Introducing the Online Education & Course Market Map

ainewground's second market map covers online education and courses. It brings together 233 companies and creators that run learning platforms, sell courses or build AI learning tools across the US, Europe, Korea, Japan and China (plus India and others) in a single table. Research is as of October 13, 2026.

Open the Online Education & Course Market Map

What's in it

• By country: Korea 58 · US 46 · China 42 · Europe 40 · Japan 40 · Other (India, Australia, Brazil, Canada) 7.
• Six origin types: ① Academy & publishing legacy; ② Online course platform; ③ Creator & solo instructor; ④ Sales tools & infrastructure; ⑤ Social & content platform; and ⑥ AI-native. Because cram schools now ship AI tutors and solo creators open offline hubs, players that span multiple categories carry secondary type numbers as well.
• Twelve filter axes: country, origin type, field (8 categories including K-12 test prep, civil-service & certification exams, languages, career/IT/AI, and business/finance), scale tier, flags (AI integrated · tools only · distressed/closed), customers (B2C · B2B · B2G), metric type, revenue model (16 types), instructor payout, price band, face exposure (real name & face · character/avatar · faceless), and ownership.
• Beyond the table: six numbers that sum up the industry, trends across 16 revenue models, a side-by-side comparison of instructor payouts across platforms, where AI threatens or expands each layer, a 2015–2026 timeline of deals and collapses, 29 key people, 13 industry trends for 2024–2026, and five notable players to watch by region.

What stood out while building it

• AI replaces "answer-selling" products first, while "teaching how to use AI" is a new growth market. Homework-help subscription service Chegg saw 2025 revenue drop 39% — explicitly citing Google AI Overviews in its 10-K — while monthly questions on Stack Overflow fell 81.5% in a single year. Conversely, AI content now accounts for 56% of revenue at Korea's Day1 Company (Fast Campus), Japan's SHIFT AI reached 40,000 paid members at JPY 217,800/year, and AI course enrollments on Udemy jumped 120%.
• Shrinking marketplace payouts are pushing solo instructors toward direct sales and paid communities. Instructor share of Udemy's subscription revenue pool fell from 20% in 2024 to 17.5% in 2025 and 15% in January 2026, before Coursera completed its acquisition of Udemy in May 2026. Solo educators are moving to flat-rate SaaS and community tools such as Kajabi (0% transaction fee), Skool, Stan, note and Xiaoetong — exemplified by Justin Welsh, who built $10M in cumulative revenue at an 89% profit margin with zero employees selling directly on Kajabi.
• "Most users" and "most revenue" often run in opposite directions. In Korea, Megastudy's official YouTube channel has 236K subscribers yet the company posts KRW 884.9B (~$640M) in annual revenue, while knowledge YouTubers with millions of subscribers may have zero course revenue. That's why the map pairs usage sorting with an estimated USD revenue sort.
• Each region has moved in a distinct direction. The US is consolidating first-generation MOOCs (Coursera+Udemy, 2U's Chapter 11) while foundation-model labs sign directly with universities (ChatGPT Edu across 460K students at California State University). Five years after China's "Double Reduction" crackdown on K-12 tutoring, Chinese players have rebuilt around dedicated AI learning tablets (Zuoyebang shipped 2.488M tablets in a year) and knowledge-driven live commerce (East Buy, Time With Yuhui). In Korea and Japan, B2B corporate AI training, faceless/avatar educators (Ryo-gakucho's 9.66M subscribers, Malhaeboca), and high-margin adult finance and career cohorts (Weolbu's reported 55% operating margin △) stand out.

How to read the numbers

• Every figure carries a verification mark: ✔ = confirmed in a primary source or filing, △ = press report or secondary estimate, ✘ = shut down or refuted.
• Because one company reports cumulative signups while another reports MAU, paid subscribers or channel followers, raw numbers can't be compared directly. We group headline figures into scale tiers — S (100M+) · A (10M+) · B (1M+) · C (100K+) · D (below 100K) · ? (unconfirmed) — and pair them with a Metric type filter so you can compare like with like.
• Your filter and sort choices stay in your own browser.

What's next

The map isn't a one-off; it keeps being updated. Every change is logged with its date under "What changed" at the bottom of the map. It is currently available in Korean and English. If you spot a wrong figure or a missing player, use "Report an error" on the map or write to hello@ainewground.com.