My issue with Udemy isn't their constant "sales" or the way they treat their tutors.
It's the 95% amount of crap on the platform. It's genuinely difficult to sort the good quality courses from the tons of bad courses. Especially the ones that have got tons of 5 star ratings but only because the tutor promised them another free course if they rate 5 stars.
Just because everyone can upload a course to Udemy, doesn't mean that they should and the platform suffers for it
Udemy is selling a dream, more so, than an education.
They mostly target lower income internet natives, who have heard of coding, not enough to do anything dangerous but certainly enough to long for the good money and great perks.
You are not really committed to switching up your life, but a "premium product" at 90% off down to 20$, how could you not give it a try? It's an affordable dream and makes for an easy sale.
I prefer Coursera because I'd rather shell out 40 euros and get a high-quality course from say, Roughgarden at Stanford than pay 15 euros and get something worse than just scanning Youtube.
Also Coursera has the whole system of problem sets and programming assignments etc.
That said - I'd be happy if someone could show me some decent Udemy courses?
I take a lot of Udemy courses. When I want to learn something new I generally buy a course (look for at least 4 stars and a minimum 500 votes, though popular topics will have thousands of ratings) and binge-watch the entire thing in a couple of days. It gives me an idea of what's possible with this particular technology. Later when I really need to use that technology I spend futher time doing code examples etc. Has worked really well for me to keep abreast of multiple technologies in my CTO job.
One main issue is that most of the courses only cover bigginner and intermediate level tasks only. I think the reason for this is that an instructor needs thousands of sales to be profitable on Udemy. Even for relatively popular topics like Magento and Salesforce development, one sees very less enrollment numbers. Only core popular techonolgies like Python, Node.js, AI/ML, etc see thousands of sales.
I've never taken an Udemy class, but am sure there's quality content on the website. However, I've always felt that the way they show their prices is a little fishy.
Looking at their offering now, all of the courses are priced between 10 - 13 euros, but each one seems to be "on sale" with the actual price being in the hundreds of euros.
There actually is a German DIY store that went bankrupt because of this practice. Their slogan was "20% off everything except animal food." Since it was pretty much always 20% off, nobody bothered going for any sale. Instead they only went when they really needed something or chose a different store because of their stupid slogan. Closed down a few years back. Having a constant sale doesn't seem to help your sales apparently.
I noticed a course this weekend I was a bit interested in. And they said it was 94% off. 150 NOK ($16) instead of 2350 NOK ($250). It was some kind of offer that would expire this weekend, and I had "9 hours left" or something to get it at that price. I actually wrote it down because I had the same feeling of being manipulated.
You made me check, it's still 94% off at the 150 NOK price. Now it's some kind of offer that lasts until Feb 21. Will be interesting to see what the price is in two days..
They used to be in the hundreds range, but for a few years now Udemy has been on a constant sale. They used to go up and down from the sale but I haven’t seen them go up anymore for ages.
"JavaScript: Understanding the weird parts" by Anthony Alicea is a high-quality course which helped me understand JS on a more fundamental level. This is the main one I always recommend for folks who know JS, but would like to take a step further: https://www.udemy.com/course/understand-javascript/
I studied Vue and Nuxt through Maximilian Schwarzmüller’s courses, which I liked. He has a very beginner-friendly teaching style, which was right for me at the time but might not work for everyone.
His Kafka course https://www.udemy.com/course/apache-kafka/ is highly rated and AWS courses get good feedback. A lot of effort gone in to the production and is knowledgeable on the topics.
Given the Kafka course has 56,023 registered students alone even at the lowest offer price minus Udemy fee's he's done alright out of it.
I have the same experience, in fact for the most part I feel like everything I've tried on Udemy has been the same level of quality as a YouTube tutorial.
I've been generally happy with Ben Tristem's beginner game dev courses. Specifically because they make an effort to stay up-to-date with the engine updates, and they demonstrate every single step involved in the process so if there's anything a beginner Unity/Unreal dev gets stuck on in the process, they'll find a video demonstration of how to do it there.
I sell a course on Udemy for 189 Euros.
They constantly sell it at around 9 Euronand keep a big chunk of it.
The only way to make money is to bring in your leads but at that point it's just better to sell directly.
They should send them $5M and claim they saw they were on sale at a 90% discount on the website. That would give them a taste of their own medicine, it is exactly how they treat their authors.
Hi guys!
