Why Creators Are Leaving Skool at the End of 2026

Why are creators leaving Skool in 2026? Discover the real reasons behind the mass exodus and what platforms creators are switching to instead.

In this insightful video, we explore why creators are leaving Skool at the end of 2026. We examine shifting dynamics across content-creation platforms, the impact of policy changes, and emerging alternatives attracting talent. Discover the trends influencing this migration and what it means for the future of digital content. Tune in to understand the landscape and why creators are making this pivotal shift.

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The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:17.060] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 188. In this episode, why are creators leaving school In the last third, last quarter of 2026, um, Skool has done some major changes to their platforms, added some major costs. Um, should be interesting show. Um, I just don’t want to apply it just to have a go at Skool, but I think our discussion applies to like Patreon or Substack. Or any of these platforms really. I’ve got my great co-host Kurt with me. Kurt, would you like to quickly introduce yourself?

[00:01:02.060] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, Jonathan, my name is Kurt Von Ahnen. I own the agency called Mañana No Más, work directly with LifterLMS, and of course the great team over at WP-Tonic.

[00:01:12.250] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. Like I say, we’re going to be discussing Event School, their new pricing structures, Um, how you gotta pay to be discovered on their platform. Should be an interesting show. But before we go into the meat and potatoes, I’ve got a couple messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:01:36.020] – Speaker 4

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[00:02:54.500] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. I’d like to point out that we do a fabulous newsletter. It’s totally free. It normally has a subject around WordPress membership marketing, and then I find the latest stories of the week and I combine it all into one newsletter. It’s totally free. You can get it by going over to wp-tonic.com/newsletter, wp-tonic.com/newsletter. So, um, how are we going to introduce this? What’s your initial thoughts, Kurt?

[00:03:34.210] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I think we’re kind of leading in with the title a little bit, Jonathan. I don’t, I don’t, I, like you said, I want to disparage against just Skool, but it— there’s a certain, like, um, there’s a certain attractiveness to the way that they package these things. Uh, you know, you mentioned Patreon in the intro. You could say Patreon, Locals, um, Skool, to a certain extent Kajabi, but they like lure people in. with this idea that not only is it fast and easy, but they’re gonna provide you the shortcut to discovery. They’re gonna provide you like the secret easy button, you know, to become economically solvent on the internet. And I find that that promise is always overhyped and underdelivered. And, and I think when we start looking at how some of these programs like surge in popularity and then, and then kind of wean off of that, I think we’re gonna see that that’s a common theme.

[00:04:30.260] – Speaker 4

Overpromised, underdelivered.

[00:04:32.350] – Kurt von Ahnen

and leaving people wanting and usually wanting on the side of, yeah, you said you had a marketplace, but no one’s ever clicked on my course through your marketplace. Like there’s so many people that say that, that it becomes truth and not just an idea.

[00:04:45.890] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think that’s great. I think let’s go into the mechanics of it. Basically the Growth Boost School pay-to-play, basically. What is it? Well, basically They are— it’s from 30% to 70%. If people— if you want to show up in search and guarantee that you show up and guarantee in certain places of the interface, they’re going to charge you 30% to 70%. You don’t have to pay it. You can turn it off. I don’t know if you’re ever going to show up ever. If you do, maybe I’m being a bit cynical here. And obviously, I think it’s I think it’s on top of the standard processing fees, which is hobby is 10%, and then the pro is two point 9%. That, that’s their cut on top of, um, for their processing fees. Um, so I think it’s on top of that. So, and they had problems with discovery anyway before it, you know, around search and being found. It wasn’t that good. They did improve it a bit. But what do you reckon about this? Is a fair old chunk, isn’t it?

[00:06:19.990] – Kurt von Ahnen

It’s a giant chunk, but let’s also be very realistic about what other people are doing in this space. I think it’s super important, Jonathan, you and I being, you know, we’re agency professionals, but, you know, I think everyone knows our tool of choice is generally WordPress, you know, outside of a few use cases. And when you look at like Patreon, they charge a percentage of sales, right? OnlyFans, OnlyFans is— they’re billionaires scraping tons of money off of what those ladies try to earn on that site. Am I a fan of OnlyFans? No. But when you look at the money, when you look at the structure that’s created, they created a platform and then they bring talent in, right? So in school, you’re the talent. So they bring talent in, they charge the talent for possible exposure, and then just scrape the profits right off the top. The idea that you could create like a proof of concept course in Skool for the $9 a month to host a course in there, that part’s still pretty attractive. Like if you’re just doing a proof of concept, you wanna build a course, you wanna flesh out an idea, $9, what is it, $9.99 a month or something like that?

