Coursera Is Just Not That Into You

The new 15% "platform fee" comes on top of de-emphasizing OPM degrees and university content

Author

Phil Hill
October 23, 2025

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Can we just admit it at this point? Coursera is doing its part to tell universities what it thinks of the relationship. The company’s origin was based on university content and partnerships, “Learn online from top universities” and all, and Coursera is happy to continue leveraging university brands. But the real brand is Coursera.

  • Nov 2024: Coursera’s Content Strategy Change - The plan is laid out to investors for Coursera to increase investments into developing its own content, signaling that university content was too slow and not responsive to the AI era.

  • April 2025: Friday Follow Up (premium) - Coursera takes the next step, telling investors that Degrees (university OPM relationships) are expected to decrease and will now just be another type of Consumer business.

This week might be the biggest change, even if it is in the same vein, Coursera announced via email to its partners that it will start charging a “15% platform fee” on January 1, 2026 for all non-OPM channels.

To sustain this progress and continue investing in innovation that benefits our educators and learners, Coursera will implement a 15% Platform Fee beginning January 1, 2026, across all product types in our Consumer (excluding Degrees) and Enterprise channels. This fee will be charged to learners and customers using the platform, and will not change partner revenue-sharing percentages. Learner pricing remains unchanged. The fee applies to Q1 2026 activity and will be reflected in May 2026 disbursements.

The email goes on to describe the purpose of the fee to fund investment in discovery, optimization, assessment & validation, and reach.

A More Direct Reading

The real motivation is hiding in plain sight, however. It is financial optimization for Coursera.

  • Platform fee essentially means that this is revenue 100% allocated to Coursera.

  • Note the combination of “fee charged to learners” but “learner pricing remains unchanged.” This means that the 15% will be subtracted from top-line revenue before Coursera splits the revenue with university (and corporate) partners.

  • The letter was sent out two days before Coursera’s Q3 earnings release today.

The email then told university partners to:

expect the distribution percentage to decrease beginning in Q1 2026, reflecting our ongoing efforts to drive efficiency and reinvest more value back into partner growth.

Give us more so we can “reinvest more value” in your growth, that’s some interesting logic. I think it would have been better to admit what is happening.

Careful Discussion or Unilateral Action

Near the end of the email comes this context.

We recognize that any change to our model deserves care and transparency. This decision was shaped by months of analysis, benchmarking, and thoughtful discussion on how best to support sustainable growth for both Coursera and our partners.

What I’m hearing is quite different. Coursera might have spent months of analysis and thoughtful discussion internally, but many university partners are, how shall we say, quite upset. This was not a months-long process of open discussion with university partners, working to explain the issues and getting them on board. The phrase I am hearing is that this move was unilateral.

I assume that Coursera spent months review its contractual language, because in the end this platform fee is simply a way to reduce the percentage of top-line revenue distributed back to partners. Is Coursera allowed to unilaterally make this move? I do not know the answer to this question, but I would be willing to bet that there are dozens of university lawyers exploring this question.

But it is worth noting that the Degrees (OPM) business line is not included in the scope of this new fee, despite it theoretically benefitting from the same platform investments. Why? Occam’s Razor would suggest that OPM contracts went through much more review by university lawyers and executives, and that Coursera cannot unilaterally change those terms.

Aggregator Theory

The problem for universities is that Coursera is what Ben Thompson from Stratechery describes as an aggregator. Aggregators create demand (learners) and leverage that to control markets and set terms with suppliers (universities). Thompson described this dynamic in his 2018 post defining the concept [emphasis added].

Because aggregators deal with digital goods, there is an abundance of supply; that means users reap value through discovery and curation, and most aggregators get started by delivering superior discovery.

Then, once an aggregator has gained some number of end users, suppliers will come onto the aggregator’s platform on the aggregator’s terms, effectively commoditizing and modularizing themselves. Those additional suppliers then make the aggregator more attractive to more users, which in turn draws more suppliers, in a virtuous cycle.

There may be a lot of frustrated university leaders today, but do they really have any options beyond legal contractual review? I suspect that Coursera is banking on this dynamic. Welcome to being a commodity - your Coursera partnership may be lucrative, but your partner is just not that into you.

And the blasé attitude was reinforced in that Coursera did not even mention the new platform fee in the shareholder letter sent out today.

Stay tuned, and I’ll update tomorrow if more information comes out in the earnings call.

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