Udemy

JohnBura · ‎02-17-2023

While lots of companies overhired in the last couple of years, I think if the marketplace rules were relaxed and instructors were allowed more freedom and choice, most of these people would not need to be laid off. Consumer marketplace Consumer segment revenue decreased 4% year-over-year, including the negative impact of 5 percentage points from changes in FX rates year-over-year, to $74.7 million. Monthly Average Buyers on Udemy’s Consumer marketplace decreased by 2% year-over-year, but increased 3% sequentially from Q3 2022, to 1.36 million. Depending on who you listen to, this might be the first round of layoffs. Udemy could be a 4 billion dollar-a-year company if they just let instructors scale up like the App store, Steam, and Amazon. Here are my suggestions on how to accomplish this. - Reduce Udemy's share to 30% - Allow us to opt out of international pricing - Allow us to put certain courses in international pricing - Allow us to bundle our courses and sell bundles at a discount - Remove the personal subscription and replace it with instructor-level subscriptions - Order bumps on our coupon - Order bumps on free coupons - NO order bumps on our courses from other instructors - Allow us to talk about our other ventures outside of Udemy - Bring in a leader board of people who make the most Enrollments, sales, and reviews, on a weekly basis. - Change the algorithm to be more sales-based and not engagement based - Allow us to set our own affiliate percentages These suggestions are more Udemy specific - Put a second price floor at courses above 30 hours. - Get away from the minutes watched versus a la carte pricing. Instructors will always make more money with a la carte purchases versus minutes watched. The marketplace is losing money every single quarter. Something needs to change. Every quarter that the marketplace loses money, people's jobs are at risk.

JohnBura · ‎02-11-2023

I know. It seems like management at Udemy really doesn't want this to happen even though most of the public views Udemy as "the App store" of eLearning. 🤷

JohnBura · ‎02-09-2023

If Steam can be a 4 billion dollar-a-year marketplace, there's no reason Udemy can't be as well. That's good for instructors, investors, and employees. Literally, everyone wins. It seems like Udemy simply does not care about the marketplace anymore. Numbers don't lie. I expect the marketplace to decline. What we really need is the marketplace to double in revenue. The only problem with that is the way Udemy accomplishes that goal is they have to give way more freedom to the instructors. IOW they have to reverse the marketplace policies over the last 7 years. It's hard to explain that to investors. Here is how that is accomplished. "We want the marketplace to generate 1 billion dollars a quarter. In order to do that, we have analyzed other top-performing marketplaces. Since the variables of business change over time, we have decided to reverse a lot of the policies that we have put in place since 2015. While these policies at the time lead to more growth, we have concluded due to the current business environment, that the best course of action is to change our policies to drive growth. Our target revenue of the marketplace is 4 billion dollars a year" It is really that simple. They have to basically give instructors more freedom to make money. But it seems like Udemy only cares about minutes watched and subscription numbers.

JohnBura · ‎02-07-2023

Please also relay that we want to see significant growth in marketplace revenue. Ideally, we have double-digit growth in the marketplace, not declines.

JohnBura · ‎02-05-2023

I usually write long posts about what should be done so here's a list. Again the idea is to grow the marketplace to 4 billion a year which means more for everyone. Im modeling my suggestions from observations of other marketplaces. - Reduce Udemy's share to 30% - Allow us to opt out of international pricing - Allow us to put certain courses in international pricing - Allow us to bundle our courses and sell bundles at a discount - Remove the personal subscription and replace it with instructor-level subscriptions - Order bumps on our coupon - Order bumps on free coupons - NO order bumps on our courses from other instructors - Allow us to talk about our other ventures outside of Udemy - Bring in a leader board of people who make the most Enrollments, sales, and reviews, on a weekly basis. - Change the algorithm to be more sales-based and not engagement based - Allow us to set our own affiliate percentages These suggestions are more Udemy specific - Put a second price floor at courses above 30 hours. - Get away from the minutes watched versus a la carte pricing. Instructors will always make more money with a la carte purchases versus minutes watched. All somebody has to do is make a direct competitor with the above suggestions and instructors will flock to that site. In short, please give us more freedom to build scaleable businesses. Udemy should be more like Steam, the App Store, Google Play, and Amazon and less like Disney+

JohnBura · ‎02-02-2023

Remove the personal plan and replace it with instructor-level subscriptions.

JohnBura · ‎10-22-2022

I think we're all excited about Black Friday. What I would really like to see is the marketplace make some significant gains in the November 2nd income report and the Q4 report in 2023.

JohnBura · ‎09-07-2022

Most instructors are hurting because of lower sales and this just stings a bit more. Are there any plans to help us make up this revenue? Perhaps a "rev share holiday" where the rev share drops to 30% (udemy's cut) for the rest of the year.

JohnBura · ‎08-04-2022

I think the real question is: is the marketplace dying? I can't really blame Udemy for going the UB route as it makes a lot of money. However, since they are ignoring the marketplace, that will create a vacuum and some other organization will fill that void. Best case scenario - No recession and businesses keep investing in training. Udemy expands UFB Worst case scenario - Big recession and businesses stop investing in training and a competitor makes a better marketplace. Udemy sales go down. Clown case scenario - Udemy has a ton of shorts that have to cover and there's a huge short squeeze. Whatever happens, I hope the stock goes back to 40.

JohnBura · ‎07-19-2022

The biggest motivator for me is increasing sales. I equate sales with doing a good job. More sales = more learning. Biggest turn-off - decreasing sales. Decreasing sales means that my courses are not as useful and people aren't learning enough.

