Course Creator Royalty Program

What This Recipe Does

This recipe creates a royalty program where course instructors earn a percentage of every sale of their courses. When a student buys a course, Siren detects the product in the order, identifies the instructor who owns it, and credits them with a 50% royalty. No referral links, no coupon codes, no manual attribution. The tracking is fully automatic based on product ownership.

This is the standard revenue model used by course platforms like Udemy and Skillshare, rebuilt for WordPress. If you run an online education site with multiple instructors and want each creator to earn a fair share of the revenue their courses generate, this is the recipe to start with.

Who It’s For

• Online course platform operators who want to pay instructors automatically when their courses sell
• LifterLMS or LearnDash site owners looking for a simple, automated royalty system tied to course sales
• Education entrepreneurs building a multi-instructor marketplace on WordPress and WooCommerce

How It Works

When you apply this recipe, Siren creates a program that tracks a single engagement type: collaborator product sold. This event fires whenever a WooCommerce order contains a product that has been assigned to a collaborator. In this case, the collaborator is the course instructor and the product is the course.

You set up the relationship once: assign each course to its instructor in Siren’s owned products settings. From that point forward, tracking is hands-off. A student buys Introduction to Photography, Siren sees that the product belongs to the Photography instructor, and that instructor earns 50% of the sale price.

The resolver is “newest binding wins,” which in this context is straightforward. Each product has a clear owner, so there is no competition for attribution. One course sold equals one royalty credited to the instructor who created it.

If a single order contains courses from multiple instructors, each instructor earns their royalty independently. A student buying three courses from three different creators generates three separate commissions, one per instructor. The royalty rate applies to each course’s line item value, not the order total, so each instructor’s payout is based on the price of their specific course.

{
  "version": 1,
  "name": "Course Creator Royalty Program",
  "description": "Instructors earn a 50% royalty on every sale of their courses. Tracking is automatic based on course ownership.",
  "programs": {
    "courseRoyalty": {
      "name": "Course Creator Royalties",
      "description": "Earn a 50% royalty every time one of your courses is purchased. No referral links needed.",
      "incentiveType": "saleTransactionPercentage",
      "incentiveResolverType": "newestBindingWins",
      "units": "USD",
      "status": "active",
      "incentiveAmount": 50,
      "engagementTypes": [
        { "type": "collaboratorProductSold", "value": 100.0 }
      ],
      "transactionCompilers": ["includeLineItems"]
    }
  }
}