Just to add some background. My lad has just started a Udemy online course in Unity/C#. From the number of course completions and the price the 2 authors appear to have taken ~$10M for what amounts to, it seems, a relatively straight forward course. (I'm not saying it wasn't hard work setting up, but it seems like less work than a year's regular teaching.)
With Udemy, keep in mind that most people will have purchased the course for about $10, and not whatever shows up as the list price.
That doesn't mean the course creators aren't still doing well. Just that there's almost always some kind of '90% off' sale or promotion available. So I find the list prices for courses on there to be mildly dishonest because hardly anybody pays anywhere near that price.
I don't let that stop me from buying courses via Udemy because I've been very happy with the quality of what I've gotten so far.
>That doesn't mean the course creators aren't still doing well.
There's almost certainly a power law effect. I'm sure a (small) subset of people who do training/consulting/writing/instruction who have managed to build mostly fairly small-scale but very respectable businesses. The nice thing about video training course is that they're probably a better way for a solo practitioner to scale than most other things out there. Assuming they have the skillsets/talent for it of course.
Yes, we bought at discount and IIRC I assumed 80% did, it was a very popular course (I'd be surprised, given the figures were correct and the course wasn't free at any point, if I'd been more than one order of magnitude out -- which makes it still massively more financially rewarding than direct teaching: which was my point).