JohnBura · ‎06-29-2022

This is all well and good, but what would be better is the ability for the user to sort courses by. Most courses sold Highest rated Most Enrolments Lots of other marketplaces do this and Udemy should as well.

JohnBura · ‎05-27-2022

@Bella Thanks for recording this. The personal subscription really should be discontinued and the sooner the better. Everyone's revenue in the "my revenue is down thread" is down because of the personal subscription and instructors are increasingly getting frustrated that it's getting harder and harder to make the same amount of money. Udemy should also consider lowering the revenue share to 30% organic and 50% for ads. That would certainly help.

JohnBura · ‎05-27-2022

I made a bigger post about this topic. TL;DR. Udemy should stop the personal subscription and replace it with an instructor-level subscription. The PS divides instructors into haves and have-nots and makes most instructors poorer. https://community.udemy.com/t5/Marketing/The-personal-subscription-engaged-learners-and-lower-profits/td-p/102202

JohnBura · ‎05-16-2022

I think the business strategy is to set the marketplace up as a loss leader and leverage the students for other more central products. So if an engaged learner wants to do a 2k coding bootcamp, udemy will get 600 from the commission (or something like that). There have been no developments in the last few years, that enable course creators to make more money other than going through the central channels such as UFB and now the personal subscription.

JohnBura · ‎05-14-2022

I hope it leads to every instructor being able to offer 1-2k bootcamps on Udemy. Otherwise, it just feels like the marketplace is a loss leader for other products.

JohnBura · ‎04-04-2022

It would be so much better if I could sell a personal subscription on Udemy rather than having a global subscription. Instructors would make much more money this way and you could still get all of the benefits of a subscription. The global subscription should be axed because it makes Udemy uninvestable for top instructors.

JohnBura · ‎10-09-2021

That's just what the site says. I do think some of it as an estimate. Having said that, since you post your earnings now and again, Teaching Guide does accurately guess your income (ish). My income on Teaching Guide, however, is not accurate.

JohnBura · ‎10-08-2021

If you haven't gone to https://www.teachinguide.com/ , it has some good metrics. The top instructors according to the site make 300k per month.

JohnBura · ‎10-07-2021

@FrankKane and @PhilEbiner are the only ones on this list that publically share their earnings. I have long thought that some of the superstars that don't share have contracts with Udemy. Greater exposure for less revshare but more consistent money. This list doesn't include off of udemy profits either which could be quite a bit. This is a very comprehensive list on how to be successful.

JohnBura · ‎09-26-2021

Do you sell on your own website? Most people sell their courses in multiple places.

JohnBura · ‎09-01-2021

CorpU was founded in 1997. This is an interesting acquisition as it's mostly a course producer. I guess with A Cloud Guru being sold, Udemy has to now acquire other companies doing this kind of work.

JohnBura · ‎07-14-2021

Looks great. I thought that dark mode was on the roadmap. Is that still going to happen?

JohnBura · ‎06-22-2021

I would like to see a panel of all of the investors and ask them a handful of questions.

JohnBura · ‎06-02-2021

The #1 thing I recommend is to specialize all of the parts of your business. I have done that and seen sales and reviews rise. Let's take a look at a few examples Film Industry Director Writers Actors Cameras Stagehands etc Video Game industry Director Tech Lead Programmers Artists Marketing Support Here's what I've done with my company eLearning Industry Director (me) Master Instructor Instructors Video editors Support Marketing I would recommend people think more like indie game studios rather than single instructors. Hiring people to make the content and specializing in this manner is not only more fun, but the quality of courses and student experience is much better. After running around doing everything myself for years, once I started hiring people, it's been so much better. An example of this is one of our top selling products has a name one of my employees came up with. I would like udemy to make business more scaleable here such as adding instructor level subscriptions.

JohnBura · ‎03-21-2021

I just ran my numbers: 25% lower. But... I already put a down payment on a Lambo...

JohnBura · ‎03-17-2021

This is complete speculation but I do suspect that there are lots of heated discussions between investors and core members of the Udemy team/founders. The core team wants to make sure teachers can make money and continue producing while the investors just want as much money as possible. You can sort of seeing this with the policies and language they use. Either way, the biggest problem facing eLearning right now is the lack of scalability on the course side. Udemy should be more like the app store and steam. I can tell you from my experience, it's much easier to produce courses with a team. Also, my reviews show that I am doing a better job with this format than just me and that really makes sense because of the specialization of tasks. Udemy's competitors do this (have multiple people working on the content) and Udemy's answer is to crowdsource the teachers on the marketplace and then sell them to a subscription. The end goal will be individual subscriptions. Again, you can see this tug of war between the core Udemy team and investors. If the investors ran the show, we would already be in a subscription site like Skillshare. All roads lead to that conclusion.

JohnBura · ‎03-16-2021

Is the affiliate system going away or is it changing? @KatieBent

JohnBura · ‎12-01-2020

Im looking forward to an amazing 2021!

JohnBura · ‎11-25-2020

Udemy is slowly moving away from being a marketplace and moving towards becoming a LinkedIn Learning competitor

JohnBura · ‎11-25-2020

Also, if you read the article, it said that UFB has a good ROI. Most likely we will see more UFB income, but less marketplace income. The marketplace is underperforming IMO. With a few tweaks, I bet the marketplace could 10x.

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John Bura

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John Bura

JohnBura • Storyteller

Best Selling Instructor Web/App/Game Developer 1Mil Students

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