Udemy

The short answer: both. Marketplace students want the best value for their money, and the Udemy Deals program ensures that most courses are "cheap" to begin with.   The longer answer: you need to study the existing top-selling courses in your category (they are easy to find via the Marketplace Insights tool.) If you expect your course to sell, it needs to compare favorably to whatever courses are already entrenched with large numbers of positive reviews, and large numbers of enrollments. That can tell you roughly how long a successful course needs to be in order to be competitive in your category.   I took a look at your course, and it's a fairly niche category that may not have much competition to begin with. If you're struggling with sales, I suspect it's not really about your price or your course length, but how many Udemy students are looking for what you have to teach in the first place. Again, the marketplace insights tool can help you understand the demand for your topic. Udemy isn't the right place for everything; if Udemy isn't the place people go to learn about mining, then Udemy might not be the place for your course.   Finally, if your course is destined for the Udemy Business program, then all bets are off. Udemy Business learners aren't paying out of pocket for their course, so they value their time more than the money. In Udemy Business, you may find that shorter courses attract more enrollments, because busy corporate learners can't afford to spend 20 hours taking some incredibly expansive course when all they need is some specific thing. However we are paid by the amount of time Udemy Business learners engage with our content, so you still don't want your course to be *too* short. ... View more

This does take a lot of new instructors by surprise, including me at first.   It's best explained at:   https://support.udemy.com/hc/en-us/articles/229605008-Instructor-Revenue-Share   and   https://support.udemy.com/hc/en-us/articles/229232827-Instructor-Promotional-Agreements-and-Udemy-Deals   Basically Udemy can offer your course at a lower price than your list price, and Udemy and many middlemen take most of the revenue before it makes its way to you. Driving sales with your own coupon codes will allow you to keep more of it.   But you are correct - it does require a large volume of students to earn a good income here. Udemy has a very large audience though, so that is possible. ... View more

Udemy Business makes up over half of my revenue. Without it, I'd make less than half what I do now. The only case where you might want to opt out is if you teach a topic that isn't business or professional in nature, in which case the exclusivity terms may not be worth it. ... View more

That literally has nothing to do with the question, and sounds like something ChatGPT would say. Are you a bot? ... View more

Best wishes for your next chapter! ... View more

Be sure to understand the costs you will incur when student downloads 100GB for your course. It could really eat into your proceeds from the enrollment or even cause you to lose money on the deal. ... View more

I use Camtasia, others use Premiere or DaVinci Resolve.   I think you'll find that video quality has more to do with your lighting and recording environment than anything, though. There are some good resources at https://teach.udemy.com/recording/ worth reading through.    Welcome to the instructor club! ... View more

In reality the price you set is hardly ever the price students are offered, so it doesn't matter. You want to read https://support.udemy.com/hc/en-us/articles/229232827-Instructor-Promotional-Agreements-and-Udemy-Deals and https://teach.udemy.com/january-2023-pricing-update/ carefully.  ... View more

I do wonder what the time window is for the pricing experiments Udemy conducts. The economy has been changing very quickly, and if they're looking at behavior over say, the past year, that may be too long. More aggressive testing might be needed when the world is aggressively changing.   At the same time, asking students to pay more in such an environment is also a tough sell. I don't envy whoever's in charge of pricing at Udemy. ... View more

What's great about Udemy is that unlike other platforms, you have a lot of creative freedom in how you present your courses.   If you want to film outdoors, go for it! It's of course more challenging to control the lighting outdoors and get consistent lighting as you record across different days at different times, but there's no policy against it if you're up for the challenge. ... View more

This isn't a channel to Udemy's trust & safety team, so you're unlikely to get any help here I'm afraid.    What was your mistake? ... View more

No, but you can send out an educational announcement to let them know what changed and how it might affect their learning.  ... View more

What are you an expert on, and what are you passionate about? Is there knowledge you can share from those topics that solves problems faced by a large number of people?   If you can find a topic that is the intersection of what you know, what excites you, and what people need, that is a good place to start.    Also check out the marketplace insights tool in your instructor dashboard for more guidance and information about the competitive landscape for your topic. ... View more

