Black Friday and Cyber Monday: edX, Pluralsight, Udemy and Skillshare Join the Marketing Season

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IBL News
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IBL News | New York

This year, online education was not immune to the marketing craziness of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Even edX.org, the nonprofit organization founded by Harvard and MIT, and focused on higher education at scale, fell into the guerrilla promotional techniques after the Thanksgiving day.

Competitors, Coursera and Udacity, the two Silicon Valley largely founded unicorns, contradicted their commercially aggressive reputation and stayed calm. Also, Microsoft’s LinkedIn Learning and 2U’s GetSmarter short courses unit remained quiet.

On Thursday, edX announced that something big was coming: “Mark your calendars and head over to edx.org tomorrow for the reveal.”

That big event was no other than a 20% discount on the purchases of courses and programs, as stated on their website, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn:

edX’s offer highlighted a selection of 24 programs and courses about Data Science, Business, and Computer Science, although the code could be applied to other courses, as MITx reminded on its Twitter account.

Another large company, Pluralsight (NASDAQ: PS), with a whopping market cap of $2.3 billion, offered a discount of 40% on an annual subscription: prices on regular subscriptions dropped from $299 to $179, and from $449 to $269 on premium. (Connected or not to the deal, Pluralsight’s stock grew 2.23% yesterday.)

Black Friday savings were also heavily promoted on Udemy.com, with one of the largest catalogs of courses (over 100,000 titles).

Udemy launched thousands of courses starting at $10 when those classes normally cost $100.

Skillshare didn’t miss the shopping opportunity and went with a “super sale”.

Finally, Teachable.com, the course creation platform, launched its first-ever discount (10% to 20%) on basic and professional membership plans. Its main competitor, Thinkific, joined the marketing season, too.