PSA: Don’t Forget to Download Your Creative Live Courses Now

At the end of September, Creative Live announced that it would close down permanently. Emails were sent; however, if you’re like me, you may have missed the memo. My email got buried in a spam folder in an old email account that I no longer use. Luckily, I saw the announcement elsewhere and could access my Creative Live account (albeit after several password recoveries and resets!).

So here’s a reminder to any of you who might be procrastinating to download your Creative Live libraries before the December 31st shutdown date. After this, it will be too late, and everything will be deleted.

Why is Creative Live Closing Down?

According to its parent company, Fiverr, the platform is no longer relevant. “In this era of self-publishing, short attention span clips, infinite free content … continuing to run CreativeLive as originally envisioned is no longer sustainable,” they stated. This essentially means that the business case for long-form paid content with big shooting/production costs didn’t hold up.

However, the truth is a little bit more complicated than that. Chase Jarvis, the original brain behind the platform posted to his Instagram that after the aquisition of Creative Live in 2021, Fivrr had essentially pulled the plug and had deliberately not invested in the resources and strategy that was needed to keep the platform thriving.

Subscribers have noted that their subscriptions were cancelled several months before September’s shutdown notice, and no new livestreamed classes were being broadcast.

What’s so special about Creative Live?

It was a pretty groundbreaking format for many of us who remember when Creative Live was first conceived. Free photography and video education was livestreamed in real time worldwide; if you missed it or wanted to rewatch, you could purchase the course. I probably watched days’ worth of free education on the platform. It was all new and pretty exciting because these were real working photographers showing their craft and behind-the-scenes footage of live shoots, and it was all footage you wouldn’t usually get to see.

By this point, digital photography had taken a firm foothold, so there were also plenty of courses on post-processing and retouching. I was introduced (via the platform) to some of the most influential photographers and professionals in the industry. People such as Pratik Naik, Bella Kotak, Sue Bryce, Don Giannatti, Andrew Scriviani…these photographers absolutely helped shape me into the photographer I am today. They inspired me to keep learning and developing my skills.

The other heavy influence that the platform had was to help photographers with the business side of things. These courses weren’t just about how to use a camera; they helped new photographers value their work and run a successful business, whether in the commercial world, portrait studios, or wedding photography. This was possibly the most groundbreaking part of Creative Live; everything was for the first time, and it was much more transparent about how photographers found clients and marketed their work.

What to do Now

If you have purchased courses on Creative Live in the past and haven’t already done so, download them now.

• Log in to your CreativeLive account and go through the list of courses you purchased.
• Download each course you want to keep: the platform states that purchasing and downloading will remain available up to December 31. You can use teh Creative Live fast download app if you wish, although it did crash once or twice and I had to download a few chapters manually from a couple of courses.
• Store the files somewhere safe (an external drive, cloud backup). Don’t rely on the platform continuing.
• If you don’t remember the email you used (or if it’s an old address you no longer check), dig through spam/junk folders. These notices might easily have gone there (as you flagged in your own situation).
• After December 31, big risk: your access vanishes and the content disappears.

End of an Era

So, it’s with a little bit of nostalgia and quite a bit of sadness that we have to say goodbye forever to Creative Live. Perhaps it’s true that nobody has the time or attention span anymore to sit and watch hours of behind-the-scenes shoots and education. However, I think we will all be the poorer for losing this resource.

I’d like to say once again how grateful I am to Chase Jarvis, the Creative Live production team, and all the photographers and educators who published courses there. Without them, I can almost certainly say that I wouldn’t be doing what I am today.

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