
Advice to read before buying a course from Udemy - yarapavan
https://www.labnol.org/internet/buying-udemy-courses/31851/
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nickjj
Keep in mind instructors don't really ever get paid 97% of their list price.

Let's say I give you a coupon to buy my course for $19. Technically I would
receive 97% of that, but that never happens because Udemy constantly puts it
up for $10 and as soon as you reach the course's description page you will see
Udemy's "better" deal, and naturally you'll click that.

So instead of receiving 97% of $19 as an instructor, you'll end up with $5
(50% of $10 because you normally only get 50% revenue).

Also Udemy tries to push instructors to make 7-8+ hour video courses which
could easily take 3 to 4 full time months to create.

Then of course they play favorites with certain instructors. For example it's
not uncommon for Udemy to reach out to certain instructors and then go into a
bounded contract with them which basically says "look, if you make a top
quality course, we'll promote the shit out it for you. We'll even give you a
direct internal contact and resources to help you make the best course
possible for this niche." which essentially means if you're NOT part of this,
it will be impossible to compete with someone who is because the biggest
factor in ranking well is number of sales + number of positive reviews.

Long story short, I've spent a few years teaching on Udemy (and even made
decent $ on it without any special treatment on Udemy) but I'm slowly trying
to remove myself from them because of how poorly they treat instructors.

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Rotdhizon
Udemy rubs me the wrong way. When I see courses that are supposedly several
hundred to several thousand dollars, constantly marked down to pennies on the
dollar, that seems like a red flag. I've tried a few of the tech courses and
in my experience, a lot of them are outdated or outright worthless. Their
micro-certification courses are about as long as a news article. As someone
else said, there's definitely some good courses thrown in, you just have to be
able to find them.

~~~
subpixel
I've thought the same thing and figured it's A/B tested to hell and just
produces conversions. I know it's worked on me.

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bespoke_engnr
I sell a poorly marketed (but well-loved) "Project-Based Linux" course on
Udemy. Most of my business there comes from my YouTube channel. Since
launching the course two years ago, the average price students have paid has
hovered around just over $9.00.

I think of Udemy as the Packt of online course platforms. There are certainly
some gems to be found, if you have the time to look for them and don't mind
getting a few duds in the process.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
Two points of context:

1\. I have a friend with a well performing Udemy course and he's doing about
the same price/unit sale as you are. I think it's just a volume thing.

2\. Udemy courses are so inexpensive and as a result does it matter if there
are a few duds? Again from the stats my friend shared, about 80% of the people
buying the course don't even start it.

~~~
bespoke_engnr
Thanks for that.

And just to clarify, I didn't mean to sound negative. I actually think it's a
good thing -- I've picked up several really good courses on real estate
investing, machine learning, and other stuff.

A few misses at $10/pop come out in the wash when you also get courses that
can add tens of thousands of dollars' worth of knowledge to your life.

------
gaius
_if you prefer proper instructor-led video courses, go with Udemy_

That’s a bit of a stretch. There are plenty of video courses in EdX which are
generally of a very high quality as they are produced by real institutions,
with real lecturers, not random people off YouTube.

And EdX is free, you pay only for a certificate if you need/want one. With no
pricing tricks based on web/app either.

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curiousgal
I thought this was going to touch on how many Udemy courses are stolen.

~~~
duxup
Are there a lot?

Like people copying slides or such?

~~~
curiousgal
More like people reuploading entire courses.

> _in 2015, we have received 125 DMCA notifications as well as 45 “Hey, this
> looks weird maybe you should look into this,” notifications_

[https://medium.com/@robconery/how-udemy-is-profiting-from-
pi...](https://medium.com/@robconery/how-udemy-is-profiting-from-
piracy-5638b929ffca)

~~~
Rotdhizon
Interesting read, I didn't know anything about that. It seems like all would
be solved if they put even a tiny bit of effort into vetting uploads. What
type of educational site allows most any upload to make it through? They're
approach seems to be reactive as compared to other sites being proactive,
another red flag.

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duxup
I don't think I've ever seen a udemy course NOT on sale.

~~~
retro64
Here's an interesting tidbit from my experience. My son was looking at
purchasing a Udemy course. He was asking my advice about it as we chatted over
the phone (he lives a short distance from me). I visited the site and found
the course he was referring to. "Oh, the one for only $11.95?"

"No, it's $19.95"

After going back and forth for a moment we verified it was the same course,
but for him it was offered at a higher price. He was using an Android phone to
visit the site, and I was on a Linux box. He had never visited the site before
searching for this course, and I had never heard of it.

