
Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse - h4l0
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/19/online-learning-marketplace-udemy-raises-50m-at-a-2b-valuation-from-japanese-publisher-benesse/
======
ChrisRR
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

~~~
NikolaNovak
I've bought ~20 courses on Udemy; variety of software engineering; music
lessons; language lessons; and random; not a single one had reasonable
"information density" \- i.e., I'm sure if I watched all 20 hours I'd pick up
some useful information, but probably only an hour's worth.

I've since moved to mostly either using free Youtube videos and just picking
specific knowledge I need, or paying much more for targeted professional
courses.

Mostly though, I've gone back to my preferred method of learning - books -
where I can control the speed and repetition as it suits the moment :-/

~~~
michaelbuckbee
I'm friends with a top course creator on Udemy and the info density issue is
caused by the buying habits of users.

\- Most buy based on sales (at a crazy discount), ASP is ~$10 off his
ostensibly several hundred dollar course

\- Most 95%+ never even _open_ the course

\- Of the remainder it's about .25% that "finish" the course in any meaningful
way

\- Most people buying the courses are aspirational about it ("Yeah I should
know about that") and aren't making a detailed analysis of the materials

\- Most people buy on _length_ - that they'll look at two courses on the same
topic and take the one that is longer and/or has more modules or chapters

\- Udemy has a new program for enterprises that pays based on minutes/month of
content consumed.

Should be noted this is a highly technical course aimed at developers/devops
(situation might be different for guitar lessons).

~~~
ghaff
>Udemy has a new program for enterprises that pays based on minutes/month of
content consumed.

LinkedIn has something similar with what used to be Lynda. (Not sure what the
payment scheme looks like.) I imagine this sort of thing is fairly common.
Corporations have a relatively modest set of online courses they create (or
have created) on topics specifically relevant to their products/market and
they want to fill out their training catalog with a lot of general and
relatively low cost material.

------
jstummbillig
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.

~~~
_fizz_buzz_
I don't have a ton of experience with Udemy. But I took an introduction to
Autodesk Inventor class there in January and I thought it was quite good. Was
only something like €10 and I was able to do quite complex drawings (at least
for what I need) after two days. Much cheaper and probably almost as effective
as one of those expensive corporate training classes that are often a €1000,-
for just two days.

~~~
epanchin
How many managers would give you time off to study a udemy course though, vs a
£1000 professionally run one?

It’s frustrating that the main advantage of paying a lot for a course, is
having some proper time to do it.

~~~
gboss
My team which manages our company's ecommerce website inherited maintaining an
iOS app that was being developed by a contracting firm. No one on my team had
much experience in iOS. My company is extremely frugal. I bought an intro to
iOS course on Udemy for the five of us for about fifty dollars total. It was
excellent. Was definitely blown away by the quality and the price. It got us
quickly up to speed on xcode, debugging, swift, view creation and publishing
to the app store among other things. I am sure there is junk content on udemy,
but there is also really good content that is worth more than the price.

~~~
Ididntdothis
We as a team also did a four hour course on TLS and PKI and it was a game
changer. It was much better than reading up stuff.

~~~
Bombthecat
Oh nice! Whats the name? I dont need it. But i try to teach this stuff to
newcomer!

------
alexgmcm
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?

~~~
tostitos1979
I have a PhD in CS but am a huge udemy fan/user. The itch it scratches when I
want to learn about a brand new topic. You asked for good courses .. Andrew
LeMoth's course in electronics is absolutely brilliant. He does the lecture in
a very unconventional style .. almost like he stayed awake for 40 hours and
recorded the whole thing. It isn't college level .. I.e. no differential
equations but it is brilliant. I have also gotten my money's worth from FPGA
courses and those on arm/rtos programming. Oh .. once I got a course on
wireless charging just to support a a blogger who goes by afrotechmod. It was
short but great content, and let me say thanks to someone I admire.

The ai lectures on udemy are a bit weaker in my opinion. YouTube and
university content is better.

In contrast, I have never paid for coursera, edx or audacity. A key thing is
the price point of 15 bucks .. I don't feel bad at all blowing cash on the
udemy courses .. it is like a movie ticket. A 100 usd course feels like real
money.

~~~
Gene_Parmesan
The great thing about Coursera and edX are, the certificate is optional and
auditing is free. I took courses on Algorithms by Sedgewick from Princeton,
courses from MIT and Harvard, and so on without ever spending a cent. In fact,
this is how I self-taught CS and programming (and eventually switched careers
from law).

As far as practical skills go, a Pluralsight subscription was by far the thing
that helped me the most. As long as you stay with the well-reviewed courses,
the information density tends to be extremely high. It's how I learned enough
about desktop GUI dev via WPF to score a volunteer 'consulting'-type gig with
a nonprofit, and that combined with what I learned from there about Angular
got me my first job.

