One thing that's worth mentioning is Udemy is a completely different type of company based on you being a watcher of courses vs being an instructor on Udemy.
I was an instructor there for 5+ years (with ~30k enrollments) and in my entire professional career I've never met a worse company in terms of how corrupt they are and how little they actually care about instructors unless you happen to be one of the few instructors they reach out to privately and sign a contract with in which case they do extra things for you like promote and rank your course more so than related courses in your category. Their entire platform is based on manipulating both instructors and watchers of courses.
I would seriously suggest anyone thinking about creating courses to avoid using any type of course marketplaces (ACG is especially bad too). It's worth it to build your own audience because on Udemy and other platforms you're actually not building your own business, you're building their business because you won't receive any information about anyone who signs up which means your students are 100% locked into that platform. If you leave you're essentially starting at ground zero in which case you might as well start at ground zero on your own terms.
This is such a good point, and impossible to overstate.
I decided about a year ago I wanted to create my own course (https://css-for-js.dev/). After exploring the options and hearing about the Udemy horror stories, I decided to build my own platform.
It's gone better than I ever could have hoped, and it's set me up well for a lucrative career I'm passionate about.
You don't have to create your own platform from scratch, either; I haven't personally tried them, but there are SaaS companies like Kajabi and Teachable that look like white-label course platforms, so you can build your own course on your own domain. If I wasn't such a perfectionist, I would have started with a smaller course on one of these services.
If anyone is thinking of creating an interactive coding course I'm working on https://codeamigo.dev/ to help. I want to create a free and open marketplace for coding courses. I'd love to talk with anyone about good/bad experiences at other course platforms. My email is in my profile.
Hey Siddarth! Yes I have support for C, Elixir, Java, Python, Ruby, and Rust at the moment. I'm going to be adding more courses and languages over the next few weeks! If you'd like to follow along with the progress checkout https://twitter.com/codeamigo_dev
If you're ever looking to support TypeScript eventually, the Monaco editor (https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor) is your place to go. This is the same codebase that powers VS Code, yet is browser compatible and can come with all the Intellisense you need!
EDIT: Actually it probably supports a variety languages
Very rarely do you find something better on Udemy than you would on YouTube. YouTube often is a bit better since you don't have the sunk cost of paying 30$ for a class to realize it's trash.
Unity Learn is a much better alternative to any Unity content you'll find on Udemy. And with Unity deciding to make it free( I doubt anyone was really paying for it when it was a premium service), it's a great way to get started.
For most tech, take Flutter or React as good examples, the official websites tend to have tons of quality educational content.
For anyone interested, I'm also a Udemy instructor of a best selling course with 13K students.
My course is priced at $54.99 and I've made $44,000 from the course in total. So that comes to about $3.50 per student.
To be fair a good chunk of the money I make is from their Udemy for Business program.
The results aren't the best, but I do appreciate being able to make money with zero effort in marketing on my end.
That being said, I'm working on a new course. This time I'm building out my own platform - which will actually be a 100x better experience for students, and I'll be sure to do my own marketing this time round.
The fact that you made $44k for your first course is great. The first one is the hardest because of the general learning curve of making it and figuring out what their system wants. Keep going.
I'm sorry but please do not believe anything this commenter is saying.
I've been a "managed partner" with Udemy for 5 years now (600k enrollments) and I have never once been asked to sign a contract. Despite my repeated attempts to get them to promote my courses, they do not do anything special for this secret cabal of instructors. I still launch courses on Udemy that crash and burn spectacularly. No, they do not manually rank your courses for you. Your course ranks for its keywords and following a fairly straightforward system that considers student satisfaction, keyword density, and search list CTR (and other things).
Udemy does have problems and chief among them is the "disgruntled instructor problem", as in there are a lot of instructors who did not find traction on their system and are convinced they were somehow screwed and it was all a conspiracy to steal their content. It's the same dynamic on YouTube. For every 1 Youtuber who makes it big, there are 50 that don't manage to crack the code and find success. Most platforms are like this.
If your course didn't do well on Udemy, there are generally 3 reasons: 1) your content isn't as good as you think it is 2) you made something that is quantitatively worse than an existing course on the same exact subject. 3) your topic doesn't have demand or your offer just isn't compelling. It's really that simple.