The difference? Not exactly sure? Is it profiling based on OS? Doesn't seem
likely. I suspect the price was based on cookie residue he picked up or
profiling based on prior surfing. He had been searching the web for a while
looking at similar products. Was his surfing behavior calculated into his
price, scoring a more likely chance for him to purchase at a higher rate?

I have not yet found out (does anyone here have a reasonable explanation?),
but it's a definite turn off to use any more of their products.

~~~
thomdailydingle
Pretty simple - new users get a cheaper price.

Mobile apps also won't match up, the prices are controlled by their own tier
structures. e.g. $10.99 on a website might translate to 13 euros for a dude on
the app in France.

~~~
pritambaral
> He had never visited the site before searching for this course, and I had
> never heard of it.

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matte_black
Every Udemy course I ever bought was on a massive sale, usually in excess of
90% or so. There’s so many sales all the time nothing is worth buying at full
price.

~~~
segmondy
No course is ever on sale if every course is always on sale.

------
dwags
I have used Udemy for programming and music courses. Some programming courses
have been mediocre or outdated for sure but I have always looked back and
noticed that it was my fault for not reading more about the current state of
the subject and referenced that with the course description.

I've also used Coursera but i'm just not a fan of the online classroom
approach nor do I care about the certifications but all the courses I have
taken were awesome material-wise.

What I do know is if I ever meet Stephen Grider or Maximillian Schwarzmüller
in a bar I will be buying them a beer.

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learc83
My assumption was always that the full price is only there to act as a
starting point for negotiations with companies buying courses for employee
training.

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brightball
I've bought a few courses from there and they've been great about refunds if I
get into it and it's not what was expected.

My first experience was very good with a deep Mastering Ansible course that
was released in March of this year and is totally up to date. Others have been
a bit hit or miss, but I've had good luck trusting the highly rated ones.

~~~
jackgolding
Thats great about refunds and since I read the comments before the article on
this I thought the article might about refunds.

Coursera had very poor service when I asked for a refund on a ~$500 course
before the course actually began. Used to do heaps of free and paid courses
online and that experience actually turned me off them completely...

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projectramo
Udemy is great for new or niche content.

If you want to learn data science or machine learning or python, go with
Udacity, Coursera or EdX.

But if you want to learn VueJS, you have to use Udemy.

Best part is that the $1 million course was 90% off, so I only had to pay
$100,000 for it! What a saving!

~~~
sli
The VueJS 2 course[0] is 95% off right now, marked down to $10 from $190. I
wonder if it displays that for everyone.

I'm sorry, Udemy, but that's a _suspiciously_ huge discount.

[0]: [https://www.udemy.com/vuejs-2-the-complete-
guide/](https://www.udemy.com/vuejs-2-the-complete-guide/)

~~~
jore
I have checked a couple of courses over the last months and they always offer
90% discount and only for a couple of days. But when the time expires, the
discount gets automatically extended. So these 190$ are just a fiction

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codetrotter
They have some decent-ish stuff but I only buy their courses at the price of
about $9.99 and like another commenter said, the "full price" of hundreds to
thousands of dollars is ridiculous.

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wpdev_63
Would not recommend udacity for any reason. Their content is shallow and their
certificates are one step above toilet paper.

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vectorEQ
i like these advices, thanks a lot. it's useful and can save quite a bit if
you enjoy this platform for your learning needs.

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diN0bot
off topic, but to my ear the “an” in the title is jarring. i’ve been wondering
for a while now why “an” doesn’t feel right before some words, even though i
learned “an before words that start with a vowel.”

turns out it’s “an before words that __sound __like they start with a vowel”
regardless of how they’re spelled.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/alt.usage.english/...](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/alt.usage.english/TB140YlzFqM)

~~~
nathanaldensr
This is a common grammatical mistake that I see made by folks from certain
countries. Usually, it's using _an_ incorrectly before a word that starts with
the letter _u_ but where the _u_ has a consonant _/ y/_ sound.

~~~
amdsn
/j/ is the IPA for the English consonant "y" sound, /y/ is a vowel.

~~~
nathanaldensr
Sorry, I wasn't intending on using IPA. I've been teaching my kids using Logic
of English, which is how that sound is represented.

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Zealotux
I get the marketing advantage of being able to say "90% off!" on your products
and I guess that Udemy did their own A/B testing on that but when I discovered
the website a few months ago it really made me think twice on the quality of
the marketplace.

I bought a few courses since then and I don't regret it, it landed me a job,
but the whole "eternal discount" thing really was a real turn off, how about
just putting the right price from the beginning?

~~~
jmportilla
they actually tried a "normal" pricing model for a summer, but purchases
dropped. very similar to the JC Penney price change. psychologically people
like things on sale