The trends for March looked worrying here at first as well, but marketplace sales for March ended up a bit higher than February for us. That's the right direction.  ... View more

Absolutely! Keeping your course up to date and improving it over time is very much encouraged.  ... View more

Let us know the results. ... View more

You can, but it's likely to lose money for you. The cost of a conversion from a paid ad is typically more than the revenue you will receive from the sale on Udemy.   I'd advise focusing on things you can do for free: YouTube videos that link to your course, blogs, focusing on SEO on your Udemy course landing page, making your course image stand out,  stuff like that. See https://teach.udemy.com/marketing/use-external-marketing-tools/ and https://teach.udemy.com/marketing/course-landing-page-keyword-exercise/ for more ideas. ... View more

Unless it's some sort of emergency, I limit my working days to 5 days a week, and each of those days I set a goal for myself. Once that goal is complete, and all of the messages I've received for the day have been dealt with, I sign off, go outside, and enjoy nature for a bit. As an introvert I don't need much else to recharge.   My working day starts as soon as I get up, usually around 7 or 8 AM - so usually I'm done by 2 or 3 PM, which leaves plenty of time for the other stuff life has to offer and all the stuff that needs doing around the house. I find it far more rewarding to wrap things up after producing something I aimed to produce today, than to wrap things up at some arbitrary time on the clock.   I am religious about maintaining "inbox zero" so I'm not left with outstanding things to worry about all the time.   One little hack I do is to take my "weekends" on Mondays and Tuesdays whenever possible, when the local attractions are much less crowded. We also try to schedule actual vacations during off-seasons to make them more enjoyable. Our kids are grown and on their own, so we're no longer tied to school schedules! ... View more

Hm, you're right - that doesn't sound right. The only explanation that would make sense would be if a bunch of 5-star reviews have recently expired from your review average calculation, due to them aging out (3 months I think it is.) But it sounds like your reviews are consistent enough for that to be unlikely. ... View more

Udemy (as far as we know) still weights more recent reviews higher, as well as reviews that have written comments in them. How far in the course the student was when the review was written may also be a factor. So if those one-star reviews fit any of those categories, they may be weighted disproportionately.   All any of us can do in this situation is try to drive more reviews to average out the effect of the occasional bad ones. Your courses appear to be quite popular, so the good news is it shouldn't take too long for some more rational reviews to bring things back up. ... View more

I think there's some confusion over what a "sub-group" is. I think we're just talking about expanding the taxonomy for new posts, right? So if you want to post something that doesn't fit into "Published Instructor Club / Course Creation" etc., like a discussion specific to growing sales for instructors at a certain point in their journey (that's my vote, by the way) there's a place to put it. Or maybe there's an "off-topic lounge" where people can just post stuff about... whatever. Good places to be a digital nomad, what people are doing for other side businesses, etc.   But, these wouldn't be closed communities, right? I assume they would still make into the "latest" and "trending" buckets that people check on a daily basis, if so warranted. ... View more

Raise prices on course topics with high Q&A demands; the cost of supporting them has risen with inflation, while the revenue we get per enrollment has fallen. Margins are getting thin for instructors. (I know pricing experiments are already underway)   Build systems to help learners support each other and build their own communities.   Allow instructors to schedule recurring promotional announcements, so we can spend more of our time and money making content instead of promoting it.   Or if you're looking specifically for community ideas:   Bring in actual filmmakers and cinematographers to do webinars on how to create compelling and visually interesting videos. What can course creators learn from Hollywood? ... View more

Perhaps it's a language or cultural barrier thing, but in the US dismissing someone as an "old man" is considered insulting. ... View more