9 times out of 10 when you hear the "uDemYY is A SC@m" screed, you can know they fit one of those 3 reasons. Ask for a link to their course. It's almost always disorganized, poorly produced, on a topic that's already saturated, and with confusing copywriting.
Figuring out what works on a platform takes time and iteration. It's fairly rare that you hit it big on your first shot. Some people push through it and eventually find their stride, and some people just don't (and often blame the platform for not recognizing their genius). It's a MARKET. Their algorithm ranks based on quality metrics. If your stuff doesn't rise to the top, then your course doesn't have what the system wants.
Per the "build your own audience" argument: Yes, you do not get access to the direct email addresses of the students. This is a tradeoff you make to work with them. They can drive you 10s of thousands of enrollments a month, but it is after all their system and so they're going to control what they can. The beauty of making a Udemy course is you don't have to DO any marketing if you make content worth buying. Personally, I enjoy making courses but find selling them to be a massive headache.
> I've been a "managed partner" with Udemy for 5 years now (600k enrollments) and I have never once been asked to sign a contract
Just because you haven't doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I know 2 instructors who have and have seen the contract in 1 of the cases. I've also chatted with popular instructors who have showed me emails back and forth between them and Udemy that doesn't leave me thinking too highly of Udemy in terms of how fair they are with how they rank courses in their search results.
> If your course didn't do well on Udemy
They did ok (around 30-50 sign ups a day for years) within ~60 days of being on Udemy until one day a light switch was flipped and my traffic started to plummet. Not just sales but page views to the landing page. Nothing changed. There weren't too many new courses and I kept mine up to date. There were no emails or anything. Funny enough for the longest time one of my courses had a rating of 4.8 with a bunch of sign ups (highest rating in a niche with hundreds of courses) but the course barely hangs on the bottom of page 2 and now gets about 30 sign ups a month. Every metric that Udemy gives to instructors to determine if a course is good was nearly maxed out (high retention, good reviews, 100% watch rate on nearly every video and back when they showed those metrics with the bars every bar was nearly 100 / 100).
I've also emailed Udemy about this a few times and usually within a day or 2 of emailing them my course(s) will magically end up on the first page of the search results for very broad and good keywords (often the name of the tech) for a day or 2, I'll get a sales spike and then within a few days it'll drop back to the bottom of page 2. This pattern has repeated multiple times over the years.
I don't think there's a massive conspiracy. It's painfully obvious that Udemy has special deals with certain instructors and they heavily manipulate search rankings based on courses that align with whatever they think is best. Of course you do need a good course and landing page but it's not close to enough to get ranked well.
> It's the same dynamic on YouTube
I'm on YouTube too and I never once thought the algorithm was against me. I think YouTube is a great platform. I'm not affiliated with them in any way and I have no monetary incentive to promote them over another platform. Despite having the ability to monetize my videos with ads I choose not to. I make $0 dollars from YouTube and have 13k+ subs. It's been a gradual incline over the years. I don't care about views, subs or money. I post videos there because I love making videos.
Likewise I don't have a competing marketplace to Udemy and while I do sell my courses on my own site I'm not mentioning that here because this isn't a case of trying to bad mouth a platform to profit on my own thing. I'm just giving my honest assessment after having sold tech courses for the last 5 years on Udemy, other marketplaces and my own site.
The self-publish course route works best when the instructor has a following on social media and can appeal to their followers (Twitter, YouTube or even on GitHub). Without followers in some form, course discovery can be hard via the self-publish route. That's why Udemy remains an attractive option (despite how badly Udemy treat authors as you say). It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation.
> That's why Udemy remains an attractive option (despite how badly Udemy treat authors as you say). It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation.
It is but at the same time it's not.
If you make a course in a category where there's 500 other courses which is the norm for a lot of tech niches you'll be on page 30 and no one will ever find you. For new courses Udemy might decide to show your course to a tiny percent of traffic in a higher search ranking to see if you gain traction but unless you drive your own traffic to Udemy from your own site / resources you're going to have a hard time competing with folks who do. Their algorithm very much prefers instructors who send their own audience to Udemy.
