Dive Brief:
- Codecademy’s chief executive said in an interview that his company aims to fix the ills of higher education — namely student loan debt burdens and poor job prospects for graduates — by “rethinking education from the bottom up.”
- Zach Sims told Benzinga that Codecademy exists to teach the skills its students need to find jobs.
- He also said that monetizing the free online computer programming training site is not a focus, but hinted that it will become a consideration in the future.
Dive Insight:
Monetization is a key question in the company’s future. How can it sustainably continue to offer its services for free? With 24 million users now, four years after launching, it would appear to have grown large enough to implement some kind of revenue-generating measures, and other code-teaching schools and websites are succeeding with paid-tuition models. About 30% of Codecademy’s market is in the U.S., with 70% in the rest of the world.
