7 ms·

I was a Udemy instructor for ~10 years selling tech courses but focused more on delivering courses through my own site for the last ~5-6 years. Something never

by nickjj 10mo ago

I was a Udemy instructor for ~10 years selling tech courses but focused more on delivering courses through my own site for the last ~5-6 years. Something never felt right with how Udemy promoted courses. I used to have a top selling course there, selling thousands of copies a month and now it gets basically no sales but it's still one of the highest rated courses in that niche on their platform. It's just no longer ranked or promoted by Udemy, for years. I have no evidence of this but my personal opinion is their ranking is probably not fully automated and they have special offers and deals with certain instructors and if you're not a part of this club, oh well. Again, it's all speculation but I can only go by what my numbers are. They were small scale life changing and now nothing but the quality of the courses I produced didn't change. It doesn't make sense. Of course it could be one big coincidence too, but this has been tracked and analyzed over years.

linhns 10mo ago
I dropped Udemy years ago when they started to promote outdated versions of courses.
iris-digital 10mo ago
Speculating, but perhaps it needs to be updated once in a while? Last modified might be a (dumb) factor.
- nickjj 10mo ago
  > Speculating, but perhaps it needs to be updated once in a while? Last modified might be a (dumb) factor. It's a fair point. I have over time, such as updating libraries which produced new zip files and also modified lessons. It didn't move the needle for rankings, but it did update the timestamp.
gustavopezzi 10mo ago
I also started teaching on Udemy in 2019 and even though the number of students was high, I quickly noticed that income was low and most enrolled students did not even start the courses they purchased (let alone complete them). I also decided to invest time and money in my own website/school and that was probably the best decision I've ever made. Also, I'm not sure most people know that Udemy was never profitable up until 2025. Before going public, Udemy had never been profitable despite good revenue growth. As of mid-2021 (around its IPO filing), the company had accumulated significant losses (hundreds of millions of dollars) and explicitly noted it had not generated a profit in its SEC filing. After its October 2021 IPO, Udemy continued to report net losses most quarters and years, even as revenue grew. Losses persisted through 2023 and into 2024. Finally, in 2025 they saw profits for the first time since its IPO.
- swores 10mo ago
  > "I also decided to invest time and money in my own website/school and that was probably the best decision I've ever made." Thanks for not jumping to self promotion, but I'm actually curious to see how you did it - would you mind sharing a link?
  - gustavopezzi 10mo ago
    pikuma.com
    - zerr 10mo ago
      How are the videos served?
      - dmpk2k 10mo ago
        wistia.com
        gustavopezzi 10mo ago
        That's right. :)
- pclmulqdq 10mo ago
  I started writing a udemy course some time ago in a very weird specialty and then I saw the $5 promo days. I was planning to charge $50-100 for the course (in line with other training materials in the specialty), and I realized that this was incompatible with udemy's model.
- techcode 10mo ago
  Any idea if some (perhaps many) of those enrolled students were from Udemy's corporate clients? When we used to have access to (not all, but a lot of) Udemy through work - I could enroll into seemingly unlimited number of courses. And IIRC there was no (or no good) playlist/favorites mechanism - so I would just enroll in courses as a "playlist".
ravenstine 10mo ago
Modern society totally devalues anything considered even slightly old. I used to notice it as a real lack of intergenerational knowledge transfer, but it's gotten so bad that it seems like more and more people react with "how do you know so much?" and "why would you do that?" over very basic knowledge that isn't even that old. For all the reading the average person claims to do, they sure don't seem to know very much outside of a 10-year window unless they happen to have studied history in college or whatever. But I don't necessarily blame said people, at least in the proximal sense. The technological industrial complex continuously refines its understanding of the desire for novelty that's always been there and seeks to exploit it; and they've gotten unreasonably good at that. It doesn't matter if your intellectual property is just as relevant as ever, perhaps more so, if there's some hip new alternative. Udemy and of course social media sites know this, and I think there's a feedback loop that goes beyond mere exploitation of the human psyche, but in the actual training of the human psyche to have blindness towards the past. The only answer right now, besides hosting your own courses (with hookers and blackjack), might be to periodically recreate your online presence from scratch in order to exploit the algorithm back. If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard. With the current state of AI, this may just be a cat and mouse game that can't be sustained.
- oceansky 10mo ago
  Can you give specific examples on lost knowledge?
  - dijit 10mo ago
    “why is I/O in docker slow, and how would you improve it” is pretty esoteric knowledge now, but would have been considered basic knowledge (for other applications, not specifically just docker) only 12 years ago. I have had people working who don’t in the slightest understand how a filesystem works, so taking it a step further is impossible. When I tune things I am asked how I know, but everything is just built from the basics, and the basics don’t make you feel productive, so they’re always skipped when possible.
codezero 10mo ago
Not sure if anecdata helps but when I worked at Quora udemy course link spam was one of the higher volume sources of spam. It’s possible other courses are doing better because they pay people to link spam.
ljlolel 10mo ago
Try reloading new course with same videos, (or modified or updated version but honestly probably 90% is just new year label) saying 2026
j45 10mo ago
Good for you for building your own garden. Sites like Udemy and Coursera have many upsides but they are still anchored in earning in the past, while that world is finally changing rapidly.
zenoprax 10mo ago
I respect the restraint from self-promotion here but... Your [Docker, Flask, HTTPS, AWS Docker, and DevOps courses](https://nickjanetakis.com/courses https://nickjanetakis.com/courses) look good and the price is fair. Bookmarked! (the last two could use some more detail in the overview but the first three would give me enough confidence to take a chance)
- nickjj 10mo ago
  Thanks, funny enough the last 2 are on Udemy (my first courses) where as the others are on my main site. I've kept the Flask one up to date for almost 10 years, all free updates. I have so many course ideas but starting a new one is tough because I've lost all search traction to my site and courses in general. I don't want it to end but I also have to be real. I've put a decade into writing blog posts, hundreds of free YouTube videos (without ads or sponsors), 100+ episode podcast related to programming and none of it has grown an audience in 5-10 years. I mean sure I have 21k subs on YouTube but most videos get like 200 views. I do it because I enjoy it but that doesn't mean it's wrong to also want to be able to sustain myself again doing it like I did between 2015 and 2021.
  - chirau 10mo ago
    I took your Build A SaaS course on Udemy some year back, it was really good. I didn't realize it has updates to the day. The Udemy version is still the 10 hour one though, so perhaps that's why.
    - nickjj 10mo ago
      Thank you. Yep on my site there's around 30 hours of content for the same course. Basically a bunch of updates and refactors along with building a 2nd app. I was trying to differentiate my site vs Udemy by adding extra perks.
musebox35 10mo ago
The bitter lesson here is that if you want to control a business you can not avoid or outsource marketing. It is a huge part of any trade and you have to bear the marketing cost. I totally understand the desire to avoid it and concentrate on the craft and to create. I tried and failed at it numerous times. I decided that I will not start a business if I do not have any partners who understand and are willing to engage in sales and marketing.
elric 10mo ago
I've been bamboozled by Udemy a couple of times, thinking a course was recently made, only to discover the videos were 10 years old and most of the content was woefully out of date, with a few "recent updates" videos tacked on at the end. Whether this is a problem obviously depends heavily on the subject. Classical CompSci problems won't suffer from this, depth first search is still depth first search ten years later. But the framework-du-jour is often a different beast entirely 10 years down the road. Perhaps they simply have too much content to be able to curate things properly.
renjieliu 10mo ago
Wow hey Nick, I took your docker course on udemy a few years ago. Even these days, I am revisiting it. Gotta say it's one of the best courses I have taken. For me, it was not the recommending system from udemy brought me to it, it was just a google search. I was interested in docker container at that time. Maybe SEO works better for the niche.
elric 10mo ago
Can I ask what your tech stack is for creating courses? Or is that a trade secret?

