PLUGGEDIN - Homework help site flourishes in hard times

By Gina Keating

PASADENA, Calif (Reuters) - Welcome to Homework: Recession style, where cash-strapped tutors and students meet in a spare, virtual marketplace called StudentofFortune.com to solve homework conundrums for an agreed-upon price.

The concept is simple: post your homework problem on the site with a price you want to pay for help, and either wait for experts to accept or raise your bid, or let the site match you with a tutorial that is already available.

The site is the pared-down, set-your-price entry in a fast-growing niche of homework help sites like Cramster.com, eduFire.com and TutorVista.com, which are slicker and charge subscription or flat fees for classes, exam prep and tutors.

Student of Fortune, launched in 2006 by software developer Sean McCleese and computer scientist Nikhil Sreenath, both aged 25, has grown revenue into the millions at a 12.5 percent average weekly clip for over a year on fees from transactions averaging $15 each with no help from outside investors.

The site is making money for its users, too. The top tutor, a college senior, made about $56,700 in less than a year by selling thousands of tutorials, the site showed.

"A lot of students have the same level of confusion about the same topics so people can sell the same tutorials over and over again," McCleese said.

Cheating is discouraged by the site's Academic Honesty Policy, by frequent checks to remove explicit requests for answers, and by the marketplace, he said. Users quickly find it pays more to craft quality tutorials that drive repeat sales.

The marketplace also took care of McCleese's and Sreenath's fear that users would go offline to avoid fees of as much as 40 percent on sales if they could contact each other directly.