The short answer: yes, selling online courses is profitable... for a minority whose behavior we can describe with data. Among experts on Kajabi who have made at least one sale, the typical expert has earned $3,653 lifetime, while 14% have crossed $100,000 and 2.4% have passed $1 million. Since 2010, experts have earned more than $11.7 billion on Kajabi, and the gap between the typical expert and the six-figure expert comes down to three measurable behaviors: customers who buy again, a catalog deeper than one offer, and enough months in the game for both to compound.
That paragraph is the whole report. Everything below is the evidence.
Key findings
- The typical expert with at least one sale has earned $3,653 lifetime. The average is $122,047, roughly 33 times higher, because a small group of giant earners drags the average away from everyone else's reality.
- The top 1% of experts collect 44.3% of everything ever earned on the platform. Even so, one expert in seven crosses $100,000, and about one in forty crosses $1 million.
- 53.8% of all expert earnings arrived on a customer's second purchase from an expert, or their third, or their tenth.
- Experts with one offer have typically earned $180 lifetime. Experts with ten or more offers have typically earned $82,212, and 45% of that group crosses six figures. (The causation caveat is below, and we mean it.)
- The typical first sale lands 67 days after signup. Experts who go on to reach $10,000 typically cross it 5.16 months after their first sale; $100,000, 16.91 months.
Where this data comes from (and its one honest limitation)
We run Kajabi. Since 2010, experts on our platform have earned more than $11.7 billion selling what they know, across 101.0 million transactions. Every number in this report comes from real transactions... money that moved, from a buyer to an expert. Survey data rounds up. Ours can't.
Two things to know before you quote us:
"Typical" is the median, in plain words. Sort every expert who has ever made a sale by lifetime earnings and pick the one sitting at the exact halfway point; that expert's total is our "typical" number. We lead with it because the average lies in this dataset: a small class of enormous earners hoists the average to a figure that describes almost nobody.
The honest limitation. Successful experts rarely sell courses alone. A course sits next to a membership, next to a coaching program, all in one catalog, often bought by the same customer. We can't surgically isolate "course income only," and we'd distrust anyone who claims they can. These numbers cover expert businesses across every model experts run on Kajabi... courses, coaching, communities, consulting, certification... and a course is the most common thing experts describe themselves as selling.
One more thing to demand from anyone publishing numbers like these: the denominator. Every stat in this report is among experts who have made at least one sale. People who signed up and never sold anything don't count against these numbers, and they don't get to count for them either.
What does the typical online course seller earn?
$3,653. Lifetime. All of it, total.
You won't find that number in the other articles ranking for this question. Those articles quote survey averages and revenue screenshots, and their authors tend to sell a course about selling courses (read their numbers with that incentive in mind). Every platform in this category has its real median sitting in a database. Publishing it is the uncomfortable part. Here's ours.
Now put the second number next to it: the average expert has earned $122,047. Same dataset, same day, same experts. A typical figure in the low four thousands sitting under an average deep in six figures can only mean one thing: the biggest earners pull the average so far up the scale that it stops describing the middle at all. On Kajabi, the top 1% of experts have collected 44.3% of everything ever earned.
So the market splits into two groups with a canyon between them. Most experts earn close to nothing. The group across the canyon, bigger than you'd guess, runs businesses that changed their households' finances: 14% of experts with at least one sale cross $100,000, and 2.4% cross $1 million. Call it 1 in 7 and 1 in 40.
1 in 7 is a serious number. Those are hard odds and honest odds, and unlike lottery odds, they move when your behavior moves.
The variables that sort experts onto the two sides of the canyon are behaviors, and behaviors can be copied. Expertise, credentials, and effort decide far less than you'd hope... we've met PhDs and twenty-year practitioners camped near the bottom of the distribution after years of real work. Follower counts help far less than the influencer economy wants you to believe... the expert economy pays for transformation, and we ran the follower math separately in a million followers, same odds. The three behaviors that do the sorting are next.
What separates six-figure experts from everyone else?
Three findings. All three are visible in transaction data, and none of them is charisma.
Finding 1: More than half of all expert earnings come from repeat buyers
Take the more than $11.7 billion earned by experts on Kajabi and trace every dollar to its buyer: 53.8% of it arrived on a customer's second purchase from an expert, or their third, or their tenth.
That single percentage quietly indicts how most first-time experts operate: launch one course, spend everything chasing brand-new buyers, repeat until exhausted. The majority of the money in this economy went to people a customer chose twice.
