to the Myngle website. Qualified traffic to be exact. I did not see a Myngle Google Adwords advertising for a long time. End of 2008, beginning of 2009 they were basically everywhere. If you google today for phrases like German tutor, learn German online etc you don’t see them anymore.
Therefore I think behind the partnership frenzy of Myngle is a method. After getting lots of traffic over the Google Adwords campaign that did not convert into clients (as the campaign was not targeted enough to my mind), Myngle decided to go for cheaper, organic traffic building entry points to their website via partnerships. The good thing about this is that Myngle only pays if there is a transaction. I don’t know much about the Academies but as they work with an affiliate link I am quite sure the Academy owner gets commission from Myngle when a lesson is sold. Same for the affiliate banners.
The big question is though: is the traffic from the partner sites enough? If you check out the stats of Myngle on compete.com you see a decrease from around 15.000 unique visitors in March to about 3.000 unique visitors in August. This is a decrease of 80%. If you then take a look at the visits per month you see that they are going down in the same rate. Only exception: August. There we see an increase of 62%. How does this come? Is the strategy finally paying off and high quality traffic = paying students come on the site?
I am afraid, no. August is the month where the back to school immersion started. 30 days, one lesson a day = 2 visits (one teacher, one student). So this increase is just the effect of students meeting their teachers for their daily lesson.
The idea behind this strategy is not bad at all but it seems as if it is not working at all. So Myngle has to ask themselves: why? I could think of a couple of reasons but this would make this post too long. Therefore…
…on to Livemocha. The long awaited Active English Course in partnership with Pearson is finally online. I had the chance to get a first look on the product and now you can, too. Just go to the Livemocha website and there you can try it out for free. The monthly price is $19.95 or $49.95 for a six month subscription.
And the latest one to join the partnership league is Busuu. They announced a partnership with Tripwolf.com, a free social travel guide which offers their members reviews and travel tips from members of the community as well as publishers like Marco Polo or footprint. In this partnership Busuu implements a Tripwolf widget in each user profile on Busuu showing content related to the home country of the user so other users who add them to their network can learn about the place he / she is coming from. Tripwolf will embed the Busuu flashcard widget on their travel info pages.
So what we can see are basically two big trends right now.
1. Partnerships between online communities and classic publishers. The communities build online applications and courses based on the content of the publishers. This saves time and money on the development on the community side and adds a new revenue stream out of old content for the publishers without investment in new technologies from their side.
2. Partnerships between online communities / teaching platforms and other internet companies. This is to bring targeted traffic to the language learning websites and can add a revenue stream for the internet companies that offer those entry points via affiliate links.
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