I hope I’m able to contribute by bringing some of my own experience and real data to this discussion. I'm the founder of Classpert (https://classpert.com), a search and comparison site for online courses. In the last 6 months, we’ve managed to sell over 2000 courses, in 8 different languages and across 80 different countries (Udemy alone is selling around 200 courses each month through Classpert). So while it is true that price has an impact on low-income customers (especially from developing countries), even for developed countries (USA, Canada, Germany, Japan) Udemy still is leading the race in number of sales (at least if we use our database as a proxy of the market)
Much of their success stems from the fact that Udemy has by far the largest catalog of online courses on the web (something around 110k courses). And while some people may argue that this comes at a cost of providing low-quality courses it also naturally provides an extremely aggressive long-tail SEO strategy. The majority of potential customers don’t correlate e-learning platforms and quality (most of their customers are not high-profile HN users), so if you are googling for an online course chances are that Udemy will be ranked at the top (and on a global scale). This also explains why they have 10x more traffic than Pluralsight or 3x more than Coursera.
On top of that (an here is much more my personal intuition than data-based analysis), Udemy not only offers cheaper courses but also has not yet adhered to “subscription models”. Subscription models target specific users. Subscription models are awkward and feel totally unnatural to most “normal users”. Why on earth a normal user, seeking for a specific bit of knowledge will lock himself on a subscription? The subscription business model seems to work much better on B2B than B2C.
Good point and I will agree to that; I am pretty much the target audience for Pluralsight, but unless my employer offers it, every time I took a subscription, I felt a strange "pressure" to utilize it (turning learning into chore rather than fun), as well as pressure to unsubscribe unless I can really justify it.
I find it strangely easier to buy a course on either Coursera or Udemy because of seeming lack of pressure :-/
Udemy is one of the most corrupt / worst marketplaces I've ever encountered in the world -- for the folks who make courses at least.
For reference I've had some of my courses on their platform for years and it's not like I'm bitter because no one bought my courses. I've made a solid amount of money there over the years (6 figures).
The problem is they constantly sell your course for $10 and then take 50%+. Any traffic coming from Google results in them taking 50%+ too. If you opt out of their controlled pricing then your course will be hidden from all search results, in which case you'll make nothing because no one will be able to find you and that defeats the entire purpose of using a marketplace.
But that's only the tip of the iceberg. Udemy heavily hand tunes search results and cuts behind the scenes deals with instructors in certain niches, and when those deals happen, other people in the same niche get completely fucked over night.
For example, I was selling close to 50+ courses a day, then Udemy signed a contract with another person in the same niche (they told me directly). A few days after their course went live, the traffic to my course dropped by over an order of magnitude and my sales dropped by 20x. My graphs literally looks like a nose dive and I went from being able to sustain myself to having to stop creating courses.
The hilarious thing is my course is even higher rated than theirs and I've had people message me privately saying they took both courses and much preferred mine, yet it sits barely on the first page with a 4.7 average rating and like 1 sale a day with little to no traffic.
Every time I email Udemy asking about this they say they don't modify search results, but then every time I show them screenshots of very strange ranking behavior they change what they say and usually I get in a bump in sales for a day and then it drops off.
For the last few years I've spent a lot of time (and a lot of hard work) attempting to build my own audience instead of making new courses so I can drop Udemy all together. I'm not there yet, but one day I hope I'll never have to deal with that platform again and I wouldn't recommend using Udemy for both buying or selling courses to my worst enemy.
Oh, and one fun thing about being on Udemy too is, you can expect people to black mail you for unreasonable things. I've had more than 1 person on the platform email me saying things like I "MUST" help them with their custom project for free and if I don't then they they are going to give my course a 1 star review. I think due to Udemy's low prices, it attracts a certain type of person.
You should totally branch out on your own. Maybe put some "teaser" courses on Udemy with good content, but not premium, and do premium on your own. I want to take your letsencrypt course but would rather pay you directly. So as an example of my suggestion in this case, your Udemy course would maybe explain SSL, explain LetsEncrypt, and show how to get around, but the best, most usable scripts and info would only be available in your course.
It's like all the other platform stuff: You're basically a contractor for Udemy. Their rules, their terms, and you're ditched when somebody makes them a "better" deal.
Udemy's business model is, as far as I can tell, identical to Valve's: get digital pack-rats like me to buy a ton of stuff we'll never even open when it's on sale. Can't fault them for doing what works, though. Of the courses I've actually gotten around to taking, I thought they were pretty good.
Did Udemy get around to putting controls in place to stop course stealing? I remember Troy Hunt in particular had issues with people taking his material, narrating over the top of it, and selling it on their Udemy channels.
Udemy is a great platform for beginners who want to try different field or a niche without shelling lot of money (hey 90% off). They also have refund policy which is great too. I had purchased courses for photography, aws and newer javascript frameworks (e.g vue.js) in the past. There are many courses out there for the same topic, have to be careful in selecting quality course with good feedback.
