

The Udemy Pyramid Scheme – Why I stopped Teaching at Udemy - royosherove
http://osherove.com/blog/2014/5/7/why-i-stopped-selling-courses-on-udemy.html

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shopinterest
I think its based on ecommerce limitations and AdWords logic/tracking.
Obviously Udemy cannot rely on pure 'organic' growth (instructors bringing
students), so, Udemy would spend $x to get a user into the platform. If that
user ends up in your class, Udemy paid for that student, not you, so it
wouldn't make sense to reward you at the same level.

Furthermore, I do understand the 'winner takes all' mentality of source
tracking for retailers and affiliates. Only very, very sophisticated systems
can track multi-source/multi touch and even less can do multi attribution on
the fly. (e.g. you brought an Udemy student but he/she decided to use your
code on someone else's class, then what? who gets what?....ad absurdum)
Something in your head such as, 'why don't we all share revenue equally' is
really hard to do in practice once you have to pay for growth. Someone pays
for a student, or you bring your own, once at Udemy, many scenarios can
happen.

I do agree that a more graceful way to do this would be to give that
preference for a given period of time (e.g. your student, the one you brought
in December gets you 90%, but after your class, that student is taking other
classes, so someone else should/may get that higher credit.

Ultimately, you are right in that more 'competition' to bring new users seems
to be the objective of the arrangement, but at least it rewards the right
behavior. You want to reward the best teachers (for acquisition and retention
purposes) so while it seems 'unfair' compared top the old system, the old
system doesn't scale once Udemy starts paying for traffic.

I know, sucks, but this one decision seems less motivated by greed than by the
struggle of marketing spend attribution and growth

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jlawer
This instructor doesn't feel that 25-50% is a fair split for the effort of
teaching the course. Given that he is now selling the course directly most
likely backs this up. I am not familiar with the specifics, but I think it
would be hard to argue that 50% of costs in running a online training course
are administrative.

One could also quite fairly argue that taking another 25% to cover paid ads
either indicates that either Udemy is unfairly putting majority of the costs
of marketing on the instructor OR that Paid Ads are an ineffective marketing
option (50% of sales price going towards marketing?!?).

Udemy needs to either offer more value to earn their cut, or optimize so they
can afford to take less.

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ScottWhigham
_but I think it would be hard to argue that 50% of costs in running a online
training course are administrative... Udemy needs to either offer more value
to earn their cut, or optimize so they can afford to take less._

Your comment _might_ be even remotely true if udemy was a not-for-profit
company but that's not the case. The goal of a company isn't to have a net-
zero sum at the end of the year (no profit). How much did udemy spend on
advertising in the past years? Because the result of that advertising is what
the OP is going to "cash in" on with his unbelievably high 50% revenue cut.
How many conferences did udemy go to as a sponsor/have-a-booth? How many
training sessions did they send their employees to so that their website +
backend would be amazing fast and available?

Go to Microsoft Virtual Academy, or to Cisco, or to Oracle/etc, and ask them
how much you will get paid if they do the same thing as udemy is doing. Go to
O'Reilly and ask them, or Lynda.com, etc. How much will Packt pay you to write
a book?

Complaining about a 50% revenue share is like complaining about a $49 airplane
ticket from NY to Paris. First, you're talking about a small group who need to
or have ever flown from NY to Paris, and second your price point is likely
100% lower than the lowest fare anyone else has ever paid. So that leaves one
solution: start your own airline and DIY (which is, in effect, what it appears
the OP did).

