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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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'm "congenitally limb deficient" below the elbow. Grew up in the 90s using horrible myo electric prosthetic limbs that had 2 hour battery life and were in all practicality a glorified claw machine. I ditched that as soon as I realized they were actually a hindrance.
In 2006, there was a TED talk with Dean Kamen about a prosthetic arm developed by DARPA. It blew my mind and got me finally interested in wearing a prosthetic again. So much promise in a field that had been in a coma for the last 20 years.
That arm never happened. Why? Because it took the FDA 7 years to approve it. The project now is dead in water and the group responsible for building it is trying to literally give away their designs. Why did the FDA have to approve a prosthetic limb? Well, because it touches your skin. Yes, the silicon on the back had to be tested because of skin contact.
I'm now the lucky recipient of BeBionic 3 arm, which is great. Worst part about it? It uses radio frequency to control the hand and has a tendency to go haywire. I asked why they didn't just use Bluetooth and he said that would require another 2 years to get FAA approval. Ugh.