A Leaderboard Says the Median Course Creator Makes $83,000 a Month. Then You Notice 67 of the 90 Said Nothing.

Here is a number that will ruin your afternoon: $83,000 a month.

That's the median on IndieMakerList's educator leaderboard. The site ranks 23 educators and course creators by publicly reported monthly revenue, led by Sahil Lavingia at $17.8M a year from Gumroad. Dan Koe sits at roughly $100K a month off $1M–$1.5M a year, and Zach Wilson's DataExpert.io shows $56K MRR plus cohorts and $4.7M all-time, verified through TrustMRR. Justin Welsh's LinkedIn Operating System is logged at $10M+ lifetime, about $145K a month.

Now read the footnote.

The 67

Of the 90 makers in the Educators & Course Creators category, 23 have shared revenue publicly. Their median is $83K a month, 20 report at least $10K, and seven report $100K or more.

So the median is not the median course creator. It's the median of the people who volunteered. Sixty-seven said nothing, and silence in this industry is almost never a humblebrag.

The site is straight about the rest of it. Revenue is self-reported or pulled from public statements and is not verified by IndieMakerList, except for rows marked TrustMRR, which pulls from the payment provider. The site recommends TrustMRR by Marc Lou for verified numbers — and Lou's own listing is $98K a month, self-reported for July 2026, on a verification service he owns.

The same data, a different denominator

The best demonstration of the trick is on the same website. IndieMakerList's State of Indie Makers 2026 report puts the median for Educators & Course Creators at $29K a month, from a sample of 39.

Same category. Different cut. Roughly a third of the headline figure.

The report also names the mechanism out loud: among the 172 profiled makers who publicly report revenue, the median is $24K a month, 66% report at least $10K, and these figures are self-reported and skew high, because successful makers are far more likely to publish their numbers.

What the platforms see

Platform-wide data comes from everyone, including the quiet ones. Kajabi says its average creator earns about $37,000 a year. An independent analysis of hundreds of thousands of Udemy courses found the average instructor earns $3,306 a year, with 75% under $1,000 and roughly 1% earning a full-time income.

Then Kajabi published its own transaction data, which is the most useful thing anyone released this year. The typical expert with at least one sale has earned $3,653 lifetime. The average is $122,047, about 33 times higher. The top 1% collect 44.3% of everything ever earned on the platform, though one expert in seven crosses $100,000.

That gap between $3,653 and $122,047 is the entire psychology of this business in two numbers.

Even the stats get laundered

Ruzuku's statistics page now runs a correction on its own video: the clip says the average Udemy instructor earns about $3,300 a year, and the publisher states it has no source for that figure.

A number gets repeated into fact. A leaderboard gets read as a census. A median built from 23 self-selected winners becomes the thing you measure your launch against at 11pm.

The leaderboard isn't lying to you. It's showing you exactly what it says it's showing: the people who picked up the microphone.