author: Yu Huan, Editor: Wan Fang, head Figure from: Vision China
The largest payment platform for knowledge is about to go public, but what knowledge have you learned from them?
Not long ago, Luo Ji, the originator of “knowledge payment”, hit the GEM and wanted to become “the first stock of “knowledge payment”…
On October 21st, the early knowledge paying player Little Goose officially announced that it has received hundreds of millions of yuan in C round investment……
The two major players known as payment for knowledge have successively deployed in the capital market, once again pushing the concept of payment for knowledge to the forefront.
One hour of proficiency, one day of learning, realization of millions in a week, class leaping… These dream-like vocabulary are often seen in the course promotion interface of knowledge payment.
The birth of this industry is accompanied by boundless hopes. People hope to pay for knowledge to make up for the cognitive gap and relieve anxiety.
In the eyes of users, it seems that as long as they pay money, they can obtain knowledge, but the payment for knowledge has been ridiculed and criticized again and again, and gradually fell into silence.
Is payment for knowledge an outlet or a scam? Are you creating wealth or harvesting leeks?
This issue of microscopy stories tells a group of in-depth experiencers who pay for knowledge. Among them:
Some people have been in the industry for 6 years, have seen too many “industry secrets”, and are familiar with the packaging logic of a best-selling course;
Some people pay tens of thousands of yuan at a time to learn how to “make money by starting a business”, but in the class they talked about “why make money” for three sessions…
The following is their true story:
The “36 tricks” of cutting leek, as long as you want to take shortcuts, they will have a way to harvest you
Smoker 28 years old, independent content producer
I have been in the field of payment for knowledge for 6 years.
From the perspective of a practitioner, I divide the players in this industry into three echelons:
The first echelon is a professional platform like Luo Ji Thinking and Chaos University;
The second echelon is Fan Deng Reading Club, Ten O’clock Reading, Wu Xiaobo Channel, etc. The traffic is good, but the professional platform is average;
The third echelon is players based on WeChat ecology, such as Qianchao and Litchi Microclass. 80% of the leek cutting occurs in this field.
Of course, there are smaller players, just like the capillaries of various industries. They teach classes to collect money and accumulate personal traffic, and they harvest those who want to take shortcuts.
There are hundreds of different types of leek cutting courses, but most of them have one thing in common: poor quality and high fees.
If you want to study the issue of cutting leeks for paying for knowledge, you have to look at the third batch of players and below.
Their purpose of paying for knowledge is only one, to collect money. For them, doing courses is just a means to collect money.
Their methods of collecting money are extremely diverse.
First, it started with a headline of “warranty” and the so-called high conversion rate, and then a seductive marketing, carefully packaged and optimized course details page, and finally let users buy.
As for the content and whether the users will gain, the organization completely ignores it, and it all depends on whether the lecturer is reliable.
Because course production organizations can quickly develop courses and make lessons quickly in order to compress the overall production cycle, most of them are not responsible for the course production process.
To put it bluntly, they don’t know what the course is about. No one checks the quality anyway, maybe the lessons you listen to are made in more than ten or twenty minutes.
In some course institutions, a company has less than 10 employees, but it can develop 328 courses in a year.
There is also a company with 6 employees, which develops more than 200 classes every year. How can such a small amount of manpower control the quality of the courses?
The company has so few employees. The high-paying position is not course development, but course sales.
The paid-for-knowledge platform wants to sell more courses, and the platform does not care about the quality of the courses, so as long as it is given huge traffic support, more people will buy and the money will be made.
However, the quality of such courses cannot be guaranteed at all, so some users buy courses and give bad reviews, but institutions and platforms don’t care.
You said my course is bad, and some people say my course is good, If you want to refund the money, you will definitely not refund.
If you make a lot of trouble, I will refund you the money. Anyway, the marginal cost of doing the class is zero. Sell one for one, and sell ten for ten.
If you want to make trouble, I will refund you the money, and shut up after the refund.
In addition to the people who get platform traffic, there are two other important roles in the organization:
The first type is people who pull lecturers. They have KPIs. They “chat” dozens of “lecturers” every week, and pull them to give lectures in institutions;
The second type is the person who makes the copy of the detail page.
The lecturer will complete the class by himself, and will fill in a list of content on the detail page. Based on this list of content, the copywriter can write a very attractive detail page copy.
Even if they haven’t watched the class at all, so many copywritings that look very attractive are basically routines.
At the beginning, this kind of copy is to describe your current plight, and describe the scene with several parallels;
Then explain how to solve the dilemma;
Finally cut to the topic: Come and buy this course.
How good this course is, how many people have it, how good the lecturer is, and then list some people who have taken the course, their gains and changes.
As for what kind of class is good and what kind of class is cut leek, I can only say that good courses are the same, and bad courses have their own bad methods.
Some courses are poorly produced and cannot keep up with the supporting services. Others have problems with values. For example, some courses teach people to socialize in the wine bureau. Doesn’t this class promote the wine table culture more?
The reason why more courses are considered “cutting leek” is mainly because the content does not meet the expectations of the participants.
The marketing details page is written in a mess. After listening to one class, you can earn more than 10,000 a month, 12 recruits to convince people, and a few classes to master the philosophy of life…
But it is really difficult to achieve, after all, learn oneA one-dimensional quadratic equation takes three days. How can one class catch up with others for many years now?
I spent more than 10,000 to buy entrepreneurship class, and the teacher used three lessons to talk about why we should embrace the Internet
Xiao Xiao, 33 years old, employee of education and training institution
I started paying for knowledge in 2016.