------
pritambarhate
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.

~~~
satvikpendem
I've found this person's courses [0] to be very high quality, and they go
through pretty advanced topics, such as convolutional neural networks for
natural language processing, which might be to your point.

[0]
[https://deeplearningcourses.com/course_order](https://deeplearningcourses.com/course_order)

------
Pandabob
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.

~~~
matsemann
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..

~~~
matsemann
An update to this: The offer expired yesterday. Then I however was prompted
that the normal price was 2350 NOK, but as a new user I could get it for 150
NOK for the next X hours. So just a new offer with the same price lined up
after the first expired.

Earlier today I checked, and then the price was back at 2350 NOK. However,
checking again now a few hours later, it's again a new offer for 150 NOK as a
new user. And if I log in, it's 250 NOK without any mention about why, just a
"90% off!" tag.

So yeah, the full price is a fake one.

~~~
matsemann
Update again: The last 150NOK offer is now over. There is however a new
campaign where I can buy it for 163NOK for the next 4 days.

------
Lucadg
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.

Classic rent extracting platforms.

~~~
blowski
I always wondered who gets to decide what's on sale! How does your agreement
work with them?

~~~
Lucadg
I am not sure as the Udemy account is managed by a friend. I'm pretty sure we
have no saying on the price. With 100 students we cashed $329. So, there it
is: 3,29 $ per course.

Basically a tip.

I sell the Italian version of this course directly for 200 €.

~~~
dhimes
What delivery platform do you use?

~~~
Lucadg
Do you mean for the Italian version? Own Wordpress website with s2member
plugin

~~~
dhimes
OK. I just set up a LearnDash site trying to focus on content and not the
engineering for an MVP. Thinking maybe Moodle when it's time to migrate.

------
blowski
Anyone recommend any Udemy courses, on any topic? My experience is that there
are very few where both delivery and content are good.

My own recommendations would be Stephen Grider’s React courses, and Chris
Croft’s management courses.

~~~
orangefarm
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.

~~~
pritambarhate
Yes can vouch for Maximilian Schwarzmüller. I have gone through many of his
courses. He tends to cover everything from basic to advanced topics. The
courses are generally longer also.

This is his YouTube Channel: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSJbGtTlrDami-
tDGPUV9-w](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSJbGtTlrDami-tDGPUV9-w)

------
jacquesm
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.

------
codextremist
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](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.

~~~
livefastdieold
I liked the site. Congrats! Very useful. Is it Bootstrapped?

~~~
codextremist
Nice! We're open for feedbacks too! We received a seed from Quero Education(YC
S16). Last year, we’ve made our ways to the finals but eventually got rejected
by YC (S19). Not sure if we are trying a second time

------
nickjj
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.

~~~
dhimes
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.

~~~
nickjj
I tried many different strategies over the years. The only real move is to
never use Udemy for anything.

If you put a watered down version of a course on Udemy and then try to sell
your premium course at the end, then a ton of people who go through the course
will just slam you with 1 star reviews saying things like "this idiot gave us
a 5 hour course where I learned a lot but now he wants us to buy the premium
course on his own platform".

If you put a free course on Udemy, with intent to move people to your platform
by gently mentioning a premium version of the course, you'll get the same type
of negative reviews no matter how good the course is.

This is especially bad too because Udemy students are trained by the platform
to only ever pay $10-15 for a course, even if it has 20+ hours of content,
full time support and life time free updates. Suggesting a price that isn't
$10 results in hostility and practically 0% conversions.

If you go the other route and create some type Udemy-specific mini course
where you don't even talk about the "better" version of the course, and you
really make it the best it can be then you end up hurting yourself because
Google is going to rank the Udemy version higher than your own version, so
organic traffic will be driven to the Udemy version.

You're waaaaay better off never to even step foot on Udemy's platform and just
build your own audience with your own platform. Most successful courses are
successful due to word of mouth, not the marketplace. That's the whole idea
behind the "1,000 true fans" concept.

~~~
demadog
Well your $59 flask course looks awesome, you’re definitely on the right track
and I see the value over having a direct connection to the creator rather than
through Udemy.

------
tvanantwerp
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.

~~~
skinnymuch
Udemy stuff is always on sale for ~2 years now. Maybe 5-10% of the time they
aren’t.

------
whatitdobooboo
I dont know what you guys expect. Its an opportunity to learn at $10-$20 a
course. Yeah a course can be bad, but so can a book.

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
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.

~~~
avinassh
Even sentdex had to deal with the same issue -
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/8sl76u/sentdex_on_u...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/8sl76u/sentdex_on_udemys_awful_business_practices/)

~~~
Kaze404
I wonder why he made the video private. It was a really good video.

------
rasikjain
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.

------
chriscatoya
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.

------
livefastdieold
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.

------
DrNuke
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.

------
demadog
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.

