Teachers' needs drive a growing online marketplace

[Commentary] Yes, schools and school districts buy the bulk of K-12 educational materials, an estimated $8.3 billion a year. A growing slice of that pie, currently worth about $900 million, is the "supplementary digital materials market," which consists of all types of online or downloadable handouts, curricula, educational games and worksheets. And in 2014, 10 percent of that spending will happen on a single website: Teachers Pay Teachers. And most of that will come from teachers, themselves. Unlike publishing behemoths like Scholastic and Pearson Education, Teachers Pay Teachers doesn’t actually make anything. Instead, it’s an online marketplace for teachers hawking their own wares, kind of like a pedagogical Etsy. “It’s teachers who don’t make a lot of money reaching into their own pocket and saying, ‘For this great thing that another teacher made, I’m happy to spend my coffee money,’” says Teachers Pay Teachers CEO Adam Freed. “And, in aggregate, there’s a lot of coffee money out there.” And it’s growing fast -- thanks, in part, to increasing pressures on the teaching profession.