Fiverr’s $11M CreativeLive Acquisition Ends in Shutdown

This year marks the end of another edtech platform, CreativeLive, that was established in 2010. Fiverr acquired the live online video learning platform for almost $11 million in 2021 to expand communities, accelerate growth, and empower freelancers to learn and earn. Four years later, in May 2025, CreativeLive stopped taking new registrations, and on December 31, it’s shutting down.

In their official statement, the reason for stopping new registrations was that “In this era of self-publishing, short attention span clips, infinite free content, and reduced interest in photography education, meeting the economics of running CreativeLive as originally envisioned became tough.”

This also remains the reason for the shutdown.

More than 2000 CreativeLive courses have been listed in the Class Central catalog, and they were popular for their live online sessions delivered by Grammy-, Oscar-, and Pulitzer Prize winners. At one point, they broadcast six free live classes daily. In the early days, each course cost $30,000–$40,000.

Till 2017, they received around $60 million in funding, according to Dhawal Shah, the founder of Class Central. They didn’t raise rounds after.

The Fiverr Partnership was meant to grow both platforms. CreativeLive hadn’t had an investment for four years, and Fiverr’s stock had just started plummeting (it was around $320 in February 2021).

Micha Kaufman, the Founder and CEO of Fiverr, also said that Chase Jarvis, CEO of CreativeLive, and the team were a natural fit for them, and the acquisition was a part of a broader strategy.

A year into the acquisition, Chase quit.

In his recent LinkedIn post, he explained the reasons behind the shutdown.

“It was shortly after the acquisition in 2021 that Fiverr (FVRR: NYSE) chose not to put the resources behind the platform that was originally planned/required to make it thrive… This is in part why I left the company in 2022.

Their decision could be seen as understandable given the headwinds that their stock / the stock market for nearly all 2 sided labor marketplaces. When we agreed to be acquired by them, the plans were quite grand and yet it’s not all that unexpected. In fact, it’s quite common [for] more acquisitions to take this shape.”

According to him, Fiverr had “extracted all the value they wanted (engagement, large customer lists, etc) and decided to shutter the entire catalog.”

Despite this, Fiverr didn’t show long-term growth. It reported a 57% year-on-year growth in 2021 (acquisition year), which fell to 8% in 2024.

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