If you don’t know I’ve been here since 2011. I’ve seen everything. After some initial concerns and thoughts, I have come to the conclusion that the new pricing is secretly brilliant and came from a very sophisticated and savvy team. First, the biggest advantage to this pricing system is that you can select people to pay more and they physically won’t by any means be able to lower the price. That means that a person in the USA who makes over 200k would probably spend more like 20 dollars on a machine learning courses versus 10. That person will not be able to get the price at 10 dollars ever. The algorithm will force that person to pay more money On the flip side in places like Brazil, the person will probably not spend 10 dollars on a course so therefore won’t pay 10 dollars. That person and that person only will be able to see a lower price. I'm sure the Udemy development team is well ahead of game of smart people trying to use VPNs to get a lower price. The second biggest advantage is that you as the instructor can just sit back and watch the money roll in. Instead of spending your time marketing you can create another course or two. With instructor coupons becoming less effective, time is much better spent answering questions or creating a new course. Third, Udemy is a data-driven company that has received over 173 million in funding. There’s no way between the investors and the staff that they are going to let revenue fall. Last time during the 2016 price change when revenues dropped 80%, it was an anomaly and since then the team has had lots of time to think it over. This time around, they have taken everything from 2016 and made it better. I fully expect my revenue to double or triple instead of half or go down 75%. There’s just no way they would let the top instructors, especially the tech instructors revenues fall that much. The key difference between 2016 and 2019 is the unemployment rate in the USA. If you can code, you can command a huge salary and if tech instructors don’t see a point to teach on Udemy, they know that the opportunity costs of staying on the platform versus taking a job at Google for instance. I also expect my revenue to be better than before the 2016 price change and after it as well. 2015 and 2017 were great years. It’s kind of like Star Trek movies, every other one is good. By that logic, 2019 should be amazing after this price change Not to mention there’s probably going to be a rate cut so if revenues fell for top instructors, they might start up a new idea through VC funding as low-interest rates spur growth. Furthermore, Udemy might get another series of funding. I bet that revenues will be so good from the price change that they will be able to command a great price for the next series of investment. Udemy often goes out of their way to get top instructors from elsewhere to come on the platform. Then Udemy promotes these instructors heavily. There's no way that Udemy is going to let these instructors go so again if instructors are making less money, then they are most likely to leave. I'm sure Udemy knows this by now. Also since big bucks are going into e-learning, some top instructors might leave to places like Lynda or Plurasight or some other startup. Again, no way is Udemy going to lose top talent or even middle talent to these companies like last time the price change happened. One thing that these bigger companies could do is just buy out the top instructors. That way it would limit the limited top talent on Udemy. Not to worry though, the price change is going to solidify top talent and bring in more. Since Udemy is in the business of training people, they fully know how to train their 40 million students off of the 10 dollar price. It’s a reasonable and attainable goal. After all, they have all of the data from their price testing. We haven’t even talked about Black Friday yet! As we all know Black Friday is amazing and this year I think that everyone should be able to see more money come in for their efforts. The main reason is that Udemy will have 2 full months to figure out the kinks. After that, it will be off to the races. Final words. Let’s make 2019 great with this price change. I am very excited to see where this is going to lead us. One last note, by keeping prices variable, it should always keep the student guessing what the best price will be versus always waiting for a 10 dollar deal.
... View more
•
Level 3