by nickjj 10mo ago

linhns 10mo ago

I dropped Udemy years ago when they started to promote outdated versions of courses.

iris-digital 10mo ago

Speculating, but perhaps it needs to be updated once in a while? Last modified might be a (dumb) factor.

nickjj 10mo ago
> Speculating, but perhaps it needs to be updated once in a while? Last modified might be a (dumb) factor. It's a fair point. I have over time, such as updating libraries which produced new zip files and also modified lessons. It didn't move the needle for rankings, but it did update the timestamp.

gustavopezzi 10mo ago

I also started teaching on Udemy in 2019 and even though the number of students was high, I quickly noticed that income was low and most enrolled students did not even start the courses they purchased (let alone complete them). I also decided to invest time and money in my own website/school and that was probably the best decision I've ever made. Also, I'm not sure most people know that Udemy was never profitable up until 2025. Before going public, Udemy had never been profitable despite good revenue growth. As of mid-2021 (around its IPO filing), the company had accumulated significant losses (hundreds of millions of dollars) and explicitly noted it had not generated a profit in its SEC filing. After its October 2021 IPO, Udemy continued to report net losses most quarters and years, even as revenue grew. Losses persisted through 2023 and into 2024. Finally, in 2025 they saw profits for the first time since its IPO.

swores 10mo ago
> "I also decided to invest time and money in my own website/school and that was probably the best decision I've ever made." Thanks for not jumping to self promotion, but I'm actually curious to see how you did it - would you mind sharing a link?
- gustavopezzi 10mo ago
  pikuma.com
  - zerr 10mo ago
    How are the videos served?
    - dmpk2k 10mo ago
      wistia.com
      - gustavopezzi 10mo ago
        That's right. :)
pclmulqdq 10mo ago
I started writing a udemy course some time ago in a very weird specialty and then I saw the $5 promo days. I was planning to charge $50-100 for the course (in line with other training materials in the specialty), and I realized that this was incompatible with udemy's model.
techcode 10mo ago
Any idea if some (perhaps many) of those enrolled students were from Udemy's corporate clients? When we used to have access to (not all, but a lot of) Udemy through work - I could enroll into seemingly unlimited number of courses. And IIRC there was no (or no good) playlist/favorites mechanism - so I would just enroll in courses as a "playlist".