[00:07:34.400] – Kurt von Ahnen

Like that’s still an affordable proof of concept model to try an idea. But the moment you become dependent upon their marketplace engine, their marketing, their boosted exposure, You’re just throwing money after bad at that point, and you’d be much better to move that to something more solvent like WordPress.

[00:07:54.750] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I applied to almost all these platforms, especially because their big selling point was that it was a marketplace. You would find— you would be discovered. Discoverability, if there’s a word. Discoverability. I’m not sure there’s a word. Was to be found on the platform. And I was always a bit dubious about that, to be quite truthful about it. And then they’ve got these school games where they gamified the process. And if you got so many points, there was a prize. And if you won the school game, you could win $100,000. And then they would have a conference where the top performers in the games would be invited and they would meet the founders of school, blah blah blah.

[00:08:50.470] – Speaker 1

Yeah.

[00:08:51.040] – Jonathan Denwood

And, um, I just— I, I’m just really dubious about the whole thing. And it, it reminded me very similar. But I say that the people that do these type of things like Branson, it was very like ClickFunnels They’ve been hugely successful. They’ve made a ton of money at it. But I think the majority of users don’t get much from it.

[00:09:24.850] – Kurt von Ahnen

And you have to drive back— I’m sorry to butt in, but yeah, you have to drive back to what is your purpose? Like, like if you’re an online educator, it’s expected that you’re an expert in some field, you want to share some knowledge. And that is, that’s your why, right? Your why is you want to be the expert and focus on your expertise. You didn’t want to sign up for some platform to join their gamified system of recommending other trainers.

[00:09:51.740] – Jonathan Denwood

No, exactly. But on the other hand, what you said previously, that, um, as a proof of concept to get something up really quickly and Just to find if if there’s audience or you it looks like you’d be able to build audience. I still I think for $9 a month it’s not a bad idea. But I think as soon as you prove that concept, and I suppose the tricky bit is where that point is where you prove the concept. I would look at another platform and. I would look at WordPress because that’s where you have most ownership, most control, the most flexibility of all these platforms. And I think it must— there must be nothing worse in building a business on somebody’s platform and either they’ve changed their business model or they just You do something they don’t like, and a lot of these platforms—it’s it’s not even controlled by a human being. The decision is is AI driven, and you you’re just thrown over the platform. Some have a manual appeal process. Some of these platforms don’t, do they? I think. I think it’s really dicey to build your income on somebody else’s platform.

[00:11:36.290] – Jonathan Denwood

What do you reckon?

[00:11:38.620] – Kurt von Ahnen

I think the bigger they get, the more convoluted the process becomes. So I remember during the pandemic, there was a lot of people getting locked out of Facebook or locked out of Twitter. And, you know, we don’t need to rehash the politics of the pandemic, but what we can discuss is like, what was the process when you got locked out of your Facebook account, your Facebook fan page, your Twitter account, your, you know, when your YouTube got locked down for monetization? Like, there wasn’t a lot of avenues towards a successful outcome in those events. A lot of people, you know, left platforms and never returned, like, you know, equitable voices in the space. And so to me, that always drives me back to, Ownership and flexibility, right? Like if I have a falling out with my host, I can package up my site and move it to another host. If I’m on Wix, Squarespace, Skool, Kajabi, one of these, I can’t just pack up my assets and roll to the next platform. Getting your content and rebuilding everything from scratch is another tearful moment.

[00:12:48.170] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think, I think it’s a good place for us to go for our middle break. And when we come back, we give us some views about how a little bit more about school and then maybe, you know, some ideas about marketing your course. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:13:05.400] – Speaker 4

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[00:13:42.420] – Speaker 1

This podcast episode is brought to you by LifterLMS, the leading learning management system solution for WordPress. If you or your client are creating any kind of online course, training-based membership website, or any type of e-learning project, LifterLMS is the most secure, stable, well-supported solution. solution on the market. Go to lifterlms.com and save 20% at checkout with coupon code PODCAST20. That’s PODCAST20. Enjoy the rest of your show.

