A lot has been and will be written about Salman Khan. Though he already arrived in the spotlight of mainstream media, he is clearly just at the beginning of his mission. And with fresh money in the war chest, Khan and his team are now planning the next attack on the education system. 

Besides growing the faculty of the Khan Academy, Khan is planning to open the system to teachers around the globe who can then use the Knowledge Map to build their own courses and also have access to the in-depth analytic tools Khan Academy is providing at the back-end. 

But here is the deal: the content must be put up to Khan Academy’s noncommercial public domain. Noncommercial. 

I believe, this is an aspect of Khan Academy most people have not thought about or didn’t pay attention to yet but that has the potential to change the economics of education profoundly. 

At the moment, there are basically three business models in online education. Ad-supported, freemium and premium. But there are also two large scale operations that have no business model at all, Khan Academy and Wikipedia. Let’s go to the three most popular for-profit ones before we focus on the noncommercial examples. 

Ad-supported education are in most cases smaller projects of individual educators who upload videos to YouTube and display Google ads against them. From my own experience you will earn enough money to pay for a couple of fancy coffees every month but as the revenue per click or impression for education related ads is not comparable with other topics, it is not suitable for bigger operations. 

Freemium is a very popular model amongst education startups. Users have access to a big chunk of the product for free, though this part is usually also supported by display ads. If learners then want to have access to extra content, usually grammar charts, worksheets or videos, they will have to pay. 

Premium, as the name suggests, is content that is only available to paying customers. Language learning platform Babbel famously switched the popular freemium model to premium only back in November 2009 and soon afterwards announced that the startup was profitable. Another reason was the problem the team saw in displaying ads. 

Ads are far from being an ideal revenue stream in an educational context. You cannot really control what is displayed next or even inside of the video lesson. Ads can be a distraction, especially when they are animated or feature sound effects and they have the draw-back that they are seen critically in a public school context and I think this is also part of Khan Academy’s success amongst educators. Khan Academy has always been ad-free although nowadays Khan could make some significant income based on either Google Ads or by selling sponsorships based on his reach. 3.5 million unique visitors a month are worth a ton of money yet Khan Academy stays a noncommercial platform.