ravenstine 10mo ago

Modern society totally devalues anything considered even slightly old. I used to notice it as a real lack of intergenerational knowledge transfer, but it's gotten so bad that it seems like more and more people react with "how do you know so much?" and "why would you do that?" over very basic knowledge that isn't even that old. For all the reading the average person claims to do, they sure don't seem to know very much outside of a 10-year window unless they happen to have studied history in college or whatever. But I don't necessarily blame said people, at least in the proximal sense. The technological industrial complex continuously refines its understanding of the desire for novelty that's always been there and seeks to exploit it; and they've gotten unreasonably good at that. It doesn't matter if your intellectual property is just as relevant as ever, perhaps more so, if there's some hip new alternative. Udemy and of course social media sites know this, and I think there's a feedback loop that goes beyond mere exploitation of the human psyche, but in the actual training of the human psyche to have blindness towards the past. The only answer right now, besides hosting your own courses (with hookers and blackjack), might be to periodically recreate your online presence from scratch in order to exploit the algorithm back. If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard. With the current state of AI, this may just be a cat and mouse game that can't be sustained.

oceansky 10mo ago
Can you give specific examples on lost knowledge?
- dijit 10mo ago
  “why is I/O in docker slow, and how would you improve it” is pretty esoteric knowledge now, but would have been considered basic knowledge (for other applications, not specifically just docker) only 12 years ago. I have had people working who don’t in the slightest understand how a filesystem works, so taking it a step further is impossible. When I tune things I am asked how I know, but everything is just built from the basics, and the basics don’t make you feel productive, so they’re always skipped when possible.

codezero 10mo ago

Not sure if anecdata helps but when I worked at Quora udemy course link spam was one of the higher volume sources of spam. It’s possible other courses are doing better because they pay people to link spam.

ljlolel 10mo ago

Try reloading new course with same videos, (or modified or updated version but honestly probably 90% is just new year label) saying 2026

j45 10mo ago

Good for you for building your own garden. Sites like Udemy and Coursera have many upsides but they are still anchored in earning in the past, while that world is finally changing rapidly.

zenoprax 10mo ago

I respect the restraint from self-promotion here but... Your [Docker, Flask, HTTPS, AWS Docker, and DevOps courses](https://nickjanetakis.com/courses https://nickjanetakis.com/courses) look good and the price is fair. Bookmarked! (the last two could use some more detail in the overview but the first three would give me enough confidence to take a chance)

nickjj 10mo ago
Thanks, funny enough the last 2 are on Udemy (my first courses) where as the others are on my main site. I've kept the Flask one up to date for almost 10 years, all free updates. I have so many course ideas but starting a new one is tough because I've lost all search traction to my site and courses in general. I don't want it to end but I also have to be real. I've put a decade into writing blog posts, hundreds of free YouTube videos (without ads or sponsors), 100+ episode podcast related to programming and none of it has grown an audience in 5-10 years. I mean sure I have 21k subs on YouTube but most videos get like 200 views. I do it because I enjoy it but that doesn't mean it's wrong to also want to be able to sustain myself again doing it like I did between 2015 and 2021.
- chirau 10mo ago
  I took your Build A SaaS course on Udemy some year back, it was really good. I didn't realize it has updates to the day. The Udemy version is still the 10 hour one though, so perhaps that's why.
  - nickjj 10mo ago
    Thank you. Yep on my site there's around 30 hours of content for the same course. Basically a bunch of updates and refactors along with building a 2nd app. I was trying to differentiate my site vs Udemy by adding extra perks.

musebox35 10mo ago

The bitter lesson here is that if you want to control a business you can not avoid or outsource marketing. It is a huge part of any trade and you have to bear the marketing cost. I totally understand the desire to avoid it and concentrate on the craft and to create. I tried and failed at it numerous times. I decided that I will not start a business if I do not have any partners who understand and are willing to engage in sales and marketing.

elric 10mo ago

I've been bamboozled by Udemy a couple of times, thinking a course was recently made, only to discover the videos were 10 years old and most of the content was woefully out of date, with a few "recent updates" videos tacked on at the end. Whether this is a problem obviously depends heavily on the subject. Classical CompSci problems won't suffer from this, depth first search is still depth first search ten years later. But the framework-du-jour is often a different beast entirely 10 years down the road. Perhaps they simply have too much content to be able to curate things properly.

renjieliu 10mo ago

Wow hey Nick, I took your docker course on udemy a few years ago. Even these days, I am revisiting it. Gotta say it's one of the best courses I have taken. For me, it was not the recommending system from udemy brought me to it, it was just a google search. I was interested in docker container at that time. Maybe SEO works better for the niche.

elric 10mo ago

Can I ask what your tech stack is for creating courses? Or is that a trade secret?