Reviews are a very touchy subject. As instructors we put months of effort into a course, and seeing someone criticize it with a few strokes of their keyboard, perhaps unfairly, can be very very discouraging.   Just to explain why it works that way - if you have 20 5-star reviews and get another 5-star review, it won't change your average at all. A 4-star would only change it to 4.95. ((5*20+4)/21) But a 1-star would change it to 4.8. ((5*20+1)/21)    What makes it worse is that recency is also a factor, so a brand new one star review counts more than a 3-month-old 5 star review. We don't know the details of how that works, but it explains how a new 1-star review can drag your score down so dramatically.   Everything cuts both ways, though. A new 5-star review also carries more weight than an older 1-star. It's just that if the 5-star is closer to your existing average, it won't move it as much. It's all quite fair on paper, but yes it does open up the possibility of people really torpedo-ing a course with a one-star written review.   Udemy has said below they have no plans of changing this any time soon, so we have to learn to deal with it. If you're in this situation, all you can do is see if you're lucky enough for the review to violate some Udemy policy in which case you might get it removed - and if not, try to drive more reviews to dilute the effect of it. Or simply wait it out - after a few months, it won't affect your score.   Most of your courses have exceptionally high review scores. We tend to fixate on the negative feedback at the expense of the positive! ... View more

Oh, by "paid review" you mean by a paid student... I misunderstood!   That makes sense mathematically though, right? A one star review is much further from your existing average than a 5 star would be. I'm not saying that makes it right; if a review is an outlier perhaps the algorithm should treat it as such. ... View more

@AhmedMagdyMohamed wrote:   Another thing which I discovered recently a negative paid review is highly weighted than a paid positive review! How do you know that? ... View more

Wow @AhmedMagdyMohamed way to go with throwing out accusations of racism, and then following it up with ageist remarks. That sort of behavior isn't acceptable here, or anywhere else. Perhaps you could offer some more constructive feedback, such as how you earned ratings of 4.9 - 5.0 on some of your courses. We must have a lot to learn from you about how to create some of the best content on the platform, and how to motivate students to write positive reviews. Please share your tips with us!   Look, EVERY review system is fatally flawed. They are ALL subject to gaming and the biases of the reviewers. But like it or not, students - which are Udemy's customers, and our customers - expect them as a tool in making a buying decision. If I were in charge, I'd eliminate reviews entirely in favor of some objective engagement-based metric from the behavior of paid students. But I'm not, and reviews are here to stay.   Bad reviews hurt my feelings too. That's why I don't look at reviews at all, or respond to them. Only if I notice a course is doing noticeably worse than my others will I dig into reviews looking for actionable feedback on what's wrong with it. And if there is some, I act on it. Otherwise, I accept that reviews are for students more than they are for me, and that the system is about as good as it can reasonably get.   It's been awhile since Udemy talked about how the review system works, but there are quite a few nuances that help us out you might not know about. The last we heard, written reviews carry more weight in your review average than reviews with no text - so those one-star reviews with no text may not have useful information for you, but they also don't count much. And reviews don't count at all after a few months, so even if you are hammered with unfair one-stars, they will eventually go away and let you start with a clean slate again. I think Udemy thought this all through a lot better than some of the huge tech companies, like Amazon.   Suggesting mandatory written comments on one and two star reviews is not an unreasonable idea. But it would bias reviews toward the positive, as it would introduce friction to negative reviews, and make the reviews less helpful to students as a result. "OK then, require comments on all reviews" you may say - but there are just too many courses on the marketplace, and reviews are spread too thinly as a result. Udemy needs to drive all the reviews they can get, in order to get a meaningful measure of every course's quality from learners. I appreciate Udemy's stance on this, and it's really an impossible situation.   Anyhow, my advice as always is to focus on what you can control. If your course is getting hammered by bad reviews, there's probably a reason why. Make your course better. Stop offering it for free and making it easy for trolls to access. And if you really think there is a concerted attack against your course from competitors - find evidence of it, and present it to the policy team. Never in the history of this community have I seen anyone actually have evidence of an attack from competing instructors, though. More often it goes back to Larry's point of how we want to blame someone else for bad things. Larry's a very wise man by the way. Y'all should listen. ... View more

Thank you for setting a friendly tone at Udemy and always being an advocate for instructors, Gregg! ... View more