The ultimate do-nothing side hustle

I know that it’s not logical to believe I can get rich by lightly tapping my wrist, head, and other parts of my body. I know it’s even less logical to pay to learn how to do it. And yet, I’ve spent days wondering if it’s worth giving $44 to someone who calls herself “Manifestation Babe” for a weeklong course on how to do just that.

As part of my new fascination, I’ve also repeatedly watched a 12-minute video from a woman who goes by “Money Queen” as she tries to tap her way to $10 million. (That video’s free, but she’s got multiple courses she’d like to sell me, too.) The tapping thing — the Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT — is a real method for managing emotions. Using it to make cash appear out of thin air, not so much. These tap teaching options are just one tiny facet of the massive, messy industry that’s flourishing online. Welcome to the wild world of courses.

Want to build a business? Get more TikTok followers? Learn to flip Goodwill finds? There’s almost certainly an online class for that — or, likelier, dozens. An estimate from Grand View Research puts the global digital education market at $134 billion in revenue by 2030. Companies that let people create courses online, such as Kajabi and Squarespace, are worth billions of dollars. Newsletter publishing platform Beehiiv is building out ways for its writers to sell educational products. It seems like half the celebrities are teaching something on Masterclass. There are even a plethora of courses that teach you how to … make courses.

There’s an extremely low barrier to entry in creating and selling online courses, which is good in that plenty of people have knowledge to share, but less optimal in that on the internet, “expertise” can simply be code for “confidence.” The space is broadly unregulated and unsupervised. Even success is improvable: When students prosper, it’s impossible to decipher whether it’s because of the course or a combination of pluck, luck, and the algorithm. The vast majority of them fail to complete the courses they sign up for.

Coursepalooza is a product of our precarious economic and cultural landscape. Creators need ways to monetize their audiences outside the whims of digital platforms. Americans are on edge about their finances, and taking a course may seem like an avenue to stability. Confidence in traditional institutions is in the basement. Courses promise control in an environment defined by unpredictability.

If some lady on Instagram says I can think my way into a financial windfall if I fork over $1,000, there are worse-sounding deals.

There’s widespread uncertainty in the influencer and creator space. Platforms can kill someone’s reach or collapse an important revenue stream in an instant. That’s left people “scrambling for a lifeline” to get more ownership over their audiences, explains Brooke Erin Duffy, a social media researcher and associate communications professor at Cornell University. They want to strike while the iron’s hot and establish a direct line to their communities while they can. From the creator’s standpoint, courses represent just that: record some videos, make some slides, set it, forget it, and sell it — at least in theory. They fulfill the eternal desire for low-effort, high-margin passive income while ensuring a stable stream of revenue not subject to the whims of social media advertising.

If you can pay $49 or $300 or whatever it is to feel like you are going to improve yourself, you might say OK.

Many of these people have been in the game for a while. They’ve hustled to gain followings and become known in their niches, and they’re burned out. They’re tired of putting themselves out there and of doing all the work that got them attention in the first place. They’re also concerned that posting less consistently will get them dinged.

As self-made experts and influencers push into educational content, they’re meeting a receptive audience. The pandemic’s upheaval of America’s education system normalized online learning and left many people wondering whether college is worth it. AI is threatening jobs, and many kids dream of becoming influencers. Universities and accredited institutions don’t generally offer classes on the creator economy, and there’s no surefire way to future-proof your degree.

“That mix of uncertainty about the future of education, the need for professionalization, and the lack of security, I think, has created a perfect storm to see the emergence of these courses,” Duffy says.

Tyler Denk, the cofounder and CEO of Beehiiv, is seeing this play out firsthand as the platform rolls out various ways for its newsletter writers to make money. They let people sell templates and guides and make themselves available for paid bookings with their audience, and they’ll soon be launching paid webinars. “I think the next wave of the creator economy is if you do have a specialty or expertise, how do you provide value to your audience and monetize it?” he says. Three months after Beehiiv’s full launch of its digital products offer, 6% of paying users are doing it.