The contrast sharpens at the six-figure line. A six-figure expert's transaction history typically shows 563 distinct buyers averaging 2.67 purchases apiece. Below that line, the typical history shows about 10 buyers at 1.22 purchases each.
Those are two different machines. The first starts every sale cold and has to win a new buyer's confidence from scratch. The second gets cheaper to run with every customer, because a second sale to an existing customer skips the costliest work in this business: getting someone who has never met you to trust you with their card.
"So I need hundreds of buyers before any of this applies to me?"
You need a second thing worth buying. The 563-buyer expert started at 10 buyers too. What she did differently was give those 10 people somewhere to go next. The next thing takes whatever shape fits the expertise: a watercolor teacher follows her course with a critique community, a leadership coach follows the workshop with a group program, a fractional CFO follows the audit with a retainer.
Finding 2: Catalog depth predicts earnings (with the caveat that keeps it honest)
Among experts with at least one sale, the single-offer experts sit at a typical lifetime total of $180. Experts with ten or more offers sit at $82,212, and 45% of that group crosses $100,000.
Now the caveat, because the caveat is the credibility: experts with deep catalogs earn more, and we cannot tell you which direction the causation runs. Neither can anyone else, whatever their landing page says. Catalogs grow while experts succeed. By the time offer number ten goes live, the expert behind it has usually survived long enough to learn, from paying customers, which nine ideas deserved a tenth. Some of that $82,212 is the catalog earning. Some of it is survival, measured in offers.
So the supported takeaway: one offer is, typically, a $180 business, and the second offer is where compounding starts, because it gives the buyers from Finding 1 something to come back for. (A sprint to ten offers by Christmas would skip the years of customer feedback that made the deep catalogs work.) And "offer" covers far more ground than "another course." A course is one of five models an expert business can run... coaching, community, consulting, and certification fill out the set... and the limitation section above already told you the successful catalogs mix them. We mapped how to choose among the five business models for selling your expertise. Pricing that second offer against your first is its own arithmetic, and we wrote it up in the course pricing math.
Finding 3: The profitable experts were still there when it mattered
Both findings above share a hidden requirement: time. Repeat buyers need something to come back to. Second offers get built by people who didn't quit after the first one. Which raises the question every would-be expert actually cares about.
How long does it take to make money selling online courses?
Among experts who make a sale, the typical first sale lands 67 days after signing up. About 30% get there within 30 days, and 58% within 90.
That makes your first sale a 90-day project, and the honest planning number, roughly a two-month one. The fastest experts compress it further by selling your course before you build it... collecting real money as validation instead of building for months on a hunch.
The pacing after the first sale surprised even us. Experts who eventually cross $10,000 typically get there 5.16 months after their first sale. Crossing $100,000 typically takes 16.91 months from first sale.
Carry the denominator with you: those figures describe only the experts who got there, and the canyon above tells you plenty never do. But among the ones who do, the whole arc from first sale to six figures typically fits inside a two-year apartment lease. And the transaction history of the typical expert sitting at $3,653 is short: about 10 buyers, barely more than one purchase apiece. Both compounding behaviors from the previous section, never begun.
So, is selling online courses profitable in 2026?
Profitable the way a small business is profitable: for operators, at real odds, with the startup costs of a laptop instead of a lease.
Treat $3,653 as the number to beat instead of the number to expect, and the data on this page becomes a checklist. Get one customer to buy twice. Build the second offer when (and only when) the first one works... in whichever of the five models fits what your buyers ask for next. Plan on 90 days to your first sale and stay in the game past it, because the experts who reached six figures were, above all else, still playing at month 17.
"You run a course platform. Of course you'd say it's profitable."
First, the frame: Kajabi is the all-in-one platform experts run whole businesses on, and a course is one of the five models our experts sell (coaching, communities, consulting, and certification sit right beside it in the same catalog). Second, the incentive: we just told you the typical expert on our own platform has earned $3,653, that the top 1% take 44.3% of everything, and that the typical one-offer business has earned $180 lifetime. As sales pitches go, ours needs work. We published the ugly numbers because the experts who make it are the ones who walked in knowing them.
One last data-backed warning before you go build: the most common failure pattern we see is months of building followed by a launch to an empty room. We took that one apart in why most online courses never sell. Read it before you record lesson one.
The experts who crossed the canyon asked a sharper question than "is this profitable?" They asked what the profitable ones do, and then they did it. As of today, you know exactly what that is.
