Supporting marketplace health with a new program
The Udemy marketplace is home to tens of thousands of instructors and courses, and we strive to provide an opportunity for success for each one.
In order to increase the discoverability of quality courses, improve site performance, and support overall marketplace health, we've introduced a marketplace maintenance program to periodically audit and unpublish nonperforming, outdated content. This helps us surface the freshest, most relevant courses to prospective learners, and creates more room in the marketplace for new courses and instructors.
Content will only be flagged for removal if it has had little to no recent traction with new students, low historical traction, and no recent updates. Instructors with at-risk content will be notified via email and through their instructor dashboard. Before the content is unpublished, they'll have a chance to address outstanding issues and keep their course open to new enrollers.
Our goal with this program is to ensure the Udemy marketplace can continue to support the fresh, high-quality content instructors publish every day. You can read the details about this new program in our Help Center, and ask any general questions about it below.
Comments
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SMH….
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I welcome this.
A great move from Udemy that benefits all serious instructors.2 -
Well, I’m a serious instructor - and I view it as just another potential roadblock if it’s not implemented right. It’s couched as “so there’s room for more courses.”
really? Is there, like, limited “shelf space” I’m not aware of?
there are a thousand other things they could be working on - that actually help instructors. This isn’t one of them - and I can already see it for the black box that it will be.
The statement below is already scary looking:
Content is more likely to be flagged for the maintenance program if its Course Landing Page is sparse and/or has a significant amount of content in common with other Course Landing Pages.
What does that mean? Do I now need to worry about someone copying my landing page (which people have already done)?
And what does “significant updates” mean?? Are we supposed to now update our courses for the sake of updating them?
And what does “significant” engagement or enrollments mean? Vague terms = opacity.
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Hi Tom (@Anonymous
), thanks for sharing your concerns.First off, I want to reiterate that this program only applies to content that has had no new engagement or instructor attention for some time. We don't want to unpublish any content that's still providing value for students or to its instructor.
Regarding the question about duplicate content -- some instructors "recycle" landing page elements across their courses, copy and pasting significant portions rather than creating descriptions specific to each course. If someone has plagiarized another instructor's landing page elements it should be reported to Trust & Safety as before.
We do believe this program will benefit instructors. Old content, "thin" content and redundant content are all issues that can harm a site's standing with search engines like Google. By removing courses that have these issues, we can improve the Google ranking of all other Udemy pages. We piloted this program this last year and saw concrete SEO benefits.
I hope this helps provide more context.
Bella Almeida
Udemy Community
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Thanks. That DOES provide more context and makes me feel a bit better about it.
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@Anonymous
I would say this is an EXCELLENT move.I think 12 months is a great time-frame.
If an instructor has not updated a course in 12 months it should be removed.
If a student has not enrolled in 12 months it should be removed.
When courses are flagged and removed it should provide the instructor more motivation to buck up and develop better courses.
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Literally nothing you just said was specifically mentioned in the announcement. Literally none of it.In your attempt to disagree with my point, you actually made my point for me. The vague wording is open to interpretation, which is exactly why I raised the issue.
there are also many topics that do not require a course to really ever be updated.
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@Anonymous
I think they are looking for feedback. I would suggest 12 months as a timeframe.Do you like the 12 month timeframe?
I have seen some courses that were last updated in 2016.
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Doesn’t matter when a course was last updated. Some topics are evergreen and don’t require updates.
My question is why isn’t this awesome “AI” that Udemy seems to rely on for everything not already smart enough to just push the crappy stuff to the bottom of the pile?
I don’t have a problem with stuff getting yanked, but I DO worry about implementation, based on past experiences with Udemy’s weird algorithms (ie. a course rated 4.5 earning highest rated badge over a 4.6 course).
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@Anonymous
See @Bella
's last sentence"You can read the details about this new program in our Help Center, and ask any general questions about it below."
Asking questions is very similar to soliciting feedback.
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What? No it’s not. If they wanted feedback, they would say that. Again, you are making things up.
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This sounds great. If an instructor has active students, enrollments, or are actively updating their content, the courses would stay. But if none of those things happen you get a heads up, can correct it, or let it be unpublished. I see no negative here.
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Love this. I asked for this change years ago.
Obviously, there are courses that were published 6 years ago, which haven't had a student enrollment in years, and are just taking up search result space. Like a library that only adds books and never removes them. It's just clutter.
And as the announcement says, this improves Google SEO by not having useless results in the Google Search index.
This should be a benefit for all instructors.
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Well, since I was a part of their beta program involuntarily I can see some issues.
I was warned about a course I had published that was in danger of being removed from the marketplace. So, as the email stated I updated the landing page, the course material, and so on. Even Udemy's own system said the course was updated that month. So, I thought I was free and clear and I wouldn't get my course unpublished.
Sadly, it was.
So, in response I sent an email asking why Udemy unpublished my course when I clearly followed the directions in the email. I got back a non-answer from "Trust and Safety" which clearly didn't answer my question but ultimately I decided to just drop it.
The trouble with using AI is that you need to have a human training it.
