Update: Learner Name Display in Revenue Reports

Hey instructors,

We want to share an update regarding how learner information appears in your Revenue Report.

As part of Udemy’s ongoing commitment to protecting user privacy, we’ve made an update so that learner names are now partially redacted and displayed as initials instead of full names in the revenue report.

Why this change?

Our Privacy team regularly reviews where identifiable information, such as full learner names, is displayed across the platform. Following a recent review, it was determined that full learner names are not required for the revenue report's core purpose.

You’ll still have access to all essential revenue details, including:

Purchase dates
Transaction amounts
Your revenue share

This update helps reduce unnecessary exposure of learner personal data while maintaining the reporting information you rely on.

Will this change apply elsewhere?

Privacy reviews are an ongoing process across the platform. Each area of the instructor experience is evaluated independently to balance functionality and user privacy. Any further updates will follow this method.

We want to hear from you.

We understand some instructors may have workflows that previously relied on seeing full learner names. Your feedback is valuable, and we’ll continue sharing community input with the teams responsible for privacy and instructor tools.

If you have thoughts or questions, please share them in the comments below.

Thank you for continuing to help us build a safe and trusted learning environment for everyone.

Teach on,

Ryan

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Comments

FettahBen

What's about the name in course student list?

Thor

Does this mean reviews too?

I am all on board with privacy, but I also see some potential issues.

The trust me, these are definitely real people's reviews. (FS, HS, SF, GC, etc), making reviews look fake.
Interactions with reviews become a lot less personal, same with QA. (Congratulations on passing your exam DF vs. Daniel).
Our insights become a lot more opaque, we have to just assume information is true, without having a way to confirm anything.

RonErez

I agree that privacy is a good thing and it's a good decision.

ThomasMitchell

If we wouldn't hide student names when they show up to a live class, I don't see why there's a need to here. I mean, students don't show up to a live class anonymously. This isn't Ashley Madison. I don't get the privacy thing.

SivakamiS2017

Was there any specific reason you suddenly decided to do this, @RyanJaress ? Did anyone complain ?

KarolyNyisztor

@RyanJaress I’d also like to understand why this anonymization suddenly became necessary. Seeing who actually bought our courses gave us some confirmation that real people were willing to pay for them.

Removing that visibility takes away one of the few signals instructors had about their audience. A bit more transparency about the reasoning behind this change would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

KarolyNyisztor

@Thor I agree, anonymizing people in the review section would be a terrible decision. It would serve as a green signal for bad actors who used to buy reviews in the past. You could recognize those fake reviews immediately just by looking at the made-up names, which typically followed the same pattern (e.g., S. Connor, P. Smith, and similar).

Xavier_SSAA

Some of the instructors grant exam and certification at the end of their courses. These courses tend to be quite popular for obvious reasons. But we can only make this work if we know at least the name of the student, otherwise we can't distinguish between a legitimate candidate and a candidate that wants to take our certification without actually being a student. So, please do take this into consideration.

Thor

I mean as a cybersecurity trainer I still don't understand the "Why", even with a whole section for it.
Mostly because you do not explain it.
It is just: "We have determined full names have no value".

OK, HOW have you determined that. Did you ask instructors? Or is this purely no value to Udemy?

I have MANY student who contact me outside of Udemy about Udemy courses, now I have no clue if they really are students or not.
I have certificates of completion for students outside Udemy, because Udemy only grants them based on hours of video. Now they will be random unusable names.

Again here, this is why we don't feel like partners anymore.

SoyMarketer

Just one bad decision after another. At least I am seing Udemy promote through ads in Facebook and YouTube again, so there's that.

SoyMarketer

Keep preaching brother. They make one bad decision after another. The only upside I see, is after Genefa or whatever her name was, they began running paid ads once more and I saw a small bump in sales.