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Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse

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Re: Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse

#101

Post by Bombthecat »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #79
gboss wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My team which manages our company's ecommerce website inherited maintaining an iOS app that was being developed by a contracting firm. No one on my team had much experience in iOS. My company is extremely frugal. I bought an intro to iOS course on Udemy for the five of us for about fifty dollars total. It was excellent. Was definitely blown away by the quality and the price. It got us quickly up to speed on xcode, de…

We as a team also did a four hour course on TLS and PKI and it was a game changer. It was much better than reading up stuff.

Oh nice! Whats the name? I dont need it. But i try to teach this stuff to newcomer!

Re: Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse

#102

Post by dhimes »

nickjj wrote: post #60

Udemy is one of the most corrupt / worst marketplaces I've ever encountered in the world -- for the folks who make courses at least. For reference I've had some of my courses on their platform for years and it's not like I'm bitter because no one bought my courses. I've made a solid amount of money there over the years (6 figures). The problem is they constantly sell your course for $10 and then take 50%+. Any traffi…

You should totally branch out on your own. Maybe put some "teaser" courses on Udemy with good content, but not premium, and do premium on your own. I want to take your letsencrypt course but would rather pay you directly. So as an example of my suggestion in this case, your Udemy course would maybe explain SSL, explain LetsEncrypt, and show how to get around, but the best, most usable scripts and info would only be available in your course.

It's like all the other platform stuff: You're basically a contractor for Udemy. Their rules, their terms, and you're ditched when somebody makes them a "better" deal.

Re: Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse

#103

Post by slumdev »

heyozapzap wrote: post #99
nickjj wrote: post #60

Udemy is one of the most corrupt / worst marketplaces I've ever encountered in the world -- for the folks who make courses at least. For reference I've had some of my courses on their platform for years and it's not like I'm bitter because no one bought my courses. I've made a solid amount of money there over the years (6 figures). The problem is they constantly sell your course for $10 and then take 50%+. Any traffi…

Udemy is in business to make money. Be it the 50% or tweaking SERPs, why shouldn't they do that?

Udemy is ostensibly in business to help people learn something.

Re: Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse

#104

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

tostitos1979 wrote: post #58
alexgmcm wrote: post #9

I prefer Coursera because I'd rather shell out 40 euros and get a high-quality course from say, Roughgarden at Stanford than pay 15 euros and get something worse than just scanning Youtube. Also Coursera has the whole system of problem sets and programming assignments etc. That said - I'd be happy if someone could show me some decent Udemy courses?

I have a PhD in CS but am a huge udemy fan/user. The itch it scratches when I want to learn about a brand new topic. You asked for good courses .. Andrew LeMoth's course in electronics is absolutely brilliant. He does the lecture in a very unconventional style .. almost like he stayed awake for 40 hours and recorded the whole thing. It isn't college level .. I.e. no differential equations but it is brilliant. I have…

The great thing about Coursera and edX are, the certificate is optional and auditing is free. I took courses on Algorithms by Sedgewick from Princeton, courses from MIT and Harvard, and so on without ever spending a cent. In fact, this is how I self-taught CS and programming (and eventually switched careers from law).

As far as practical skills go, a Pluralsight subscription was by far the thing that helped me the most. As long as you stay with the well-reviewed courses, the information density tends to be extremely high. It's how I learned enough about desktop GUI dev via WPF to score a volunteer 'consulting'-type gig with a nonprofit, and that combined with what I learned from there about Angular got me my first job.

Re: Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse

#105

Post by andrew_c_v »

alexgmcm wrote: post #9

I prefer Coursera because I'd rather shell out 40 euros and get a high-quality course from say, Roughgarden at Stanford than pay 15 euros and get something worse than just scanning Youtube. Also Coursera has the whole system of problem sets and programming assignments etc. That said - I'd be happy if someone could show me some decent Udemy courses?

Mine is great!

https://www.udemy.com/course/create-web-apps-with-apex-5/lea...

Re: Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse

#106

Post by nickjj »

dhimes wrote: post #102
nickjj wrote: post #60

Udemy is one of the most corrupt / worst marketplaces I've ever encountered in the world -- for the folks who make courses at least. For reference I've had some of my courses on their platform for years and it's not like I'm bitter because no one bought my courses. I've made a solid amount of money there over the years (6 figures). The problem is they constantly sell your course for $10 and then take 50%+. Any traffi…

You should totally branch out on your own. Maybe put some "teaser" courses on Udemy with good content, but not premium, and do premium on your own. I want to take your letsencrypt course but would rather pay you directly. So as an example of my suggestion in this case, your Udemy course would maybe explain SSL, explain LetsEncrypt, and show how to get around, but the best, most usable scripts and info would only be a…

I tried many different strategies over the years. The only real move is to never use Udemy for anything.