Denk uses himself as a proof point. He put together a presentation on building a newsletter and sold about 950 of those via Beehiiv at $10 a pop, banking nearly $10,000. He also lets people book one-on-one coaching sessions with him for $1,000 — he’s sold a couple so far. “If I were paying for the platform, that paid for the platform like 10 times over,” he says.

The thing is, in this digital gold rush, it’s hard to tell the difference between the snake oil salesman and the people who have valuable insights. Anybody can make a course, which means anybody can make a course, and with AI, that may mean popping some loose ideas into ChatGPT and making content regurgitating whatever it spits out. Many creators who teach courses on creating courses openly say that subject-matter mastery isn’t required.

Saying these endeavors are all about money sounds off-putting, so why not spin a tale about social connection or community-building?

“There’s tons of people out there that have absolutely no expertise in what they’re doing and that are incredibly good marketers that are able to package something together and sell it to people,” says Mara Einstein, a digital marketing critic and the author of “Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics As Cults.” When people are on edge about their future earning potential, they want to feel like they’re doing something, and spending money on a course feels like doing something.

“If you can pay $49 or $300 or whatever it is to feel like you are going to improve yourself, you might say OK,” Einstein says.

Latasha James is aware that some people might think she’s a scammer. As much as she’s confident her various courses on social media management, becoming a YouTube creator, and launching an online business are worthwhile, she also worries about the “trust recession” among audiences. People are tired of coaches and creators trying to separate them from their money with dubious promises. “People are more discerning than ever,” she says.

Because of this, James, who lives in Michigan, says the course business isn’t as good as it was during the pandemic. AI giveth, and AI taketh away: It’s harder to convince people to give her $500 to learn to be a social media manager when they feel like they can ask the bot and get the gist.

“Back in 2020, 2021, I had a few template packs that sold really well, and I was making like five figures a month in passive income from those,” she says. “Those days are gone.”

To combat this new reality, many creators say they’re not just teaching classes — they’re building communities. They’ll put people together in cohort-based courses, Facebook-like spaces where users can interact with one another and, occasionally, with the course leaders themselves. It’s a way to add value for people and to try to get more of them to stick it out until the end. It’s also a selling point: Saying these endeavors are all about money sounds off-putting, so why not spin a tale about social connection or community-building?

Influencers are supposed to be “strategic actors,” says Taylor Annabell, a lecturer at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media, and Culture, but they’re not supposed to draw too much attention to it. “You should only earn money for the right reasons because you love what you’re doing and you want to share it, but don’t be in it for the money,” she says.

The conditions that have made courses appealing have also made the arena ripe for hype, vague assurances, and scam-adjacent behavior. People who pay for classes sometimes pony up for the first bit of material, only to be told later that the good stuff costs more. Creators lure them in with prospects of wealth and growth, but somewhere in the fine print, there’s a note that those results aren’t typical (and the refund policy is a doozy).

Laura Smith, the legal director of Truth in Advertising, says that many of the tactics sketchy course leaders employ are similar to those of multilevel marketing — a controversial business model in which salespeople earn income by selling a product or service and recruiting others to sell the same product or service.

“You are luring in consumers with attractive income claims,” she says, and the product is “often secondary” to the chance to sell it down the line. It’s not about what the course teaches, it’s about what the course promises. “That is appealing to a lot of consumers, not only making money but making easy money,” she says.

The mini-communities built around the courses can help people feel connected, which, in an increasingly isolated culture, many crave. And if they fail, they’re made to feel it’s their fault. “These are kind of cult marketing tactics,” Einstein says. “If you can’t find the money to do this, then you don’t really care about improving yourself, right?”

Online courses can and do work out for some people.

