Context◆Article

Other course creators are seeing the same pattern: revenue down 50%+, less engagement, and audiences switching to LLMs that scrape and regurgitate creators' work without consent or compensation.

Comeau says other course creators corroborate the trend: steep revenue and engagement drops as people turn to LLMs that absorb and repackage their content without permission or pay. ✦ AI generated

Josh W. Comeau · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-03 · original ↗

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I've spoken to a few course creators now, and we're all seeing the same trend. Revenue down 50%+. Fewer people engaging with our content. People switching to LLMs, which slurp up all of our work and regurgitate it, without consent or compensation.

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✳ LLMs

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Mechanism · 1

AI is causing a double whammy on course sales: fear over whether developer jobs will still exist makes people reluctant to invest time or money learning new dev skills, and those who still want to learn can get free personalized tutoring from LLMs instead of buying a course.Josh W. Comeau · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 70%

In practice · 1

My third course, Whimsical Animations, is on track to sell roughly one-third as many copies as a typical course launch.Josh W. Comeau · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 60%

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supports → Sales on my two existing courses are also down significantly from last year.Josh W. Comeau · Simon Willison's Weblog supports → I'll paywall slightly more articles going forward because revenue is the only metric I can rely on to measure the blog's real influence, unlike vanity metrics like views and likes.Nathan Lambert · Interconnects extends → Sales on my two existing courses are also down significantly from last year.Josh W. Comeau · Simon Willison's Weblog