Chegg’s textbook rental business continues to grow like crazy – we’ve estimated 2010 revenues of $130 million, for example. And the company is now starting to acquire businesses complimentary to their core focus. First up is CourseRank, founded in 2007 by three stanford students. Total funding raised by CourseRank is $0 – it’s “Mountain Dew funded to date,” says Chegg.
CourseRank helps students choose classes, and 95% of Stanford students use it, says the company.UC Berkeley, Duke, Cornell and other universities and colleges in the U.S. and Canada now use it as well. The company now has five employees.
From the CourseRank website:
CourseRank is a website that aims to streamline the process of choosing the right courses for each student, and helping students take advantage of the diverse opportunities offered at their university. The website is specifically tailored to each university and provides students with all the information they need to help plan their academic careers. Features provided by the website include: Student courses ratings and reviews, a planner to help organize your academic career and grades, a weekly schedule of your courses – which you can share with your friends, and a place for you to find your books for next semester!
Chegg has raised $144 million in venture and debt capital since 2007, and hired former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig as CEO earlier this year.
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Chegg is growing like crazy…This is a good acquisition for them as they have a vested interest in the education sector
I used CourseRank when I was in Stanford as well. Very useful and precise. Way to go!
I just have a hunch chegg is going to be acquired by amazon sometime. Amazon wants to keep their lucrative textbook business in line and will expand it with acquiring chegg. I also noticed amazon giving free trials to college students for amazon prime, which is no doubt an attempt at increasing their textbook sales. Just a guess…
Amazon will not acquire Chegg for two reasons.
Minor reason is that Amazon knows that renting books is fundamentally dumb and against their interest.
Big reason is that Amazon can never be in the rental business because rental proerty (books that they stil own) creates taxable nexus — you have assets in 50 states. Amazon has built it’s entire business around avoiding sales taxes wherever possible and it will take a lot more than textbook rentals to get them to change this.
Yeah, CourseRank was a really good buy for them. I remember an old advertising quote that said: “CourseRank is how you survive four years of college.” It’s really true, CourseRank is incredibly useful to freshman and seniors alike!
i’ve been using courserank for a year now and absolutely love it — incredibly helpful in choosing classese, picking professors, and planning out my schedule and course list
Smart move — good for Chegg. This will be like eBay purchasing PayPal – CourseRank will one day be more valuable than Chegg.
Face it, the future of rented textbooks is not terrific, even if the company is growing nicely at the moment. Every publisher is moving online and open source content is maturing rapidly right behind them. But schools, online and offline, are becoming more important and the reputation of teachers and courses matters more over time, not less.
CourseRank will outrank Chegg rentals — count on it.
agreed that the rental market has no future. the publishers will go crazy with all sorts of asinine DRM and other restrictive crap to put a meter on student use of electronic texts…which will have the same end result as all DRM…massive drop in pofits once the DRM is broken, and producers suing consumers
textbooks are one of life’s grand scams. even as far back as the 80s when i was in college, the prices were ridiculous…back then, paper was the only option. colleges should just open source their course notes and kill the industry for good
CourseRank is an awesome site already incorporating chegg. I don’t know how I would pick my course’s without it.
Awesome. Filip, Andrew, and team are great additions to Chegg. CourseRank is potentially a very valuable funnel for Chegg.
I am going to college in two days and because of this post just ordered my books through Chegg. I had been putting it off because of the lucrative amount of money I was going to spend but now it’s not as painful. I hope Course Rank increases their exposure.
And I hope that Ben (above commentator) is wrong about Amazon acquiring them (because they do have such a stronghold on textbooks – a new player needs to be in the market… and Chegg fits that perfectly).
CourseRank is an awesome tool for every college student & essential to to make it through the 4 yrs. Chegg made a good choice.
Congrats to Filip, Andrew & team!!
WOW Idan, this is soooo awesome! Congrats!
the future of textbooks isn’t in the rental market, its in the creative commons
open courseware, wiki books, etc
when you say this, people start going crazy asking how on earth will quality materials appear if there isn’t a compensation model
folks its not like the first two years of calc, algebra, chem, physics etc is in a state of flux…its astounding and laughable that you see new editions of standbys like Stewart’s “Calculus”…please prof. Stewart, tell us about these new breaking developments in intro calc you just had to incorporate….indeed, has there been new material since 1920?
same with most plays and works of literature…even compsci books are mostly unchanged over the last two decades
CourseRank is a very useful tool for most college students. It’s like a better version of rate my professor. Also, CR provides easy access to tools that most college kids need, like a handy scheduling feature, a feature that shows which GERs are fulfilled, etc. It’s useful and really easy to use. I love using CR! Nice grab Chegg
Shoutout to Filip and the CR crew!
WHOA! Site was JUST updated! Sweet! Gotta love CR and the guys there! Awesome
Courserank not only has real grade data but it is 100x easier to look up classes than the system Stanford has in place. Besides that, the team at Courserank is pro!
Congratulations Bro Idan!!! I’m sure the hard work finally paid off!
Congrats CourseRank Team. The program you built is truly amazing.
Thank you Idan for bringing it to all the UNC schools!
The only reason reason chegg purchased course rank is because other more valuable alternatives like pick-a-prof/myedu and koofers rejected there offer to buy.
No i think that pick-a-prof or koofers or whatever were too expensive.
They aren’t more valuable, in fact i’d take courserank over them ANY DAY but they are more established.
Did Koofers really reject an offer from CHEGG??
They never got one i think. Koofers and CourseRank don’t really overlap in what they do, only in some places.
It’s great that Chegg is expanding. I always use Chegg to rent my textbooks, which saves me a lot of money every semester. I wanted to share a promotional code that will give you a discount on renting with Chegg. Simply put in the code when ordering and hit the “apply” button. The code also gives you back an additional $5 when selling Chegg your used texts.
Use code CC123047
The code never expires so it can be used every time you order. Feel free to share this with other starving students.