During Covid lockdowns, Masterclass.com became a household brand. World famous chefs teach you how to cook, and the best in the business would teach you how to write a compelling story and hit fame.
Lots of people seem to know of Masterclass; I don't know anyone who actually uses it.
Occasionally I like digging into household brands to see if anything interesting comes up. In the video above I did this for Masterclass
You can see in mid 2023 they were hit by a pretty bad penalty, going from an estimated 7m monthly users down to 2.5m at one point – that's quite a hit. They've been doing some work to recover since, this is all expected.
One thing I did not expect though was the number of 'sex positive' keywords Masterclass ranks for.
It seems part of their content marketing strategy, beyond cooking, business and screenwriting, is...well... sexy things!
Some of the best performing keywords giving traffic to Masterclass.com – according to third party data (provided by Ahrefs).
I find this all very interesting. As Masterclass.com has a brand of all the (forgive me) 'sexy things' – the best cooking, the best art, the best money-making tricks. But not sex itself. I am wrong to think that though.
Over 11,000 keywords with the word 'sex' in them.
Knowing how these things work – often you set up with a mission, an ideal, and along the way you discover a different niche that is underserved. I think this is exactly the case with Masterclass. Something that the brand and big dream did not envisage. And an area of high demand where the quality of content is probably generally low.
Would be interested to know how valuable this side of the business is compared to the other ones. Presumably hiring Gordan Ramsey etc to produce a course was expensive, whereas this probably brings in its own customers, just through search.
Quick look at Google trends – seems to be growing in interest
I wonder if some of these keywords below is what triggered the search traffic penalty, though. As there are a lot of adult searches here – clearly porn searches (rather than educational / course ones) – for which Masterclass is the wrong site for what people are looking for.
