Supporting marketplace health with a new program
Comments
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Hi Bella,
thanks for the update.
How about those courses which are ranking very high and got 10k + students with help of free coupons given out on different social media.. although I did think of this platform once to boost my audience rate, my heart cried seeing those spammers and bots buying my hardwork at Zero price and then mis using or not doing anything with my course. My goal is to have only paid customers who try and complete all the modules and give some honest reviews and I have improved 95% areas where they had given remarks about.
but talking about free students of 10k + and getting highest rated as against only looking for 10% of free students (like me) and growing slowly… Am worried ppl and courses like mine will become very slower compared to fast runners with 1000s of free coupons.. what r your views on them and any tips for me ?
+ few courses in my domain/subject providing 1000+ ready made excel templates to use and getting ranked as no.1. In India I know these templates are available 2000+ templates in marketplace available for Rs.200.. but how does it add value to learner’s to learn something new?!!
regards
Meghana
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I support this idea.
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I support this idea, it might be difficult to implement and could lead to wrong courses being unpublished so I hope that does not happen. Secondly, udemy courses should somewhat be passive income so it shouldn't remove but i think the benefits to udemy such as lower server costs and better SEO end up having the benefits outweigh the possible disadvantages.
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This seems like a necessary move to position Udemy as a home for quality, premium content, and in a way that should inflict the least amount of pain. While the potential SEO gains are encouraging, just making sure new learners get a good first impression is even more valuable. That drives up Udemy's perceived value, which ultimately leads to better revenue per enrollment.
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Hi Bella, my videos on Principles of marketing have been posted just yesterday on the Udemy platform. I had not availed for subtitles/ captions but it's on auto- caption mode which has resulted in wrong words being typed in many places. How can this be rectified as it may give a wrong message to my students.
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Hi everyone,
Lots of great feedback and questions here -- thank you! To respond to a few specifics:
@RichardCallaby
-- You expressed concern that courses could be unpublished when they're still generating value for instructors, resulting in instructor losses. We definitely don't want to risk anyone's revenue here, so the program is only targeting content that has little to no recent or historical traction with learners. Courses that have had strong past performance or that continue to attract even a few new students a month aren't at risk. Separately, I'm sorry to hear you "fear retribution" for sharing your thoughts -- please know that offering feedback here in the Community won't affect how your courses are featured or treated on the Udemy platform. We want this to be a space for all constructive feedback, positive or negative.@Mufaddal
-- We agree that not all topics require frequent updates to stay valuable. If you're still getting sales and engagement from new learners, your content won't be flagged for the program, even if it's been a while since your last update.
@NextGenHR506
-- Different instructors take different paths to getting their course off the ground -- for some without an existing audience, free coupons can be a way to get the initial social proof they need, but we hear you that it can be frustrating for those who don't use this strategy. Our ranking systems (and the new marketplace maintenance program) do differentiate between paid and free enrollments, so for now, it sounds like you're doing the right thing: focusing on driving engagement with the students you have and responding to their feedback.
Separate to this program to retire outdated and non-performing content, we're actually taking a closer look in the coming weeks at how different instructors use free coupons and how they affect students' behavior on the platform.
And finally @Joshua George
-- Thank you for the tip and the vote of confidence! The plan here is to route students back to the topic or subcategory page the unpublished course belonged to. This maximizes the chance they land somewhere where they see other relevant (and fresher!) courses to check out.Bella Almeida
Udemy Community
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Hi @Sanjeevani
, auto-generated captions are created using speech recognition technology, and as a result, they may not be perfect. We are, however, always working to improve the quality of our captions. While Udemy provides auto-generated captions for English-speaking courses, instructors will always have the ability to turn off the captions for their courses by clicking the “Disable” button on the Captions page.We've found that automatically generated captions can be helpful, especially to students who do not speak English as a first language. All new courses will automatically have captions generated, but instructors will continue to have the final say to prevent these captions from showing. As always, you can also edit the auto-generated captions for accuracy. You can find more information on how to edit the captions using the captions editing tool in this support article.
