Udemy

ba0708 · ‎09-28-2022

Sounds like a strange priority of development resources to be honest...

ba0708 · ‎06-06-2022

@Bella The multiple coupon tool seems broken. It gives a blank screen when uploading a CSV. Inspecting the network request within the browser, it results in a 403 forbidden status code, even though I am logged in.

ba0708 · ‎05-24-2022

ScreenFlow for screen recordings + editing. iZotope RX for audio post-processing.

ba0708 · ‎05-06-2022

@Bella I have criticised the coupon system for a while, so here's a positive comment for once. 🙂 As part of my monthly routine, I spent a moment creating a spreadsheet, which - together with the new Bulk Coupon tool - can automate most of the work of creating coupons every month. I still have to do it every month, but the process is now a bit smoother and faster. It doesn't solve the problems with the coupon system that I outlined in a previous comment, though. But it's a win - and although it's a small one, I'll take it! 🙌

ba0708 · ‎04-21-2022

Thank you, @Bella. I just did a manual check of my courses and actually found that Udemy did indeed issue DMCA takedown notices (through a partner). It's definitely not perfect since it's automated, but the number of takedown notices I had to send myself were about half of what they used to be. So it does seem like something is working, which is great! @kararonin I usually just search for the course name within double quotes followed by the word "torrent," i.e. "[course name]" torrent on each search engine. That will get you a long way I think. If you need pointers for sending the removal requests, you are welcome to send me a PM. 🙂

ba0708 · ‎04-20-2022

Is Udemy actually committed to fighting piracy this time around? Past attempts have seemed to make no difference. Even though my courses were eligible, I still found my courses on just as many torrent sites as always. As a result, I manually issue takedown requests to search engines once or twice per year, since it's fairly easy. But I'd rather not have to deal with it myself, though. I reached out to Udemy multiple times in the past (through the instructor support), but every question I had in regards to the anti-piracy program were completely ignored. And by that I mean that I never received any response and it looked like my tickets were just killed internally. It looked to me like Udemy was not comfortable answering my questions because the program was clearly not working. So, is it going to work this time around, and is Udemy actually committed to it?

ba0708 · ‎04-03-2022

Thank you for the update - it's appreciated!

ba0708 · ‎02-16-2022

Thank you for the clarification, @Bella. I do understand and acknowledge the challenges behind that design decision. In my particular use case, I would be fine with just being able to select "Best price" at coupon creation time without knowing the exact price ahead of time. For other use cases it might be important to know the exact price when planning campaigns. So yes, it is a bit tricky. But for a lot of instructors I think it makes sense to take a step back and look at why they need to create coupons ahead of time in the first place. Surely some do plan "real" marketing campaigns. But many (including myself) create coupons regularly as a workaround because we are limited by the coupon system. We create coupons to know which channels drive our sales (source attribution). One coupon code for YouTube, one for our website, etc. (e.g. YOUTUBE_JAN, YOUTUBE_FEB, WEBSITE_JAN, WEBSITE_FEB, ...) The referral link makes sense but there are two major problems with it; it doesn't give us insight into which channels drive sales, and personally I have found it highly unreliable in terms of pricing. So, many instructors "rotate" coupon codes every month as a hack to get sales channel attribution, which is something Udemy caused us to do with a previous update to the coupon system that resulted in a maximum coupon lifetime of 30 days (which again is not a problem if we had channel attribution). A lot of us have been asking for a way to segment our own promotions by channel for years. If only we could get a way of attributing our sales somehow other than naming schemes for our coupon codes, a lot of things would be solved. So we hack around the coupon system this way, getting all creative, because there is a fundamental need that Udemy hasn't solved for us, despite us asking for years. So at least for me, the reason I would like to create coupon codes months in advance is because of this attribution problem. If I had a way to attribute my own sales to a marketing channel, I wouldn't have this need in the first place. I know many instructors do this, so it might be worth looking at the root cause for why we are asking for this. Having to do this also takes up time which we would be better off spending on our courses.