In the future if you happen to get this email, just unpublish the course yourself, add new content and then resubmit it. You may then avoid this very problem.
If I have a course that doesn't make a sale in three months I will just unpublish it myself and then work on it and then resubmit it.
Such is life.
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This is exactly the thing I was worried about. Support is next to useless so when you start unpublishing stuff, instructors are gonna want answers, none of which they will receive.
The idea “sounds” good, but implementation and support is likely to be a disaster - as demonstrated here. That is my worry.
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Nice....very interesting...
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Hi everyone, I just wanted to reinforce that our instructors' feedback is always very welcome -- this is one of the main reasons why this community exists.
That being said, thank you for your comments and support, @RajGupta! Also, thank you for sharing your thoughts, @Joshua George
, @TameraDion
, and @ScottDuffy
, we greatly appreciate your trust and words of encouragement.@GuilhermeMP
, I'm glad you found this interesting!We're confident that this new maintenance program will result in a significant improvement of the platform and contribute to your success.
Bella Almeida
Udemy Community
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@TameraDion
There are no negatives to the "idea". I actually like the idea. My concerns about this are related to what @RichardCallaby
mentioned. The actual process/implementation is what worries me somewhat. You notify someone of an issue. They take action. The platform shows the course has been updated. Course is unpublished anyway. Emails to support go nowhere. Instructor is left with an unpublished course and no viable avenue to address the issue.3 -
Be Positive is one of the community values?
I have a question about that...
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This reliance on AI on platforms is something we all should be worried about. For instance, YouTube recently sent some very large publishers, channels with 2 or more million subscribers that their channels were in danger of being deleted. Why? Because of the spam that these channels receive from others, and that is something out of their control.
Say for instance we have a large publisher on this platform that for some reason or another doesn't get a "heads up" email and their courses are summarily unpublished. Hopefully, these instructors would notice the problem quickly. But in doing so these very same instructors could lose thousands of dollars of revenue as they wait for the problem to be resolved.
Udemy just won't turn the course back on, you will have to go through the whole submission process again. How long could that take if there is a large glitch in the system? A week maybe two weeks?
AI can and will fail at some point. I am just a small fry on this platform and honestly, I am a bit frightened about saying anything here as I fear retribution from Udemy. Be sure to plan ahead for courses to be unpublished due to technical glitches in the system. They happen. Okay, I have said my piece on the matter. Done.
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@ScottDuffy
... Sorry Scott. I'm not a cheerleader. I'm here to get information and to provide feedback. When there are kudos to be awarded, I award them. When there are things to be questioned, I question them. I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. I'm pretty sure my posts in here check ALL of these boxes (most of the time):Here’s what belongs in the community:
- Ask questions when you can’t find existing resources about an issue.
- Offer help and friendly advice when and where you can.
- Give generous and constructive feedback to your peers (and keep it respectful).
- Assume positive intent from other instructors and Udemy.
- Be respectful of each other.
- Have a sense of humor! Good communities are fun communities.
What does NOT belong in the community:
- Do not promote personal Udemy courses or other materials, such as blogs, products, and other forums.
- Do not share, link to, or ask for personal information about students or instructors.
- Do not derail a conversation or change the subject. If you’d like to discuss a different topic, start a new post.
- Do not use offensive language such as slurs and curse words.
- Do not comment on people’s appearances and clothes.
- Do not make personal attacks on other instructors or Udemy staff, including attacks on someone's perceived race, gender, ethnicity, disability, religion, or other personal identity.
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@Anonymous
I think you're getting too caught up on the update element of this new policy.
It doesn't matter how many times you update a course to "comply" with this update, as ultimately if the course is not selling then it provides no value to Udemy and should be removed.
A course that is selling will not be flagged, regardless if it hasn't been updated in 2 years. The key word in the support doc is "AND" not "OR".
From an SEO perspective, this new policy is a game changer. I make a living from running an SEO agency and have seen many times how impactful it can be to remove deadbeat pages from a site. Google is constantly updating its algorithm to reward sites that have great user engagement metrics, underperforming course landing pages are having a negative impact on the overall organic visibility of Udemys site.
A message for @Bella
to send back to the Udemy team, please ensure that once these courses are removed that the old URLs are be redirected to Udemys homepage to ensure no SEO value is lost. Some instructors would have acquired backlinks to their specific course landing pages which can be leveraged to boost Udemys visibility even further.3 -
I like the idea @Bella
there are plenty of abandoned courses with no activity in the marketplace.I have retired a course that was not performing- even though I was fond of it the marketplace wasn’t! I probably should have retired it two years ago…
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This is a great move.
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I like it
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I'm glad to see this.
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I welcome this policy. It is ‘AND not OR’
* Historically performed courses will be excluded, this is quite important. Some of the software courses may not be selling now. But somewhere at end of world haave old version of the software who want start start leaning can still do it. It also an symbolic guarantee how much the instructor is knowledgeable about the topic.
The implementation of the policy literally worries me. Means, in case of false positives, how we are going to address that to Udemy. Based on my recent experience support response from Udemy got deteriorated. There is slow response or no response in small technical issues.
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