For further assistance, feel free to reach out to instructorsupport@udemy.com - the team will be happy to help.Oh, and congratulations on publishing your first course! Wishing you all the best.
Bella Almeida
Udemy Community
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@Bella
How does this change affect private courses?Some of the courses that were not relevant with time, I changed them from public to private. That way these courses are pulled out from the marketplace and I am still able to support my existing students in that course.
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Good question, @SandeepKumar
! Just want to reassure you that you will still be able to continue supporting your students. The maintenance program will not affect private courses.Bella Almeida
Udemy Community
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Up to the North we soar, really. Nice innovation.
Success is definitely inevitable with Udemy, instructors and the students, if Udemy continues to be flexible and be motivating like this.
No doubt about it, Udemy really wants us to play our roles like football players on the pitch, while it plays its part too, which I find very reasonable.
Guys, I think this is a great idea -- we work more and earn more too, as our students get more as well, they don't get to get stuck in primitive approach ways of solving challenges in this fast growing generation. Let's keep focusing on what we can contribute, I mean, what we can bring to the table, since that is what we have power to change. I wish us all huge success
"Positive vibes and energy all the way!".
Thumbs up to the freshness-oriented rule coming up soon.
To the North we soar.
Back to work, later. 2 -
@Bella
even though the autogenerated captions are not perfect, I'm really amazed by how accurate they are. In my courses I use a lot of scientific, less-known terms and the software is able to recognize most of them. Most people that work with audio trancription would not be able to recognize some that terms I use unless they are from the same area as me1 -
That's great, @GuilhermeMP
, so glad to hear that the auto-generated captions feature is working well for you!Thank you so much for taking the time to share this positive feedback with us.
Bella Almeida
Udemy Community
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@SAPBuddy
@Anonymous
@RichardCallaby
... I have similar concerns as you, everything with this new program sounds good on paper, however, when put into practice my concern is if/when there's an error or an instructor does update the course to no avail, support from udemy seems to be lacking. In the past the the answer I'm often given is, "It's the algorithm."2 -
Thanks for expressing your concerns @ScottB016
. To better explain, instructors who are actively visiting the site and maintaining their content are unlikely to have a course flagged. If it does happen, applying the recommendations and guidance in our Help Center will prevent removal.
We acknowledge that there were some bumps in the pilot implementation last year. We've taken in the feedback from that process and made improvements that we're confident will make the process smoother this year. If an instructor is unable to work on their course or their landing page before the deadline, our team will be happy to help them with the re-publishing process.Bella Almeida
Udemy Community
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In theory it is a good idea: update the course every 6 months to make it more attractive to the buyer. I am all for providing as much value as possible: it can only benefit both me and Udemy. In practice, it seems a big problem: if I have to add 5 minutes of video, it is not long enough to teach anything with any real depth; and if I have to add a lot more than 5 minutes, I might as well make it a separate course, but I can't because if I don't add something, my published course will be unpublished. Add to this that it takes me up to 40 minutes to create a 2 minutes video (yes, really. I edit out all the useless bits, pauses, ramblings etc), and now adding 15 minutes to teach anything would take me hours. And if I have to do that for 10 courses, then it becomes a real problem.