If you don't gain that initial traction you're basically dead in the water. Plus it's going to be a hard sell to get someone to sign up for your course with 4 enrollments and no review vs courses who have 100,000+ enrollments and a 4.4+ rating.
With that said, having no audience won't help much on Udemy vs being on your own platform. You're still going to need to grow an audience and send traffic to your course landing pages no matter which platform you use (a 3rd party marketplace or your own site).
Man, you are just a firehose of misinformation. It's really impressive.
I started on Udemy with 0 people in my audience, and I still have 0 people outside of my Udemy audience. I don't do any marketing or drive any external traffic.
When you launch your course, you have a 30 - 90 window that you get scrutinized on. The biggest metrics the system is looking for are thumbnail CTR, enrollment rate (%), total minutes watched, and average rating. For most courses, the system doesn't need a lot of time to figure out that your course is not better than ones it already has (fewer people click it, fewer people are compelled to buy it, the ones that do watch less, and then fewer people feel compelled to rate it).
No, they do NOT heavily favor people who drive their own audience, that makes no sense. They sell their courses for $10-20, so no one in their right mind is sending large amounts of hard earned email traffic to such a low ticket sale. You can literally go into the Marketplace Insights tool and see where they list the % of sales from "Instructor Promotions". It's rarely ever over 5% of total sales and most of that is from internal promotion emails to your other course students. One thing they DO favor is instructors who have multiple courses, because they know that your pool of students is more likely to buy other material from you so its an easier sell for them (remember, they spend $ to acquire the student and they do not breakeven if the student only buys 1 course).
Talk to any successful Udemy instructor and they'll tell you that no they do not drive their own traffic. If they could drive that much traffic, they would make their course independently, charge a lot more, and make way more money.
Can you please make your substantive points without calling names or personal attacks? That's particularly important if the points you're making are true, because doing that then discredits the truth, which isn't good for anybody.
Yeah, building on what Nick said: I think it was possible at one time, 7-8 years ago, to launch a course on Udemy with no audience, and let them handle the marketing for you.
I heard a podcast recently and a successful Udemy instructor had said that these days, the SEO required to succeed on Udemy is even harder than the SEO to rank in Google. When you search for a topic on Udemy (eg. React, Go), there are dozens of highly-reviewed courses, and it's impossible to show up in those results unless you already have a huge audience or want to spend lots of money on paid traffic.
So yeah, I think it's true that you need an audience to succeed with a self-published course, but honestly I think that's true no matter which route you take.
For big categories, less than 5% of total sales comes from search traffic so if they're primary concern is ranking in search they've already missed the point.
The vast majority of sales are from their personalized recommendation widgets and email blasts. No SEO optimization needed for that.
> I've never met a worse company in terms of how corrupt they are and how little they actually care about instructors
Can you explain how?
The general world of being a content creator for someone else's platform is ... well the bar is pretty low. You're pretty much on your own everywhere aren't you? Most of these sites are ultra top heavy with the top creators also generating the most revenue.
I think he's most likely disgruntled about the direct support they offer published instructors. It's true that all you get is a support email until you've made enough enrollments to get what is effectively an account manager. You're right, this is the same as everywhere else essentially.
The thing is though... they have 65,000 instructors. They can only give so much support to everyone, and OP is most likely just upset that they aren't making as much money as they think they deserve.
Thanks for sharing! I'm planning to create a couple of courses next year and I considered using Udemy, because I use it quite a bit as a student, but I see I need to do some research before I lock myself in some platform.
Yep. I don't want to get into it here but their founders are some of the worst people I've ever encountered in my life as a human being. This is only my opinion of course based on having had a fairly long term business relationship with them in the past.
I don't like negatively talking about folks in public but yeah out of 20+ years of freelancing and dealing with dozens of companies ACG's founders are at the top of my list of folks I never want to think about or encounter again for the rest of my life.
I run a company that sells courses. We've built our own audience, which is what makes this possible. We hire instructors with the goal of working with them in the long term. (Basically, for them, our goal is for it to be the perfect part-time job.) I would recommend looking for a publication in your niche that also runs courses, and approach them about the possibility of hiring you. You could also approach an established publication, and offer a partnership, in terms of establishing a course-based business. Don't look for a platform, look for a company that you can have an actual relationship with.