It makes a lot of sense for Benesse to get into online education, let's see if they can do something that works with Udemy. It might help Udemy as well to get Berlitz co-branding on some content on the platform and start a path that's almost like Masterclass but instead of curated around industry legends, it's brands and institutions.
Also, having visited Benesse House museum this winter, I'd be really excited to see content come out of this that covers more of the art on Naoshima in a highly accessible way.
The change in Udemy's pricing policy after 2016 - applying aggressive discounts and setting maximum prices for courses - has affected many instructors in a bad way. This is directly related to the perceived low quality of their courses (obviously with exceptions). Many instructors today use Udemy to try to attract traffic to their own websites where they sell the "best versions" of their courses.
Content quality and personal goals do make the difference in continuing education, but people really need to be clear with themselves before purchasing courses, summaries or hands-on tutorials: none of these is a shortcut to a degree if you want accreditation, none of these is a shortcut to a portfolio if you want original case studies.
Don’t know if it’s a reaction to their new raise and they want to try to get full price signups with the new traffic, or what, but I’m seeing all courses full price at the moment.
First of all, Udemy doesn't "steal" anything. They're a platform for people to post videos. Like if a Udemy course appears on YouTube, you cannot say "YouTube stole videos from Udemy."
If someone stole videos, that's on the thief. It's called piracy and it's been a thing on the internet since the beginning.
Second of all, people who steal other people's videos often given them away for free. Post them to black hat sites, etc. So most of those 12,000+ are probably free.
And finally, Udemy holds the money for like 45-60 days, so if a course is found to be pirated, all students get refunds and the instructor gets banned. And doesn't make a dime.
Find me a real example of a pirated course in 2019 where the pirate made money. Go on. You can't find it, because it doesn't happen.
[+] [-] ChrisRR|6 years ago|reply
It's the 95% amount of crap on the platform. It's genuinely difficult to sort the good quality courses from the tons of bad courses. Especially the ones that have got tons of 5 star ratings but only because the tutor promised them another free course if they rate 5 stars.
Just because everyone can upload a course to Udemy, doesn't mean that they should and the platform suffers for it
[+] [-] jstummbillig|6 years ago|reply
They mostly target lower income internet natives, who have heard of coding, not enough to do anything dangerous but certainly enough to long for the good money and great perks.
You are not really committed to switching up your life, but a "premium product" at 90% off down to 20$, how could you not give it a try? It's an affordable dream and makes for an easy sale.
[+] [-] alexgmcm|6 years ago|reply
Also Coursera has the whole system of problem sets and programming assignments etc.
That said - I'd be happy if someone could show me some decent Udemy courses?
[+] [-] pritambarhate|6 years ago|reply
One main issue is that most of the courses only cover bigginner and intermediate level tasks only. I think the reason for this is that an instructor needs thousands of sales to be profitable on Udemy. Even for relatively popular topics like Magento and Salesforce development, one sees very less enrollment numbers. Only core popular techonolgies like Python, Node.js, AI/ML, etc see thousands of sales.
[+] [-] Pandabob|6 years ago|reply
Looking at their offering now, all of the courses are priced between 10 - 13 euros, but each one seems to be "on sale" with the actual price being in the hundreds of euros.
[+] [-] akuji1993|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matsemann|6 years ago|reply
You made me check, it's still 94% off at the 150 NOK price. Now it's some kind of offer that lasts until Feb 21. Will be interesting to see what the price is in two days..
[+] [-] sprafa|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dansvidania|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blowski|6 years ago|reply
My own recommendations would be Stephen Grider’s React courses, and Chris Croft’s management courses.
[+] [-] citeguised|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orangefarm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmnicolas|6 years ago|reply
Packt is OK but a few of their courses are unintelligible due to a strong foreign accent.
Lynda (or Linkedin now) has good quality but seems more geared toward beginners, it's rare to find advanced topics.
I like Pluralsight, they have advanced topics and their foreign instructors are intelligible.
[+] [-] tiew9Vii|6 years ago|reply
His Kafka course https://www.udemy.com/course/apache-kafka/ is highly rated and AWS courses get good feedback. A lot of effort gone in to the production and is knowledgeable on the topics.
Given the Kafka course has 56,023 registered students alone even at the lowest offer price minus Udemy fee's he's done alright out of it.
[+] [-] spookyuser|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indigochill|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tilolebo|6 years ago|reply
But according to some reviews it's also above average for Udemy content.
[+] [-] cbzbc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artsyca|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FrozenSynapse|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbersac|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JofArnold|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shimst3r|6 years ago|reply
Definitely worth it if you’re looking into cross-platform frontend development.