Further, the course is already thought out to stand the way it was devised originally.... if I have to add little bits, it becomes difficult to integrate them. It's not as easy as 1,2,3 to just add a 5 minutes video, because, again, it is not enough to teach much in any detail. I can teach a ton of stuff, but picking bits just to update a course every six months is not easy. But adding more than 5 minutes it would take a lot of work. It is as if I wrote a book, and then I am asked to add a new paragraph every 6 months....it would take a lot of thought just to think of what to add, and where. Some instructors can teach more naturally, especially if English is their first language. For me it is not so, so every word I say must count for something, I literally edit the video second by second. And yet some of us, like me, are making but a few sales because Udemy stopped promoting our courses. I don't blame anyone for that: I know I am certainly not the only one creating courses, and Udemy can do as it sees fit; all I am saying is that I have less incentives now than I had before to do all this work, and I am starting to get discouraged. Udemy has already flagged 3 of my courses, and it took me hours just trying to think what to add without creating an additional course for each "update".So I see lots of problems. I really love Udemy, but frankly this keeps getting harder and harder.....something has to give. I will try to do what I can, and I hope things get better, but so far this is not happening. Again, the ideas seem great, and I understand why Udemy wants to be as competitive as possible, offering as much value as possible, but I am not confident about the future, and I am looking for alternatives. As the proverb goes, "don't put all your eggs in one basket". I say all this with due respect for Udemy, it's a great company but the burdens for small instructors like me are getting heavier. I have tried all Udemy suggests for promotions, etc, but things aren't working well enough anymore. They were, but not anymore. In part, I am part of the problem: I am no internet person. I don't like "social media", and I quite detest internet marketing. I am a musician, not an internet marketer. I just want to teach what I love. Maybe Udemy could give us the choice of paying for promotion? (of course, I would have to earn a little more than I pay for promotion). I'd rather pay Udemy than Facebook, for example. And youtube, I detest it. Who wants to sit in there sifting through inane comments, and trying to be a dancing monkey for people who are just wasting their time looking for empty entertainment?
Sorry about the rantings here and there in this post. I wish a great day to all.
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You do not need to update your courses every six months. This is a misunderstanding that has already been clarified. Note the "AND"!!
Here is the Maintenance program documentation found in the Help Center.
What content is at risk of being unpublished?
Content may be considered for removal as part of the marketplace maintenance program if it:
- Has had little to no recent enrollments, revenue, and engagement, AND
- Has not historically had significant enrollments, revenue, and engagement, AND
- Has not been updated within the last six months
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other things I wanted to mention is that for small instructors like me who for example create music courses (which don't sell as much as other courses in other fields, unless you teach beginners, which I don't because it would be too boring for me; then again there's a lot more beginner musicians than intermediate or advanced ones) it's a catch-22 situation: X course doesn't get traction for a while because Udemy doesn't promote the course anymore, so it gets unpublished.
So it looks like more and more a case of: if you weren't successful from the start, you are done for.
In theory adding a few videos every 6 months should not be anything problematic. In practice, there's no time to do everything: life keeps whooshing by, the problem is not so much adding to a course, but finding the time to do so; I'd rather spend it on a new course. And putting in effort when your course stopped getting promoted, it's not a great motivator for adding videos.
As I wrote before, maybe Udemy could offer to provide paid promotion the way for example ebay does. The difference is that on ebay you can choose to promote the item, and if it sells, you pay for the ad.
Of course, I will try whatever else I can, if I have not tried it already, i.e. the stuff that AI suggested. I have already fixed some of these. I just hope my course won't get unpublished simply because I made no sales for a few weeks. The "no traction " part of this program is a bit worrying. I have already tried to do the youtube thing, social media, etc, didn't work and don't like it. I am willing to try things I haven't tried, but generally I only try once: if it doesn't work, I just forget about it, as time and energy are not unlimited.
I am only interested in creating courses. I am not interested in making a ton of sales, either. My sales goals are modest, I am not trying to make a lot of sales. Just enough to keep me on this track. Hopefully this partnership with Udemy, which I value, will work well enough to continue.
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one last bit of feedback from me to Udemy in regard to this program.... personally I don't have a problem selling my courses for less. I see lots of instructors complaining that they get less and less for their courses. Well, I am not one of them. I only am trying to earn -something-.
But without Udemy's promotions this is not working. Yes, I have heard the "you need to do your own promotion work" before, but as I wrote earlier, I tried it all but it didn't work. In part this is because my courses are not for most people, (let alone "for all") but actually for a few.
