Educational Videos – The Best Way To Make Money Online?

So you want to use web video to make money online.  But what’s the best way to do this?  Attempt to create viral videos to drive traffic to your site?  Target specific keywords with your videos and upload them to sharing sites?  Create entertaining videos and draw a large audience, where you become advertiser supported?

All of those methods can work…but one of the most tried and true ways is to provide educational videos. 

These can range anywhere from videos that demonstrate how to use software…to videos that demonstrate subjects which are often hard to understand in words or print.  And the application of educational videos can be endless.

Take for example a recently released site called Brightstorm.  Backed by $6 million dollars in funding, this site offers video tutorials on high-school level subjects.  Or in other words, it’s a video based “virtual tutor” site for high-school students.  You browse for a subject, pick a video course, buy it for $49 and get instant-access to it for a year.

But Brightstorm isn’t the only player out there.  More and more sites like these are popping up…teaching everything from SAT preparation to robotics.  And people like them.  A lot.

How much do they like them and how much money can you make with educational videos?  Well, just to give you an idea of popularity and revenue, let’s take a look at a Korean web site known as “Megastudy”.

This site offers over 2,000 video courses for Korean students, designed to help them “cram” for tests.  The company behind the site expects revenues of $65 million dollars this year.  And a nice percentage of that money (up to 23%) is shared with the teachers who help produce the videos.  In fact, one English teacher earned $2 million dollars last year alone.

Not bad for putting together a few hours worth of video instruction on a topic you know inside and out, huh?

So my advice for people who are looking to get into some type of business featuring web video is to focus on educational content.  Only a small piece of the pie has been eaten at this point…and there’s still enormous opportunity out there.

Plus, remember with web video there are no rules.  Any idea you have can be turned into any type of video product…just because it hasn’t been done, don’t think that you can’t do it.