5 ms·

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 n

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.

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.