The Explosion in Sales: Blip or Trend?

[LawrenceMMiller]

Many, if not most of us, are seeing a very significant explosion/increase in enrollments this month. If the data for the first 13 days represents half of this month's sales, the total for this month will be far higher than any previous month and close to 3X April last year. Now, we all recognize that the Covid-19 shut down is working in our favor. We are among the very fortunate few who are actually benefiting from this crisis. 

The question is, does this represent a statistical blip on the graph, or does this represent a lasting trend. In other words, six months from now will we be seeing a continuation of this performance, or a regression to the mean?

Scenario 1: Business is changed forever. This is a permanent change in how people learn. In my area of management training corporations are not going to want to bring their people together in groups at some corporate training event for a very long time and will continue to assign them to online courses, now having recognized the efficiency of these courses. Less corporate travel, more comfort with online learning and conferencing. Things have changed forever!

Scenario 2: In six months (for example) when everyone goes back to work, this will be remembered as a bad dream that you can tell your kids about. Companies will want to get their people together in groups to share experiences, listen to their corporate trainers in all their brilliance, and our online sales will return to the long term trend line that is being violated by the current data. Things haven't really changed.

Which is it? 

[FrankKane · Accepted solution]

Or, scenario 3: the economic impact of the pandemic turns out to be persistent, and companies scale back their training budgets and headcount in response. This ends up disproprotionately hitting UFB, causing Udemy to pivot back to the marketplace and personal development courses (which actually seems to be where the sudden revenue growth is coming from)

My own prediction is that it ends up as a wash; this "new normal" has introduced a lot of people to online learning who never would have considered it before, and that will have a lasting positive effect. But long-term economic decline will hit corporate training and the number of people willing to spend even $10 on a course. Those two forces might just cancel each other out.

But, if UFB positions itself as a lower-cost alternative to other employee development programs, perhaps it could do a ju-jitsu move to actually benefit from this as well.

[VipinJoshi]

Not a drastic change, but still change is change. I have also seen a change of 75% increase over last month's sales. This change is due to the pandemic that arose in countries. There is no way to have a face to face teaching, students are looking for online content and since Udemy has a strong platform base on web and hence it all ended up here. I hope it goes to the max by the end of the month.

#Stay Safe #Stay Home #Prepare online modules

---

@Hanifa wrote:

I do believe that things have changed forever - but we may have a mix of people and businesses doing more online training even after this pandemic has run its course. I believe people are truly thinking "outside of the box" of past learning opportunities and noticing that it is possible and perhaps even more cost effective and efficient.

I look forward to positive movement forward!

Hanifa

---

[NafiulAlamNayem]

wow! Great explanation, I appreciate it so much.

[JM30]

Thnx a lot for sharing n discussing great ideas with us. I m so greatful to learn a lot from experts like everyone here since I m a new instructor. 

[GregoryCaremans]

I've seen an overall 2x sales in comparison with April 2019, which will make this my best month ever. Don't forget the period February till July is usually slow. This is crazy.

One thing though: I haven't seen this growth in all my courses. Some of them are just 'normal'. And the growth has mainly come from 'organic', meaning my top selling courses have been doing even better, the slow ones remained stable.

I wish this could last... but somehow I don't want to put my hopes too high here. A lot will depend on Udemy's policies. They've clearly decided to embrace this whole Corona situation for the better. However, what will be their position once everyone is back at work...

I'm crossing fingers, but have my doubts ... 

[SivakamiS2017]

Yes, we should not expect this spike to last post pandemic. But we can hope for some of it to remain 😉

[MinervaSingh66]

Hi. I have an update of sorts. my courses are in the data science category. My March-May was better than last year. However, I have had a sharp decline in June. Frankly, my June performance is lower than what it was 2 years ago. Has someone else also seen a decline in their sales 1 week into June in the data science or any categories? It seems that while my courses are discounted during the promotional sales, Udemy is not actively promoting them. Is anyone else in a similar situation?

[DYay2810]

Yes, start to June has not been that promising for me either.

[Anonymous]

June is off to a slow start for me as well.  More specifically, the first 2 days were huge, then it really slowed down. 

[LawrenceMMiller]

May was down 10% from April, which was fine with me since April was such a killer month. I will be happy if June can just be down another ten percent from May. It will still be very good. 

But, like everyone else, the first week has been slow. Maybe a sale will kick in this month.