With most of us spending most of our time at home, I was curious to see how “shelter at home” orders translated to traffic to various online learning platforms. I looked at nine online learning platforms and on average, traffic jumped 62% from March to April 20201:
Visits to Pluralsight surged in April (up 189% compared to March). This was most likely due to the fact that the company announced that their entire library of courses would be available for free during the month of April. Removing Pluralsight from the mix, visits to the remaining nine sites I examined still grew 48% on average.
A close friend quipped that people tend to focus on two specific things during a crisis like the one we find ourselves in. We try to cut down on spending and we try to learn new skills (or sharpen existing ones). The chart above certainly seems to validate the latter hypothesis.
(1) In comparison, visits to the same ten online learning platforms, jumped 39% on average, from February to March 2020.
Update (2020-06-13)
Shelter-at-home orders were relaxed somewhat in May, at least in the U.S. As a result traffic to most major online learning platforms declined from April to May. But if you look at the last four months, traffic to these sites was generally higher when one combines traffic from the last two months – [April and May] – and compare it to the combined traffic in [February and March]:
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