If you put a watered down version of a course on Udemy and then try to sell your premium course at the end, then a ton of people who go through the course will just slam you with 1 star reviews saying things like "this idiot gave us a 5 hour course where I learned a lot but now he wants us to buy the premium course on his own platform".

If you put a free course on Udemy, with intent to move people to your platform by gently mentioning a premium version of the course, you'll get the same type of negative reviews no matter how good the course is.

This is especially bad too because Udemy students are trained by the platform to only ever pay $10-15 for a course, even if it has 20+ hours of content, full time support and life time free updates. Suggesting a price that isn't $10 results in hostility and practically 0% conversions.

If you go the other route and create some type Udemy-specific mini course where you don't even talk about the "better" version of the course, and you really make it the best it can be then you end up hurting yourself because Google is going to rank the Udemy version higher than your own version, so organic traffic will be driven to the Udemy version.

You're waaaaay better off never to even step foot on Udemy's platform and just build your own audience with your own platform. Most successful courses are successful due to word of mouth, not the marketplace. That's the whole idea behind the "1,000 true fans" concept.

Re: Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse

#107

Post by cbzbc »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #67
cbzbc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it seems we have moved away from just Udemy courses - I think the content on linuxacademy is generally good, and their labs are useful.

Linux Academy's lab based approach is pretty helpful, but sometimes their course content (videos) is pretty horrendous. Some of the course content (particularly Kubernetes and other container related courses) often seems like it is made by people who aren't as familiar with the technologies as they think they are, or are just not capable of intelligibly organizing slide decks (making things headings that shouldn't be…

I had done some of the AWS courses and was just about to move onto their Kubernetes stuff -- is there another resource you'd recommend instead?

Re: Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse

#108

Post by f18m »

heyozapzap wrote: post #98
f18m wrote: post #66

Hi guys! I hope I’m able to contribute by bringing some of my own experience and real data to this discussion. I'm the founder of Classpert ( https://classpert.com ), a search and comparison site for online courses. In the last 6 months, we’ve managed to sell over 2000 courses, in 8 different languages and across 80 different countries (Udemy alone is selling around 200 courses each month through Classpert). So while…

You are a Udemy affiliate?

NO for offers, YES for tracking sales.

NO, because all content is regularly scraped by an in-house crawling engine specially crafted to deal with all kinds of crawling shortcomings! Typically, we crawl hundreds of thousands of courses in 4 days. The offers available through affiliate marketing networks would never work out, they just look like ads

Yes, we currently use affiliate networks to track sales (soon to be changed). This metric ensures that our product works end-to-end. At this very moment we are growing at 30% MoM and we really don’t care about revenue. We know that the e-learning landscape is completely overloaded and we’re trying to solve this problem on a global scale. Whoever wants to solve this problem, will have to think big from day one

Re: Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse

#109

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

akuji1993 wrote: post #33
Pandabob wrote: post #8

I've never taken an Udemy class, but am sure there's quality content on the website. However, I've always felt that the way they show their prices is a little fishy. Looking at their offering now, all of the courses are priced between 10 - 13 euros, but each one seems to be "on sale" with the actual price being in the hundreds of euros.

There actually is a German DIY store that went bankrupt because of this practice. Their slogan was "20% off everything except animal food." Since it was pretty much always 20% off, nobody bothered going for any sale. Instead they only went when they really needed something or chose a different store because of their stupid slogan. Closed down a few years back. Having a constant sale doesn't seem to help your sales ap…

However here in the states, Kohl's has been surviving kind of on this strategy alone. The quality of the clothes is actually quite low, but they price them at "normal" prices and then almost constantly have massive sales -- 20%, 30%, even 40%. My mom will in fact refuse to shop there until there's at least a 30% sale.

Meanwhile the value-accurate price of the clothes IS that prices that's actually 40% off, but she thinks she's getting a steal.

Re: Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse

#110

Post by Lucadg »

dhimes wrote: post #80
Lucadg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure as the Udemy account is managed by a friend. I'm pretty sure we have no saying on the price. With 100 students we cashed $329. So, there it is: 3,29 $ per course. Basically a tip. I sell the Italian version of this course directly for 200 €.

What delivery platform do you use?

Do you mean for the Italian version? Own Wordpress website with s2member plugin
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