[00:14:19.260] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back. Wanna point out you can get the best hosting package if you’re trying to build your membership website on WP-Tonic. We provide not only hosting, but we hope we provide a library of some of the best WordPress plugins, plus a white glove onboarding service. Plus we specialize in this area, all rolled up into a competitive hosting price. If that’s interesting, go over to wp-tonic.com and you can book a chat with us, and that’s totally free as well. So I think what I think school is good for is Like I say, proof of concept, and like putting in a mini course, and which we’ve talked about before, which could be at some stage you could take that content and put it on your own website. You could leave it on school and use it as a lead magnet. But I think you’re bigger, and if you get traction, I think it’s fine. But you’re bigger. Price courses and your premium offering, I wouldn’t have that on— well, you can’t because basically their pro version, um, it’s not really suitable for that. But I, I would basically have it on, on another platform. That platform would be WordPress.

[00:15:50.680] – Jonathan Denwood

But I think, I think as a proof of concept for that That’s gonna in the end be turned into maybe a lead magnet or a magnet into your bigger ticket offerings. I think it’s totally fine. What do you think?

[00:16:08.400] – Kurt von Ahnen

I agree with you on the lead magnet perspective. I’m sorry, but the mailman’s trying to deliver something and the dog went crazy. From the perspective of the lead magnet, I completely see it that way. I have a live course on Skool right now that I use as a lead magnet, right? So, um, has it been successful? I regret to say that it has not been very successful, but I leave it there because it’s one of— it’s like I have one on Udemy, I have one on Skool, I have one on Fluent Community in another website. I have some LifterLMS websites. As a professional in the e-learning space, I thought it was important to have working functional samples in these spaces so that when conversations came up, we could actually answer them through experiential knowledge. So I do put some content up in these spaces and I attempt to use them like lead magnets to bring them back to what our agency does. But this is such a weird— from an experience perspective and school specifically, When you go into Skool and you start building in Skool, it’s so basic that you get confused. Like WordPress can seem complicated to some people and they get confused.

[00:17:23.190] – Kurt von Ahnen

Skool is so simple that it seems that it gets confused. You’re like, isn’t there something I can change here? And there’s nothing you can change. So the only thing you can change is light mode and dark mode and that’s it. And your course has a certain structure and your front page, which is like the newsfeed of a social feed, is there. That’s it. That’s what you can do. And I feel that that is just not a conducive environment to grow a unique message as an entity.

[00:17:53.030] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it’s really difficult. But I also think the top, the top people are normally very, very experienced in marketing and they’re very experienced either on, on one of the social media platforms or either one of the Meta platforms. Or their experience on YouTube or their experience on LinkedIn, they’ve normally got some lead-generated system or they’re in an area that’s super, super sexy.

[00:18:23.280] – Kurt von Ahnen

I—

[00:18:24.800] – Jonathan Denwood

they got into AI training and, you know, I know some of the top people in school, you know, they just produce a ton of content. They know they’re just producing an enormous amount, but we know people in the WordPress influencer space that produces— you know, I think I do a reasonable job, but they, they, they put me to shame. They’re producing video after video after video, you know. They really work at it, which I hope to emulate. But so I think, have you got any, you know, I think the thing that people avoid is the marketing side because it’s really, it’s really difficult. But I just think, I think you just got to find which platform your target audience is probably on. You got to identify them. And then you’ve got to produce content that engages them a bit, and then you hopefully can drive them to a low-cost offer which they sign up for, basically. And then you can then hopefully market a larger product. Would you say that’s roughly still relevant, what I’ve just outlined?

[00:19:59.670] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I think it’s relevant, but I think we need to be very real-world when we— especially when we’re sharing these thoughts with the masses. You mentioned it, right? You said, the biggest accounts, they still seem to do okay. And they, well, yeah, it’s like we mentioned Gary Vaynerchuk on a different show this morning, right? VaynerMedia. If VaynerMedia launched something in school and then Gary talked about it on his various channels for a week straight, there would be 16 million people in his school account. If he decided to put it on Squarespace, they’d be in Squarespace. If he decided, I’m gonna take over WordPress, you know, there’d be an extra 2 million users in WordPress in a week. There’s strength in those numbers, right? Like, I mentioned Tony Robbins on this show a few times, right? But I’m not a Tony Robbins fan per se, but like, I see the way that he runs that audience and I see the way he can control— he can say, hey, I’m from with Russell Brunson, go check out Funnelytics. And then they turn around and go, hey, we’re friends with Pedro Rodeo, go check out his, you know, Proverbs course in the, in the month of January.