I am willing to send promotional emails.... these are useful. And I am willing to create more courses. And to tweak the old ones, IF they get a little promotion afterwards, otherwise there's no point doing all that work and updating courses every 6 months. That's all I can do. If I have to add to a course every 6 months for 2 years, I'd rather have created another course, unless the course I updated the first time, gets a little promotion.
In other words: I will make the updates requested by this AI, but if the course gets no promotion at all afterwards, I won't bother updating again. What I am suggesting here, I guess, is that once an instructor updates the course, Udemy offers a little promotion for the updated course.
As for the traction, I can understand if a course hasn't made any sales for a year: if so, it must be a reflection of its own worth. But I think it is a bit unfair to unpublish a course because it made no sales for, say, 3 weeks. For small instructors like me, I don't think this is very unusual.
Thanks, Udemy, for reading my feedback. Apologies for being somewhat long-winded.
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Hi @Baghi823
, thank you for taking the time to express your thoughts about this, we completely understand that it can be discouraging to have your courses be flagged by the Marketplace Maintenance Program and we would like to address the concerns you raised. Updating your course with new video lectures is only one of the options, but there are numerous ways to keep your content relevant and up to date, such as making sure your course landing page is unique to improve the searchability of the course. We have many support articles to assist you with this:- Create your course landing page
- Improve your course's search result
- CLP Checklist 1: Your course title, subtitle, and SEO best practices
- CLP Checklist 2: Your intended learner audience, course learning objectives, description, and lectures
We also want to clarify that if an instructor's content gets unpublished as part of the marketplace maintenance program, it can still be republished. However, if the same content continues to garner low interest from new students and does not meet the quality standards, it may be unpublished again.It can be tricky to find your niche and compete, and we hear you that it's frustrating to have to think about marketing when you want to focus on teaching. The updates required by the Marketplace Maintenance Program are also good practices for making your course discoverable and appealing to new students. They also strengthen the discoverability of the platform overall, which is critical as more instructors than ever before teach on Udemy.We appreciate your thorough feedback and will definitely pass them to our maintenance team - If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to share!Bella Almeida
Udemy Community2 -
Hi Bella,
thank you for your reply, it is much appreciated. Yes, I had read the info about the landing page just a few days ago, and noticed new info that was not there the last time I checked. I have indeed fixed the faults Udemy has found.
It is very useful to know that adding new videos is not the only way to avoid having the courses flagged. If I understand correctly, it would seem that adding new videos every 6 months is not a strict requirement, if all other things are in place? That would be a lot more reassuring.
What you mentioned about the searchability of the page makes complete sense, I had missed the info that Udemy added in the last few months. It would be useful if instructors could subscribe to the marketing section of the Help files, to be aware of any info added or changed, as these things are really important. However I will now check regularly every few weeks just in case.
Many thanks again for your reply.
Kind regards,
Luigi Pati
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LawrenceMMiller, thanks for the clarification. Whew.
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However, the AND argument would seem valid at first glance, but I don't think there is a guarantee that it is. Let's say that whether or not a course has been updated, the course has a copied and pasted section on the CLP, and/or the course has less than four learning objectives (my courses had less than four). Would the course not get flagged? Probably. If so, why could not the flagging apply to the third requirement only, i.e. no updates for 6 months or more, assuming that all the three requirements are "equal" ?
Unless they aren't. And this, I think, we do not yet know.
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Thank you for your understanding, Luigi.
Updating the content regularly is crucial for improving our search engine ranking and therefore increasing the chances of the course's success in the platform. But you're correct: updating your course every 6 months is not a requirement. Courses will only be flagged if they haven't historically had significant enrollments, little to no student or instructor engagement for some time, and the course landing page doesn't follow SEO best practices (all these three criteria).
Thank you for your feedback in regards to the updates we share. I agree that being able to subscribe to our Help Center would be a great idea and I'll make sure to share this with the rest of our team. As always, we're here if you have any further questions or concerns.
All the best!
Bella Almeida
Udemy Community
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