I grew up in a teacher’s family. Everyone in my family loves learning, but everyone has different hobbies and different types of knowledge.
My sister will pay for postgraduate entrance exams and civil service courses, and I buy professional courses, emotional intelligence courses, speaking courses, etc., after I get married and have children, I will also buy family education courses.
The platforms I have contacted include NetEase Open Class and Fan Deng Study. The course fees range from a few hundred to tens of thousands. I have contacted both online and offline.
There are some courses that cost a few hundred dollars. They are well advertised, but after paying, I found that there is only one point and one introduction that speaks well. In the later stage, many of them are marketing-inducing you to buy more expensive course.
When I find that the lessons may not be practical, I feel that I am being pitted.
Most adults hope that the course will give them a way to make money, and the price of the course must match the availability.
I bought a course costing more than 13,000 yuan. There are 50 lessons in total, with an average of 300 yuan per lesson, and a lesson is only ten minutes.
How can you explain particularly important theories and methods in ten minutes? But the publicity package of the class is so good that you will find that you are the leek only after paying.
There are still some classes. After payment, only a bunch of written materials will be received. The teacher does not speak, and there is no exchange between students.
It’s even worse. After paying, I can’t get in touch with the organization, and there’s no response to feedback.
After being cut several times with leeks, I slowly learned to evaluate the effectiveness of each course by myself.
For example, whether the knowledge points and skills of the course can solve practical problems, the popularity of the teacher, and then go to several platforms to “shop around”.
As for the “cutting leek” class, I think there are two kinds.
The first category is a class that teaches people to make money. I was pitted by a course called “Entrepreneurship to Make Money” for more than 10,000 yuan.
It was still in the midst of the epidemic, and my offline educational institution was affected and I was eager to make money. And their promotional packaging is very gorgeous, and they are big teachers.
I didn’t even audition, so I paid more than 10,000 yuan.
When I looked at the course, I was dumbfounded. The teacher can even teach three lessons on “Why do you want to make money on the Internet?” Isn’t this nonsense?
After the whole course, there is no case, no interaction, and you have to explore it by yourself.
The second category is skill-based courses. For example, when Douyin is very popular this year, many teachers will launch courses that teach you to make Douyin videos for 99 yuan, but those contents can actually be found on Baidu.
Although there are many pits in the payment of knowledge, I still feel that when I want to join a certain industry, it takes time to think about it by myself. I am willing to pay for it because I hope to find a professional person.
After all, there will still be some new perspectives and insights in the courses in this industry.
It said that one hour changed my life, and one month passed I still didn’t make any money
Little Deer Run 30-year-old writer
Some time ago, an official account that I followed for a long time found me.
They want to invite me to help promote a time management course in Moments. They have both speech skills and posters.
But when I saw the familiar phrase, I refused.
This sentence is: “Learning time management in one hour will change your life.”
I think of the past two years, this is how I was attracted to such advertising.
So many “one hour” passed, and I still haven’t changed much.
Starting from the first year of payment for knowledge in 2016, in the wave of payment for knowledge, I also brought my wallet and kept pace.
From January 2016 to 2017, I spent just over a year of consumption. I once calculated for myself: I bought 46 lectures on Zhihu and cost 1,500 yuan;
Purchase 21 lectures on WeChat at a cost of 500 yuan;
Participating in a writing training class costs 500 yuan;
It costs 300 yuan to purchase courses on the get;
Participating in two early bed and early wake-up punch-in groups, cost 100 yuan;
The other seven or eight courses cost 2,000 yuan…
Together, it costs about 5,000 yuan.
The biggest result of these lectures or courses is that because of the initial investment of money cost, I will naturally spend the corresponding time cost in the later stage.
The total time cost I spent is about 300 hours, and 300 hours can almost complete the writing of a book.
But looking back at the time I purchased the course, am I smarter?
Except for a few more white hairs, a few more wrinkles, and a few more bags under the eyes, everything seems to have not changed in life.
My quality of life has not improved, my job has not been raised, my travel dream has not been realized…
So I finally started to ask myself: Why do I spend so much time and energy on theseOn the course? Are these paid courses really worth it?
Although these courses are not completely useless, every principle or method is a summary of the experience of the presenter.
But the experience that people have spent ten years or even a lifetime summed up is certainly not one hour of listening to change fate.
Especially many courses have a similar appearance: 10 minutes to teach you five fast-growing experiences, one hour to build, one week to learn, and rapid life change.
People are easily moved by course promotion and marketing culture, and the title is full of fashionable new terms.
In fact, many real truths are actually simple. If you can grasp a few simple truths and apply them all the time, you will have achieved good results in all aspects.
When you see an article, hurry up to collect it; see a course, hurry to buy it; see a community, hurry up to participate.
In the face of knowledge, we may be like seeing a discounted product, for fear of missing it.
Because it is knowledge, we buy it more without guilt than clothes. But because it is knowledge, buying more will make us more confused and anxious.
Because I have some experience of paying for knowledge, I also summarized a few lessons:
The only shortcut in this world is hard work.
Spend time to read more classics and don’t pay for ignorance.
Don’t become a hoarder of knowledge, but an actor of knowledge.
Knowing too much truth, but still having a bad life, and always paying for the truth of others, is it not like this in life?
I like a passage in Calvino’s “The Hermit of Paris”: I have no confidence in anything that is readily available, fast, instinctive, improvised, or ambiguous.
I believe in the power of slowness, calmness, and long-flowing water, steady and calm.
I don’t believe that without self-discipline, without self-building and hard work, one can get personal or collective liberation.
author: Yu Huan, Editor: Wan Fang