That was the case for Gab Ferree, who lives in Arizona. After years of working in corporate communications for companies such as Salesforce, Slack, and Bumble, she decided it was time to strike out on her own. To get up and running, she took a course from Natalie Ellis, who goes by what Ferree describes as the “unfortunate name” Boss Babe. The course, called Freedom Fast Track, promises to teach people to build profitable, predictable, and repeatable businesses in eight weeks. Ferree used tools from the course to create her own training and coaching community, Off the Record, for communications professionals. It now has over 400 members.

Courses, of course, do not work out for everyone.

In my opinion, she certainly executed on manifesting money, but not on delivering to the people who paid her.

Catherine Morgan, an artist and content creator in Texas, has had positive experiences with online learning in the past, and she’s even dabbled in building courses herself. But it was a course from Kathrin Zenkina, who goes by Manifestation Babe, that turned her off. She spent $1,555 for Zenkina’s “Sovereign Money” course in early 2024. The website says the program will teach students “how to align your identity, frequency, and capacity for receiving with the level of wealth you’re ready to call in” and features nameless testimonials from clients who claim to have manifested hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

Morgan says many of the course materials didn’t seem markedly different from Manifestation Babe’s free content, and the stuff that really attracted her to the paid version — behind-the-paywall podcasts from Zenkina — slowly petered out. When people began to complain about the lack of content on the community platform, their accounts disappeared. Morgan’s still not sure what happened or whether to expect more podcasts — she’s been told by the Manifestation Babe team that Zenkina wants to leave the door open to make more episodes as she feels inspired. She was already doing well financially when she signed up, so the money wasn’t a problem for her personally, but she still feels burned. “I was disappointed, but I don’t feel super victimized by it,” she says. There were other students with less means whom she was more worried about.

“In my opinion, she certainly executed on manifesting money, but not on delivering to the people who paid her,” Morgan says, who has taken the experience as a lesson in looking at refund policies. It was the last course she ever bought.

In an email, a spokesperson for Zenkina denied that the Sovereign Money course was similar to free material and said that its proprietary methodology isn’t available outside the program. They acknowledged that the program’s private podcast schedule had been inconsistent and said they’ve made changes in subsequent course cohorts. When asked about students’ removal from the community platform, the spokesperson said participants were only removed when behavior escalated in ways that affected other students’ experiences. They said that the $14,988 calculated course value is based on “comparable market pricing” for coaching programs, while the testimonials on the website are anonymized social media posts and communications from actual students. Regarding manifesting through tapping, the spokesperson said EFT is “widely used in the personal development industry.” They said that since the company has worked with “hundreds of thousands of students” across the free and paid content, experiences can vary.

“Any program at that scale will have students who love it and students who don’t, and we take both kinds of feedback seriously,” the spokesperson said. “But we care deeply about the people who come to us looking for real change in their lives, and we don’t take the trust they place in us lightly.”

It’s easy, from the outside, to dismiss the idea of manifesting money as credulous and naive. But people are picking up what creators are putting down. And again, with so much of this, the draw is the opportunity rather than the service or product itself. Creators, from masculinity influencer Andrew Tate and his Hustlers University to financial wellness influencer Amanda Frances and her Money Queen, show off lavish lifestyles and sell people on the idea that they, too, can achieve it by following their methods. People who go to Instagram growth coach Brock Johnson for advice aren’t deeply interested in the nitty-gritty of Meta’s algorithm; they want to get rich and famous online.

Most course leaders may not say that you can literally manifest money, but they do figuratively.

Ultimately, this growing course culture is the sin of a society where many of the traditional ladders to success have rotted away. College degrees feel like a gamble. Once stable corporate careers have few guarantees. We’re all looking for a way to defend ourselves against the next algorithm tweak or round of layoffs. Paying $50 or $500 or $5,000 for a course isn’t really about the information — it’s about hope. It’s buying a digital lottery ticket.

I will probably never pay $44 for the tapping course. I know it won’t guarantee a solid retirement, give me enough money for a down payment on a house, or even result in a few hundred dollars magically falling from the sky. But I do think about it, and I’ve come back to the videos more than I’d like to admit. In all the chaos, there’s something calming to pretending like there could be control.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.