[+] [-] kipchak|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strongbond|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ing33k|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lucadg|6 years ago|reply
Classic rent extracting platforms.
[+] [-] blowski|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codextremist|6 years ago|reply
Much of their success stems from the fact that Udemy has by far the largest catalog of online courses on the web (something around 110k courses). And while some people may argue that this comes at a cost of providing low-quality courses it also naturally provides an extremely aggressive long-tail SEO strategy. The majority of potential customers don’t correlate e-learning platforms and quality (most of their customers are not high-profile HN users), so if you are googling for an online course chances are that Udemy will be ranked at the top (and on a global scale). This also explains why they have 10x more traffic than Pluralsight or 3x more than Coursera.
On top of that (an here is much more my personal intuition than data-based analysis), Udemy not only offers cheaper courses but also has not yet adhered to “subscription models”. Subscription models target specific users. Subscription models are awkward and feel totally unnatural to most “normal users”. Why on earth a normal user, seeking for a specific bit of knowledge will lock himself on a subscription? The subscription business model seems to work much better on B2B than B2C.
[+] [-] NikolaNovak|6 years ago|reply
I find it strangely easier to buy a course on either Coursera or Udemy because of seeming lack of pressure :-/
[+] [-] livefastdieold|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heyozapzap|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickjj|6 years ago|reply
For reference I've had some of my courses on their platform for years and it's not like I'm bitter because no one bought my courses. I've made a solid amount of money there over the years (6 figures).
The problem is they constantly sell your course for $10 and then take 50%+. Any traffic coming from Google results in them taking 50%+ too. If you opt out of their controlled pricing then your course will be hidden from all search results, in which case you'll make nothing because no one will be able to find you and that defeats the entire purpose of using a marketplace.
But that's only the tip of the iceberg. Udemy heavily hand tunes search results and cuts behind the scenes deals with instructors in certain niches, and when those deals happen, other people in the same niche get completely fucked over night.
For example, I was selling close to 50+ courses a day, then Udemy signed a contract with another person in the same niche (they told me directly). A few days after their course went live, the traffic to my course dropped by over an order of magnitude and my sales dropped by 20x. My graphs literally looks like a nose dive and I went from being able to sustain myself to having to stop creating courses.
The hilarious thing is my course is even higher rated than theirs and I've had people message me privately saying they took both courses and much preferred mine, yet it sits barely on the first page with a 4.7 average rating and like 1 sale a day with little to no traffic.
Every time I email Udemy asking about this they say they don't modify search results, but then every time I show them screenshots of very strange ranking behavior they change what they say and usually I get in a bump in sales for a day and then it drops off.
For the last few years I've spent a lot of time (and a lot of hard work) attempting to build my own audience instead of making new courses so I can drop Udemy all together. I'm not there yet, but one day I hope I'll never have to deal with that platform again and I wouldn't recommend using Udemy for both buying or selling courses to my worst enemy.
Oh, and one fun thing about being on Udemy too is, you can expect people to black mail you for unreasonable things. I've had more than 1 person on the platform email me saying things like I "MUST" help them with their custom project for free and if I don't then they they are going to give my course a 1 star review. I think due to Udemy's low prices, it attracts a certain type of person.
[+] [-] dhimes|6 years ago|reply
It's like all the other platform stuff: You're basically a contractor for Udemy. Their rules, their terms, and you're ditched when somebody makes them a "better" deal.
[+] [-] heyozapzap|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tvanantwerp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skinnymuch|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatitdobooboo|6 years ago|reply
The sales part is definitely dishonest, but as far as people who make content, if they get more $$ on youtube, why dont they post on youtube?
[+] [-] snorrah|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avinassh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirkonasato|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasikjain|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chriscatoya|6 years ago|reply
Also, having visited Benesse House museum this winter, I'd be really excited to see content come out of this that covers more of the art on Naoshima in a highly accessible way.
[+] [-] livefastdieold|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrNuke|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] demadog|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clubdorothe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrshawkes|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unreal37|6 years ago|reply
First of all, Udemy doesn't "steal" anything. They're a platform for people to post videos. Like if a Udemy course appears on YouTube, you cannot say "YouTube stole videos from Udemy."
If someone stole videos, that's on the thief. It's called piracy and it's been a thing on the internet since the beginning.
Second of all, people who steal other people's videos often given them away for free. Post them to black hat sites, etc. So most of those 12,000+ are probably free.
And finally, Udemy holds the money for like 45-60 days, so if a course is found to be pirated, all students get refunds and the instructor gets banned. And doesn't make a dime.
Find me a real example of a pirated course in 2019 where the pirate made money. Go on. You can't find it, because it doesn't happen.