6 ms·

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

by nickjj 5y ago

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.

GoldenMonkey 5y ago
Agreed. Similar experience as an instructor with them.
arnvald 5y ago
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. By the way: ACG = A Cloud Guru?
- nickjj 5y ago
  > By the way: ACG = A Cloud Guru? 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.
dhimes 5y ago
I think you've warned us off before— you and I may have even communicated privately. Thank you.
ironmagma 5y ago
As someone who has thought about becoming an instructor, what platforms are better?
- dominotw 5y ago
  youtube is better.
- boplicity 5y ago
  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.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  Guess you did not read his comment very thoroughly. He answered your question.
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    It just says what not to do, not what to do instead.
    - dbetteridge 5y ago
      > 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 + mailing list - Build your own site - ??
      - ai_ia 5y ago
        - Blog on the niche and build reputation It's amazing to see how instructors like Wes Bos, Kent C Dodds and Josh Comameu's CSS Course pulled off. - Create youtube channel and drive traffic from their to your course
open-source-ux 5y ago
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.
- nickjj 5y ago
  > 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).
  - regressiveparty 5y ago
    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.
plondon514 5y ago
If anyone is thinking of creating an interactive coding course I'm working on https://codeamigo.dev/ 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.
- ai_ia 5y ago
  I checked out your application. Looks cool. Are you planning to add other languages interactive environments as well?
  - plondon514 5y ago
    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 https://twitter.com/codeamigo_dev
    - ai_ia 5y ago
      Awesome. Followed you on twitter. Will be following your progress.
    - fullstackchris 5y ago
      If you're ever looking to support TypeScript eventually, the Monaco editor (https://github.com/Microsoft/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
      - plondon514 5y ago
        Hi Chris! Yes codeamigo does use the monaco editor, although I think I need to spend a few more cycles on improving the error highlighting.
duxup 5y ago
> 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.
- pc86 5y ago
  > Most of these sites are ultra top heavy with the top creators also generating the most revenue. You won't find this anywhere else, on any system that relies on networks. Pareto being what it is consolidation toward the top is all but a certainty.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- regressiveparty 5y ago
  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.
dceddia 5y ago
See also, this article from 2015 where a few well-known creators have problems getting pirated courses taken off the platform. https://robconery.medium.com/how-udemy-is-profiting-from-piracy-5638b929ffca https://robconery.medium.com/how-udemy-is-profiting-from-pir...
- regressiveparty 5y ago
  6 years ago? This is old news.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
41209 5y ago
As a student I had a very similar experience. 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.
joshwcomeau 5y ago
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/ 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.
- richlandlord 5y ago
  You must have made 5~10k on this post alone. Kudos!
LouisSayers 5y ago
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.
- truetraveller 5y ago
  Thanks for the insight!
- regressiveparty 5y ago
  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.
regressiveparty 5y ago
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.
- nickjj 5y ago
  > 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.

by nickjj 5y ago

GoldenMonkey 5y ago

Agreed. Similar experience as an instructor with them.

arnvald 5y ago

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. By the way: ACG = A Cloud Guru?

nickjj 5y ago
> By the way: ACG = A Cloud Guru? 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.

dhimes 5y ago

I think you've warned us off before— you and I may have even communicated privately. Thank you.

ironmagma 5y ago

As someone who has thought about becoming an instructor, what platforms are better?

dominotw 5y ago
youtube is better.
boplicity 5y ago
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.
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
Guess you did not read his comment very thoroughly. He answered your question.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  It just says what not to do, not what to do instead.
  - dbetteridge 5y ago
    > 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 + mailing list - Build your own site - ??
    - ai_ia 5y ago
      - Blog on the niche and build reputation It's amazing to see how instructors like Wes Bos, Kent C Dodds and Josh Comameu's CSS Course pulled off. - Create youtube channel and drive traffic from their to your course

open-source-ux 5y ago

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.

nickjj 5y ago
> 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).
- regressiveparty 5y ago
  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.

plondon514 5y ago

If anyone is thinking of creating an interactive coding course I'm working on https://codeamigo.dev/ 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.

ai_ia 5y ago
I checked out your application. Looks cool. Are you planning to add other languages interactive environments as well?
- plondon514 5y ago
  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 https://twitter.com/codeamigo_dev
  - ai_ia 5y ago
    Awesome. Followed you on twitter. Will be following your progress.
  - fullstackchris 5y ago
    If you're ever looking to support TypeScript eventually, the Monaco editor (https://github.com/Microsoft/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
    - plondon514 5y ago
      Hi Chris! Yes codeamigo does use the monaco editor, although I think I need to spend a few more cycles on improving the error highlighting.

duxup 5y ago

> 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.

pc86 5y ago
> Most of these sites are ultra top heavy with the top creators also generating the most revenue. You won't find this anywhere else, on any system that relies on networks. Pareto being what it is consolidation toward the top is all but a certainty.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
regressiveparty 5y ago
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.

dceddia 5y ago

See also, this article from 2015 where a few well-known creators have problems getting pirated courses taken off the platform. https://robconery.medium.com/how-udemy-is-profiting-from-piracy-5638b929ffca https://robconery.medium.com/how-udemy-is-profiting-from-pir...

regressiveparty 5y ago
6 years ago? This is old news.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

41209 5y ago

As a student I had a very similar experience. 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.

joshwcomeau 5y ago

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/ 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.

richlandlord 5y ago
You must have made 5~10k on this post alone. Kudos!

LouisSayers 5y ago

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.

truetraveller 5y ago
Thanks for the insight!
regressiveparty 5y ago
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.

regressiveparty 5y ago

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.

nickjj 5y ago
> 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.