> I would seriously suggest anyone thinking about creating courses to avoid using any type of course marketplaces (ACG is especially bad too). It's worth it to build your own audience
YouTube has a lot of the same issues as Udemy with regard to creator treatment. Building your own audience sounds like the ideal, but obviously there are network effects to being on a platform and those can’t be simply written off.
Yep. Udemy is just a different game and if you don't play their game, you're gonna have a bad time. Same story with YouTube.
I do think Udemy is an easier path to meaningful revenue (courses are tedious and less glamorous so less competition) than YouTube, whereas YouTube has much higher potential upside. People can spend years grinding on YouTube before ever making anything meaningful, whereas most instructors who take Udemy seriously can get there within a year. It took me 9 months to get to about $4k a month recurring earnings, for example
I’ve never been a course instructor, but I imagine the best would be something where the creators own a slice of the overall pie (share in the company).
I've literally never paid a full price for a Udemy course. I'd only do it if I was in rush to start some course quickly, but otherwise I just wait, usually less than 2 weeks, and I can pay 70-90% less
I was going to say they it all would be at 9.95 for the next 24 hours...But interestingly I just checked, and it seems there are no promotions, and courses that were sold days ago at 9.95 are now 120 and up. Is there maybe an IPO coming up? :-)
Their promotions are usually time limited. And you'll have to make a separate account because the promotions are for new users only. So now you have your content spread over multiple accounts. But you can use Udeler so that you have local copies of everything, much better anyway.
"Price discrimination is a commonplace practice that is presumptively lawful, save under special circumstances discussed below. It occurs when a seller of products regularly offers lower prices to its preferred customers and higher prices to the others when selling them the same or similar products at around the same time."
In August 2021, a putative class action complaint captioned Williams v. Udemy, Inc., Case No. 3:21-CV-06489, was filed against us in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleging violations of California’s unfair competition and false advertising statutes as well as the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act in connection with the promotional “strike-through” pricing for courses offered on our platform, alleging that the reference prices used for comparison purposes are false or misleading. The complaint seeks injunctive relief, unspecified damages, restitution and disgorgement of profits. We are in the process of investigating the claims alleged in the complaint and have not yet answered. We intend to vigorously defend ourselves in this matter.
They would be 90% smaller (though hopefully on higher volume). From the S-1:
>We incur content costs in the form of payments to our instructors, generally determined as a percentage of total revenue generated from their content.
This is a pretty typical structure when unit costs are low. It gives the publisher the ability to price as they please to optimize revenue, and because the inventives are aligned, authors don't need to know customer willingness to pay.
No, payments to authors are percentage-based, so they deflate down with the price.
It's just a form of price discrimination. If you're paying and not urgent, wait a couple weeks and the price is $10. If you've gotta have it now, or don't care about the money (e.g. work will reimburse), the price is $100.
I find that the courses on Udemy are very amateurish. I was following a course, what the guy was saying was wrong, I was seconding guessing myself and then towards the end of the course he corrected his mistake.
Coursera and Pluralsight are much better at least they have some quality standards.
That was my experience a few years ago with taking some courses from some folks who were some of their top instructors... but it was very much "guy who knows this like the back of his hand rushes through a thing and maybe mentions one or two tips ... and here's the rest of the **** owl".
Yeah I could reproduce his work but not with an understanding of what is going on / any kind of pathway to try new things, and I felt like there was no effort to communicate more than that.
A few courses I really got the feeling that the instructor was taking an inaccurate approach to the whole topic. Not wrong... but not how the concept of the language or code works.
Interesting that the founding CEO owns only 1.5% of the company while the current CEO owns 2.5%. Wonder if this is because of secondary or dilution? How much does the other cofounder (Gagan) hold? I would have thought this was a huge success story for founders but it might not be?
They probably required massive rounds of dilution in each round to fund all the user acquisition to get to the next round.
Per Crunchbase, it looks like they raise every quarter or so, and they lose anywhere between 10-20 million a quarter (amateur numbers compared to something like uber).
Josh Comeaus css course is one of the most amazing courses I’ve ever purchased. I also wouldn’t be a web dev without Wes Bos and his courses. Brad Traversy, Max Depps sorry I know I’m spelling your name wrong, also Stephen Grider. Also can’t forget the amazing Scott Tolinkski and level tuts. These guys are amazing instructors and I’m happy to give them my money, more so if they’re on their own platforms
I had not heard of these before but Reforge looks very cooked.