ba0708 · ‎02-12-2022

For my particular use case, the limitation that the start date must be within the current month makes the feature useless, unfortunately. I do see other scenarios where it is helpful, though — those are just not relevant to me. Will the upcoming bulk tool make it possible to create coupons further into the future? Or will the limitations be the same, such that it just enables coupon creation for multiple courses? The monthly coupon rotation continues...

ba0708 · ‎02-07-2022

For what it's worth, I used a Blue Yeti before switching to Shure SM7B. I found that it picked up way too much background noise because I wasn't recording in a treated or 100% silent room. If you can live with that, the Yeti is definitely a great mic for the price. Just something to consider.

ba0708 · ‎02-07-2022

It's great, yeah. Not sure what it costs because it depends on your country. I use the small CloudLifter with one XLR in/out as that's enough for me. Might be work checking if there's a newer version than iD4 since I bought that setup a number of years ago.

ba0708 · ‎02-05-2022

Shure SM7B -> XLR -> CloudLifter -> XLR -> Audient iD4 -> USB.

ba0708 · ‎11-06-2021

Direct bank deposits for international bank accounts (e.g. Wise). Not sure if that qualifies as a feature, but it's just the absolute most important thing for a lot of instructions, including myself. More important than anything you could add to the instructor UI. Buuut, if I had to mention something, it would be to tag the traffic we sent to Udemy so we can see which traffic sources convert the best. Since we only have three coupons to work with, creating a coupon for each traffic source is not an option. Also making the referral links more reliable in terms of pricing so we don't have to rotate coupon codes every month to get consistent pricing and conversion rates.

ba0708 · ‎11-05-2021

Being able to work full time on Udemy. I don't, but I could.

ba0708 · ‎11-03-2021

Quality above all. If the quality is high, success will come. Also be laser focused on what students need to know and not just what you want to talk about, because it may not matter to a lot of people. Find out exactly who your target audience is and cover their needs.

ba0708 · ‎11-02-2021

Thank you for the response, @Bella. I understand that there is legal stuff involved with international payouts. However, if anything, I'd imagine that it would be easier, since payouts would be to verified bank accounts and not just some online account where the money could essentially go anywhere. But I'll admit that I have zero clue. However, I do know that basically every freelance platform (Upwork, Fiverr, etc.) and other online course platforms support this. So it can't be that much of a hassle, especially given Udemy's size. If everyone else can do it (including companies that are significantly smaller than Udemy), it must come down to prioritization. I know Udemy focuses on growth, but this is really important to a lot of us as it eats a lot of our profits, and so I think it's about time this gets prioritized.

ba0708 · ‎10-23-2021

If flying on Musk's rocket palm tree was the only way to get off the island, would you risk it? Of course it would have no landing legs and would be caught by a tower...

ba0708 · ‎10-19-2021

By far the most important thing you could change about the promotional system is that we still have no way of tagging our traffic to figure out which channels drive the most sales. Sure we could create different coupons, but the system is too constrained for that to work in practice. Specifically because we cannot create enough coupons. And doing that also means that the referral link wouldn't be an option, since that's just sending traffic into a black box. Which, by the way, doesn't work very well; I've moved away from that link since it doesn't convert traffic very well, and gives me less revenue than using coupon codes. In a perfect world, I'd be able to tag my URLs with a source, just as with utm_source, and the referral link would be reliable. That would enable me to figure out which channels drive the most sales, plus save me the hassle of rotating coupon codes every month, updating links, etc.

ba0708 · ‎09-29-2021

None, sorry. I don't mean to be negative, but those things just haven't had any effect for me. The personal plan might, but that's too early to say. The direct deposits for non US instructors would have a huge impact, as we are losing 2-3% of our revenue in payment fees. We have been waiting for a long time without any word on it, so I surely hope it's being worked on!

