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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