I was impressed by the names you got on there, and that you are actually selective and seem to say no to some people. (For those who are wondering: I am not a plant, and I do not know buf.)
Can you say a little about the placement rates, and what people end up doing after the program.
One thing I particularly appreciate from Udemy compared to other platforms is that there are many great (and not so great) courses covering obscure topics that are not available in Coursera, Edx, etc.
I agree. If you want to pick something brand spanking new, your best bet is Udemy. I remember when Vue first hit the scene and Udemy had 3 courses on it but the others did not. The same with a "small" topic like containers when they first came out and so forth.
They can't match the depth of Udacity -- which, in my experience, is as deep as top graduate level courses -- they do have coverage.
Wow. Crazy journey for Eren Bali. I remember when he was a Sr. Engineer at SpeedDate. When I was let go he was casually discussing Udemy around the office. At least the beginning ideas for it.
What do you guys think about educative? It's getting more popular in for people who focus on interviewing.
I've been told a good author can earn about 20k during 6 months. It's pretty good ROI given it's all passive. As an author myself, what I really want to a direct communication channel with readers to answer their questions.
I don't think that's as relevant as the current demand for VCs to unload their investments as fast as possible before the next major economic catastrophe.
It boggles my mind that we're set to nearly double the record number of IPOs this year, and last year was the highest number since 1999, yet in general no one finds this at all interesting or alarming.
I don't think I have any special insight here, but it seems like a lot of the companies this time have actual products, revenue, and a plausible path forward. I've also read that during the period from 2008 until about 2019 there was an unusually low number of IPOs.
Is the online course market not over saturated with LinkedIn Learning, Pluralsight etc
The market is saturated with computing-related courses aimed mostly at beginners (programming languages, software tools etc). Despite that, there is still space for well-structured, well-narrated (scripted or semi-scripted) courses with clear instruction aimed at beginners, intermediate and advanced users.
An expert in a subject is not necessary a good teacher. This is why the course quality on Udemy varies enormously. It's also why, for example, so many programming courses follow the bullet-point slides and voiceover template. There are so many more imaginative ways to teach online - but that takes more time and effort.
Udemy also encourages long courses because it gives users the impression of depth or breadth of content (and thus better value-for-money). This is why so many courses are 10, 20, and even 30+ hours - even though length is not a marker of quality.
I'm sure many readers on Hacker News have already seen the link below which is a parody of programming tutorials. (And which applies equally to free and paid tutorials.)
I just bought 300 dollars worth of courses couple days ago on Udemy, I've used all these companies and I have to say Udemy is better than them. There is definitely a market based on teaching quality difference and the teaching tools provided.
I noticed a lot of the courses I was looking at on Coursera seemed to be from universities and the ones on Udemy looked like they were more from companies (Google, etc.) or professionals from different organizations. Is that a fair assessment?
You're right that Coursera has content from universities, on the other hand Udemy has individual instructors (and anyone can become an instructor). Also Coursera has a lot of free content - not sure if 100%, but a large number of courses offers the content for free, you only need to pay if you want to do assignments and get a certificate.
Oh, and Coursera does not have 90% off promos every other week, unlike Udemy
Thanks for the response, this is helpful because I’m trying to find a good online writing course and haven’t landed on anything solid, so that’s why I was looking between these two. I’ll have to look at the free options in Coursera a little closer.
I'm in Tech Consulting with a background in Computer Science (specifically Data Science) and I'd have to say that the courses on Udemy are much more aligned with how things are done in the industry.
And yes, most of the courses that I have taken there are taught by professionals with industry experience.
I mean in the physical world, we have lots of schools because we were constrained by distance. But we don't consider all the schools interchangeable. A farm kid from Iowa would happily travel to Georgia to study at Georgia Tech because it was recognized that the experience was superior even if they had the same materials and curriculum.
So I think there is a role for different versions of the same class. Some people may even mix and match: multi variate calculus from Coursera, machine learning from Udacity, presentations from linkedin and Angular from pluralsight or whatever.