ba0708 · ‎09-23-2021

That makes sense! Thank you for the answer, @Bella! 🙂

ba0708 · ‎09-16-2021

"When a student refunds their subscription, their payment and any consumption are removed from the overall instructor pool." It makes sense that the payment is removed, but why is the consumption removed from the pool? If someone watched my course for an hour (and potentially asked questions), shouldn't I be rewarded for that by getting a bigger cut of the pool? I.e. even though the pool is smaller, instructors whose content was viewed by students who refunded, are still rewarded for that. In my mind that would make sense - especially since I might have had to answer questions, respond to assignments, etc.

ba0708 · ‎07-30-2021

I hope Udemy will give the promotional system (coupons) an overhaul. In its current state it's garbage and has been so for a long time. An update is way overdue. The thinking behind it was good, but the implementation was poor.

ba0708 · ‎07-19-2021

Still getting lots of Q&A questions sent to me as direct messages. I haven't noticed any difference since these changes were made. I think this is a side effect of having automatic welcome messages enabled, in which case a prompt should be made there too (i.e. for threads where the only message is an automatic welcome message).

ba0708 · ‎07-16-2021

Yikes! The old visual identity was much better. Sorry Udemy! 😕 Also, it was a bit weird to tease us in advance and try to get us that excited. A new brand is cool and all, but won't get us instructors too excited since everything is pretty much the same. So meh...

ba0708 · ‎05-28-2021

There is. But you have to ask for the instructor support to do it for you after you have uploaded your videos. After that, you have to ask for every new video you upload. It's just a way for Udemy to save bandwidth. It sucks (hey, it's 2021), but that's how it is.

ba0708 · ‎05-05-2021

@JasmineBayer My understanding is that this is just to limit the scope of the pilot, so if Udemy proceeds with the Personal Plan after the pilot, it won't just be UFB courses that are available.

ba0708 · ‎05-04-2021

@Abbie, how does the Personal Plan work in regards to instructor promotions? I understand that this is a pilot so it might not be set in stone for the long term. But for now, I assume that Udemy will not promote the subscription model to traffic sent by instructors through referral links and coupon codes? For the long term, I'm curious how the model would work with promotions, if at all. Also, the FAQ states the following: "For first-time subscribers, there may be an option to trial the collection for a limited time before subscribing." What happens if someone trials the subscription for a week and watches a lot of content, asks questions, etc., but ends up not paying? Are the watched minutes just not added to the pool, so the end result is similar to refunds (i.e. instructors won't earn anything)? Or are the minutes added but no dollars are added to the pool (i.e. the minutes are factored in, but the "pie" won't be larger)?

ba0708 · ‎05-03-2021

It does work correctly for me. Looking at my sales, the change happened just recently, so perhaps there was a brief transition period?

ba0708 · ‎04-29-2021

Thanks for the response, @Abbie. It's true that if the revenue goes up (without adding more work), the revenue share doesn't matter much. I actually believe Udemy can do this; the numbers just looked odd to me. Anyway, I'm fairly optimistic since changes Udemy made have historically not impacted instructors negatively, so I hope this won't be an exception. 😉

ba0708 · ‎04-26-2021

I also don't understand the revenue split. To me the presented arguments seem more like excuses for maximizing profit. UFB has sales teams doing a lot of work to get companies to join, and given how UFB has grown, that has been well worth it for both Udemy and instructors. Fair. The same won't be the case for the Personal Plan (correct me if I'm wrong), which is going to run alongside the usual transactional sales. Potential students who are driven to the website one way or another will just be presented with both options. Of course there are nuances for pushing one or another, but anyway... Over time, it's not hard to imagine which option Udemy is going to push the most. I do understand that it is an investment to build and scale a subscription model. But how is that different from all the other platform investments Udemy has made? And if Udemy believes subscriptions is what is needed to increase revenue, won't that investment pay off even with 37% for instructors? Did Udemy just "automatically" go for 25% because that's what instructors are used to with UFB? Again, for sure there is lots and lots of work for Udemy in building out a subscription plan, but how is that work different from everything it took for the transactional marketplace to get to where it is today? Based on the limited information available, I just don't see how it makes sense.

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Bo Andersen

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Bo Andersen

ba0708 • Traveler

Lead Developer

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ba0708 •
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