1400+ enrollments in 5 days? Are bots signing up?
I recently published my first course on Udemy and decided to keep it free for demo. What concerns me is that it got over 1400 enrollments in just 5 days but only a handful of them have started the course. When I checked the student profiles of other students (who haven't yet started with the course), I found that they have enrolled in thousands of courses. It seems that there is some kind of bot that is just made to enroll in the free courses.
How can we get rid of them so that we have only genuine students?
Has anyone faced similar issues?
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No I have experienced the same with my first course. These people are not bots they are real people but when they see free courses, what they tend to do is they enroll in all of them before the instructor changes them to paid. They enroll a bunch of courses but they are just too lazy to do them. Hope this is helpful
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I think they are probably bots. Surely real people don't sign up for **literally thousands** of courses?
Some more observations here:
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The number of students a course or instructor has is a completely unreliable measure of how they are actually doing in terms of making money (which is why most of us are here). The number of reviews tells you how many "real" students are going through the course and that equates to the amount of money being made because those who review are almost always real students.
I have checked this with a number of successful instructors. Generally, real students will review a course at the rate of 1/3 to 1/4. In other words, if a course has 1000 reviews you can assume that the number of real students who have paid for the course or are actually going through the course (UFB) is somewhere between 3000-4000. If it shows that they have 10,000 students you can assume that the instructor has given away between 6-7000 free courses or coupons. You can also assume that the instructor has made $11 X the number of reviews, approximately (NOT the number of students). This varies by topic. When an instructors promotes him/herself by claiming they have a huge number of students, check the number of reviews, multiply by 3 and subtract that number from the claimed number of students and you will have the official BS factor for that instructor. High BS factors also correlate with LOWER ratings. Instructors with cleaner number have higher ratings.
For example, I do not give away any free courses and only a very few 10-20 coupons when I launch a new course. Checking this morning I have 182,312 students, 62,361 reviews, and I have earned a total of a little over 700k. You can do the multiplying and dividing.
I understand the desire of new instructors to offer free courses to establish "social proof", but it is only social proof to those who don't understand the numbers and I seriously doubt it has much impact on sales. There are better ways to create sales, but they take more effort than just offering courses for free.
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