Everyone in the space has a different take on the best way to present online courses. Udemy is the wild west market approach. They let anyone make a course, and let the algorithm sort out whats worthwhile and what's not. That means you get A LOT of terrible stuff, but absolutely some insane deals from genuinely talented instructors.
We are building an open and mostly free course holding platform. https://classgalaxy.com Just like GitHub for learning. Here instructors can access and manage all students. Social connections for instructors and learners. Market place with small fees for qualified instructors.
They do an okay job for video courses, but videos are just so dull for coding. That's why I built https://qvault.io maybe someday ill have time to make it an interactive course marketplace
I see a lot of negative comments on this thread. Fair enough. I have seen the good, bad and ugly of Udemy. I have never tried to publish a course (thought about it). I am sure the instructor-side view of reality is less than ideal. Frankly, this is true even of massive platforms like Amazon. Ask any Amazon seller what the world looks like from their perspective. It can be horrific and surreal.
Udemy (and Amazon) do not create value by developing top-notch back-end applications for instructors and sellers. Nor do they add value by having the best process for behind the scenes participants. Their value comes from what consumers see and experience.
Yes, Udemy has a bunch of junk courses. I probably bought a few hundred courses from them. I am very careful about watching as much of the free material as possible before making a decision. Once you've seen and experienced a few courses you get a sense of how to evaluate quality.
You can also do research on the instructors outside of Udemy. For example, a while ago I decided to take Robert Feranec's Altium Designer course on Udemy. I wanted a refresher. I use the software daily but I do so many things I haven't really kept up with the latest and greatest.
Robert's course is top notch. I really enjoyed it. I will likely take some of his advanced classes off-platform.
I've also had my kids go through various courses on Udemy. From software development to handwriting, math, languages and using GIMP. All great courses. No complaints whatsoever.
One of my kids is currently going through the excellent "100 Days of Code - The Complete Python Pro Bootcamp for 2021" from App Brewery. It is amazing to see just how engaged she is.
One of my other kids is currently going through MIT's 6.00.1x on EdX while simultaneously using the "100 days of Code" course on Udemy to shore-up holes in his Python knowledge. He is doing great.
From there I plan to move them to higher level courses on either (or both) EdX and Coursera. These kids are going to finish high school with actual marketable skills that will lead to nice jobs during college (rather than the useless shit they are being fed in school...don't get me started). If it was possible to take these courses for credit they could graduate high school and obtain a BS in CS within a year. Sadly the only path I have been able to identify has a starting age requirement of 17, which I think is ridiculous. They are a couple of years younger than that and can already code circles around most first and second year university CS students. Age is irrelevant.
Anyhow, I guess I am saying that there's a lot of good on the platform for learners. You just have to be careful about evaluating courses and instructors.
Like Amazon, there is a ton of crap but also some real diamonds in the rough. The fact that you can take a $15,000 bootcamp from General Assembly OR a $15 Udemy course taught by the same bootcamp instructor teaching the exact same lesson plan... is kind of insane. The accessibility that Udemy opens uo can be truly remarkable - you just have to wade through the lower quality stuff
Amazing to think that 10 years ago that there were two new format Stanford open access courses that launched at the same time: AI Class (Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thrun) and ML Class (Andrew Ng). Thrun and Ng went on to launch Udemy and Coursera, respectively.
There was actually a third excellent course launched at the same time - Jennifer Widom's Introduction to Databases. The original version is no longer available, but there are mini-courses in its stead. Highly recommended - https://cs.stanford.edu/people/widom/DB-mooc.html
I was an instructor there for 5+ years (with ~30k enrollments) and in my entire professional career I've never met a worse company in terms of how corrupt they are and how little they actually care about instructors unless you happen to be one of the few instructors they reach out to privately and sign a contract with in which case they do extra things for you like promote and rank your course more so than related courses in your category. Their entire platform is based on manipulating both instructors and watchers of courses.
I would seriously suggest anyone thinking about creating courses to avoid using any type of course marketplaces (ACG is especially bad too). It's worth it to build your own audience because on Udemy and other platforms you're actually not building your own business, you're building their business because you won't receive any information about anyone who signs up which means your students are 100% locked into that platform. If you leave you're essentially starting at ground zero in which case you might as well start at ground zero on your own terms.