~~~
whatitdobooboo
Check on a private window

------
clubdorothe
I've always wondered how japanese companies (looking at Softbank especially)
had so much cash to invest? Why do they want to invest that money abroad?

------
chrshawkes
My issue with Udemy is they stole my Python videos from YouTube and sold them
to 12,000+ students at $199.99 listed price .

~~~
unreal37
There is no way that is true.

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.

------
satvikpendem
I love Udemy. I've learned so much from their courses, including React and
Flutter most recently. Our employer has an unlimited subscription which is
great for checking out a lot of these courses, I definitely don't watch every
single one available however, but enrolling in a few courses of the same topic
shows me what's possible with some technology and which teacher is the best.

I personally prefer Andrew Mead's courses as he actually waits for you to
complete a part by yourself before moving on, which I don't see as concretely
with other teachers like Girder or Schwarzmüller, who sometimes say to try it
on your own, but Mead actually has a moment where you can pause the video and
try it, built into the course.

With regards to not having informational density, I've solved this problem by
downloading the courses locally [0] and watching them at 4x speed. In a
browser, you could set `querySelector("video").playbackRate = 4`, but since
the video changes every few minutes, especially at high speed, this isn't too
useful. I've actually made a Chromium extension that changes the video/audio
playback speed globally since I watch a lot of YouTube at 4x speed as well
[1], but again it isn't smart enough to detect when an underlying video source
has changed.

Therefore, I use a local player, SMPlayer in specific [2], which is an mpv-
based player. The problem, however, is that Chrome is very good at allowing
you to understand voices at high speed, and nearly every other player, such as
Firefox [3] and others, do not. This seems to be because they saccade the
audio, where they skip parts of it, so that it sounds tinny or not
understandable (edit: looks like it's fixed in Firefox!). Chrome does not use
this approach. I've tried loading playlists into Chrome for this exact
purpose, to simply use it as a video player, but the tab crashes because the
video files are too large. Now, we return to the local player, SMPlayer.

SMPlayer, as it uses mpv, is able to pass any command line options to mpv. In
this case, we are able to change the time-stretching amount by ourselves
instead of waiting for Firefox or another player to do so. To do so, go to
Options -> General -> Multimedia Engine: mpv, and then Options -> Advanced ->
MPlayer/mpv tab -> Options: --speed=4, Audio filters: scaletempo=stride=10.
You can play around with the speed and stride, but for the stride, around 8-20
sounds good [4]. It's still not as good as Chrome but it's usable and
understandable. I wonder if there's a full way to solve this bug.

Edit: Looks like from [3], someone figured out that you can use the following
filters with mpv as well. This just adds the overlap and search arguments in
the audio filters. This sounds significantly better than without the overlap
and search arguments as above, Chrome level basically.

    
    
      mpv --af=scaletempo=stride=8:overlap=1:search=10 --speed=4 test.mp3
    

Anyway, hopefully this helps others move through content faster. You might
balk at 4x, but you need to start at something smaller, like 2x, before
gradually moving up in speed. I like experiencing content at high speeds
personally, and I use similar hacks for other media as well, such as
audiobooks and podcasts. For audiobooks (on Android), I use a fork of the
Voice Audiobook player [5] which supports speeds up to 6x because the original
author did not seem to want to raise the maximum listening rate, citing
simplicity concerns for most people. As well, it also seems like only
AntennaPod goes up to 4x for podcasts, most podcast players I've seen only go
to 3x [6].

[0] Udeler - [https://github.com/FaisalUmair/udemy-downloader-
gui](https://github.com/FaisalUmair/udemy-downloader-gui)

[1] Speed - [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/speed-global-
video...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/speed-global-
videoaudio-s/ncaighkkcbkmhiiljbjfjpkkgelpgkab?hl=en)

[2] SMPlayer - [https://www.smplayer.info/](https://www.smplayer.info/)

[3] Firefox bug with time-stretching -
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427267](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427267)

[4] SMPlayer solution for time-stretching -
[https://forum.smplayer.info/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9069](https://forum.smplayer.info/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9069)

[5] Voice Audiobook Player fork -
[https://github.com/brandonocasey/Voice](https://github.com/brandonocasey/Voice)

[6] AntennaPod - [https://antennapod.org/](https://antennapod.org/)

------
sfblah
Udemy is just like all sorts of things in the economy: it’s a stupid-people
tax. You can learn the same information from free videos or just a book.

~~~
firatcan
Actually we are trying to create a platform called Jooseph, which is basically
playlists for learning. You can follow modules curated from different
resources.

We are trying create a platform that you can gather those kind of resources
for someone to learn that topic easily.

So at Jooseph you can follow curated list of resources from different channels
such as medium, youtube or podcasts anything valuable. Also, any user can
create his/her own list for share or just to store it.

We are at Public Beta right Now you can try free from;
[https://jooseph.com](https://jooseph.com)

