Skillfeed

» see skillfeed.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Shutterstock launched Skillfeed on 4 June 2013 with more than ten thousand videos from over a hundred instructors and a single price: one monthly subscription, unlimited watching. The logic was that the company already had millions of designers coming to it for images, and those designers were buying tutorials somewhere else, so why not here. Instructors uploaded courses and were paid out of the subscription pool according to how much of their material people actually watched.

It grew fast on paper. By the time it closed the catalog held 94,616 tutorials, 10,695 hours of instruction from 1,291 instructors, which is roughly a hundred thousand videos accumulated in twenty-seven months. Volume was never the problem.

On 3 September 2015 Skillfeed stopped accepting new customers and new instructors on the same day, with a notice that said the service was "at a crossroads" and that the decision came "after thoughtful consideration and exhausting many different ideas." Existing members kept access until 30 September. The last archived copy of the homepage is from the small hours of that final day, still serving its course listings, still carrying the Facebook pixel and the Google tag.

~ the dossier ~

~ the adobe problem ~

The explanation that circulated in the stock photography trade press is the one that holds up. A large share of what Skillfeed taught was how to use Adobe products, because that is what the audience bought it for. In 2015 Adobe launched Adobe Stock, built on the Fotolia library it had acquired, and became a direct competitor to Shutterstock's entire business. Paying to improve people's Photoshop skills is a strange line item when Photoshop's maker is selling images against you.

That may not be the whole of it. The same year LinkedIn paid $1.5 billion for Lynda.com, which told everyone exactly how expensive winning this category was going to be, and Skillshare and Udemy were both further along. Shutterstock had a side project in a market that had just acquired a very well funded landlord.

~ what happens to instructors ~

The revenue-share model is the part worth sitting with. An instructor on a subscription platform contributes to a pool and takes a slice of it proportional to watch time, which works nicely while the pool keeps growing. When the platform closes there is no customer list to take away with you and no back catalog still earning. People who had put months into producing courses got four weeks of notice that the pool was gone.

~ not my shelf ~

I have never bought a tutorial subscription. My own learning has come off documentation, papers and other people's source, which is the standard diet in this part of the industry and also a slightly smug thing to say, so here is the honest version: the design side of Skillfeed's catalog was work I cannot do and have never tried to learn. Lynda was the name that reached Turkey from this category, mostly through universities, and even that arrived late. Skillfeed came and went inside two academic years and I would not have heard of it at all.

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