[00:21:06.310] – Kurt von Ahnen

And a bunch of people run over. And it’s when you’re a— when you get to be a, uh, an influential name in the space, you do get to move that around, right? Like, there’s people in Udemy that have huge followings, and they can add more content to Udemy and funnel a percentage of that existing audience over and keep upselling them onto the next iteration, the next offer. But when we’re doing this show and we’re talking to people that are trying to like break into the space, to me, setting something up in Skool or Udemy or any of these other platforms doesn’t take away that marketing obligation. Like, to your point, you still have to market and sell Whatever it is you created, wherever you created it. Like, you don’t have the funding and the millions of followers to leverage, so you’re gonna have to be boots on the ground, sleeves rolled up, and getting dirty in the weeds to get this thing to take off. And to be even like more transparent, I know that you mentioned marketing a lot, but I think there’s a definite difference between marketing and sales. And so I think sale— marketing is one thing, putting the message out, this is available, this is available, but then sales.

[00:22:19.710] – Kurt von Ahnen

Right? If you have a lead magnet and an abandoned cart, you email that person directly. If you have a phone number, you call or you text that person directly. And when you’re just starting out, you end up having 25, 50, 100 conversations with people to get them to populate your first offer. And then hopefully it grows and expands from there because your product’s good. But if your product’s not good, those first samples of people are gonna give you some feedback and help you improve it.

[00:22:48.460] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, sure, I understand it. But any of the clients that you’ve worked with over the last year, I think you had that makeup lady, but I think you said that she managed to get on to some top television appearances as a guest or something.

[00:23:05.080] – Kurt von Ahnen

She, she did makeup for celebrities and stuff, and so there was room for her on like morning talk shows and for exposure on channels that, you know, you and I would dream about getting on. Right. And so, I mean, imagine like being on the Today Show, right? That would be like a gift. So some people have that advantage, like you said earlier, maybe you’re doing something that’s sexy, right? And people are naturally attracted to it. Well, being a makeup, you know, a makeup provider to celebrities, I, you know, that creates a lot of attention. We’re doing a college launch now with another one of my clients, and that is very much boots on the ground, sales-oriented. Like, we’ve got colleges that want students to take the courses. But we’ve still got to like, what’s it going to take for you to get 100 students from your school to enroll in this course? Right. That’s, that’s a whole different conversation. And so there’s still a lot of like manual sales technique that goes into launching some of these projects that we’re in.

[00:24:03.040] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, but I still think, you know, finding communities on Facebook, finding communities on LinkedIn, finding, getting yourself Building some type of online relationship to possible influencers, doing some pre-planning can help. I just don’t see it any other way than what I’ve just outlined.

[00:24:26.560] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, I see that as marketing.

[00:24:29.770] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, but the sales side, that can only work if you’re dealing with higher ticketed offerings, can’t it?

[00:24:37.410] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah. If you’re selling $19 courses, you don’t have time to talk to every customer.

[00:24:42.130] – Jonathan Denwood

No. Um, so really, um, and I see your initial course because that, you know, I think you would still agree with me to build up, build and spend an enormous amount of time on your first course, I, I think is not advised. Would you still agree with that?

[00:25:05.560] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, I think you need some skin in the game. So real world, like real world examples, the PowerSport Academy, that’s not one big giant course, that’s over 5 years, we grew that into 6 courses and we’ve increased the offer as more and more people have participated. So now we have 6 courses as part of that portfolio. Now that we’ve got that experience, now that we’ve got, you know, our feet dug in and we understand process and sales and signing people up, You know, our WP Agency Academy is one course with 46 lessons in it. So it’s a pretty steep course, not exactly War and Peace, but not, not a short free mini course either. And we’re launching that program, you know, at a fairly decent hit too. So that’s another one of those projects, John, where it would like, so for sales, it would require a conversation. I mean, it’s a $700 buy-in, so it’s not, it’s not some $19 hobbyist course, you know what I mean? So, so you definitely have to understand your market and, and your avatar, who you’re selling to. You have to understand your value in the space, and, and you gotta, A, market like you said, you know, jump into groups, do, do the social media stuff, do all that stuff.

[00:26:22.590] – Kurt von Ahnen

But in a lot of cases, especially when you’re starting out, you gotta talk to people and you gotta convey the value and get people to try your product.

[00:26:32.670] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think it’s a good place to stop. So what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?

[00:26:41.860] – Kurt von Ahnen

Mañana No Más is the agency name, so mañananomas.com, or you can reach out to me through [email protected] or hook up with me on LinkedIn.

[00:26:51.700] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. And if you want to support the show, why don’t you leave us a 5-star review on iTunes or Spotify? It really would help the show and both me and Kirk. Would be very appreciative. We will be back next week with another topic. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.

[00:27:09.890] – Speaker 1

Thanks for listening to the Membership Machine Show. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes and leave a rating to support the show. Until next time.

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