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Udemy S-1 IPO

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Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#101

Post by regressiveparty »

robomartin wrote: post #85

I see a lot of negative comments on this thread. Fair enough. I have seen the good, bad and ugly of Udemy. I have never tried to publish a course (thought about it). I am sure the instructor-side view of reality is less than ideal. Frankly, this is true even of massive platforms like Amazon. Ask any Amazon seller what the world looks like from their perspective. It can be horrific and surreal. Udemy (and Amazon) do n…

Like Amazon, there is a ton of crap but also some real diamonds in the rough. The fact that you can take a $15,000 bootcamp from General Assembly OR a $15 Udemy course taught by the same bootcamp instructor teaching the exact same lesson plan... is kind of insane. The accessibility that Udemy opens uo can be truly remarkable - you just have to wade through the lower quality stuff

Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#103

Post by laserpistus »

belter wrote: post #66
skeeter2020 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep. open the same page in a private session and watch prices plummet 90%+. Pretty annoying.

Grounds for a lawsuit? "Price discrimination is a commonplace practice that is presumptively lawful, save under special circumstances discussed below. It occurs when a seller of products regularly offers lower prices to its preferred customers and higher prices to the others when selling them the same or similar products at around the same time." https://www.markhamlawfirm.com/law-articles/unlawful-price-d...

Already happening. From their S-1:

In August 2021, a putative class action complaint captioned Williams v. Udemy, Inc., Case No. 3:21-CV-06489, was filed against us in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleging violations of California’s unfair competition and false advertising statutes as well as the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act in connection with the promotional “strike-through” pricing for courses offered on our platform, alleging that the reference prices used for comparison purposes are false or misleading. The complaint seeks injunctive relief, unspecified damages, restitution and disgorgement of profits. We are in the process of investigating the claims alleged in the complaint and have not yet answered. We intend to vigorously defend ourselves in this matter.

Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#104

Post by juangburgos »

sergiotapia wrote: post #38
arnvald wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've literally never paid a full price for a Udemy course. I'd only do it if I was in rush to start some course quickly, but otherwise I just wait, usually less than 2 weeks, and I can pay 70-90% less

just open the window in incognito to get the 90% discounts and log in with your regular account after adding to cart.

just open the window in incognito using a VPN to a country with a weak currency and to get 90% discounts on 30% of the original value.

Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#105

Post by afs27 »

arnvald wrote: post #14
afs27 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed a lot of the courses I was looking at on Coursera seemed to be from universities and the ones on Udemy looked like they were more from companies (Google, etc.) or professionals from different organizations. Is that a fair assessment?

Coursera also has a number of courses provided by companies, even by Google ( https://www.coursera.org/google-career-certificates ). You're right that Coursera has content from universities, on the other hand Udemy has individual instructors (and anyone can become an instructor). Also Coursera has a lot of free content - not sure if 100%, but a large number of courses offers the content for free, you only need to pay…

Thanks for the response, this is helpful because I’m trying to find a good online writing course and haven’t landed on anything solid, so that’s why I was looking between these two. I’ll have to look at the free options in Coursera a little closer.

Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#106

Post by nickjj »

regressiveparty wrote: post #93
nickjj wrote: post #18

One thing that's worth mentioning is Udemy is a completely different type of company based on you being a watcher of courses vs being an instructor on Udemy. I was an instructor there for 5+ years (with ~30k enrollments) and in my entire professional career I've never met a worse company in terms of how corrupt they are and how little they actually care about instructors unless you happen to be one of the few instruc…

I'm sorry but please do not believe anything this commenter is saying. I've been a "managed partner" with Udemy for 5 years now (600k enrollments) and I have never once been asked to sign a contract. Despite my repeated attempts to get them to promote my courses, they do not do anything special for this secret cabal of instructors. I still launch courses on Udemy that crash and burn spectacularly. No, they do not man…

> I've been a "managed partner" with Udemy for 5 years now (600k enrollments) and I have never once been asked to sign a contract

Just because you haven't doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I know 2 instructors who have and have seen the contract in 1 of the cases. I've also chatted with popular instructors who have showed me emails back and forth between them and Udemy that doesn't leave me thinking too highly of Udemy in terms of how fair they are with how they rank courses in their search results.

> If your course didn't do well on Udemy

They did ok (around 30-50 sign ups a day for years) within ~60 days of being on Udemy until one day a light switch was flipped and my traffic started to plummet. Not just sales but page views to the landing page. Nothing changed. There weren't too many new courses and I kept mine up to date. There were no emails or anything. Funny enough for the longest time one of my courses had a rating of 4.8 with a bunch of sign ups (highest rating in a niche with hundreds of courses) but the course barely hangs on the bottom of page 2 and now gets about 30 sign ups a month. Every metric that Udemy gives to instructors to determine if a course is good was nearly maxed out (high retention, good reviews, 100% watch rate on nearly every video and back when they showed those metrics with the bars every bar was nearly 100 / 100).

I've also emailed Udemy about this a few times and usually within a day or 2 of emailing them my course(s) will magically end up on the first page of the search results for very broad and good keywords (often the name of the tech) for a day or 2, I'll get a sales spike and then within a few days it'll drop back to the bottom of page 2. This pattern has repeated multiple times over the years.

I don't think there's a massive conspiracy. It's painfully obvious that Udemy has special deals with certain instructors and they heavily manipulate search rankings based on courses that align with whatever they think is best. Of course you do need a good course and landing page but it's not close to enough to get ranked well.

> It's the same dynamic on YouTube

I'm on YouTube too and I never once thought the algorithm was against me. I think YouTube is a great platform. I'm not affiliated with them in any way and I have no monetary incentive to promote them over another platform. Despite having the ability to monetize my videos with ads I choose not to. I make $0 dollars from YouTube and have 13k+ subs. It's been a gradual incline over the years. I don't care about views, subs or money. I post videos there because I love making videos.

Likewise I don't have a competing marketplace to Udemy and while I do sell my courses on my own site I'm not mentioning that here because this isn't a case of trying to bad mouth a platform to profit on my own thing. I'm just giving my honest assessment after having sold tech courses for the last 5 years on Udemy, other marketplaces and my own site.

Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#107

Post by perpetualpatzer »

weiliddat wrote: post #29
jstx1 wrote: post #2

I'll wait for the 90% discount on the stock.

I'm curious as to how payouts to instructors work when Udemy has 90% off courses every other week?

They would be 90% smaller (though hopefully on higher volume). From the S-1:

>We incur content costs in the form of payments to our instructors, generally determined as a percentage of total revenue generated from their content.

This is a pretty typical structure when unit costs are low. It gives the publisher the ability to price as they please to optimize revenue, and because the inventives are aligned, authors don't need to know customer willingness to pay.

Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#108

Post by perpetualpatzer »

solarkraft wrote: post #40
jstx1 wrote: post #2

I'll wait for the 90% discount on the stock.

Isn’t the reason they can do these discounts that that is their margin?

No, payments to authors are percentage-based, so they deflate down with the price.

It's just a form of price discrimination. If you're paying and not urgent, wait a couple weeks and the price is $10. If you've gotta have it now, or don't care about the money (e.g. work will reimburse), the price is $100.

Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#109

Post by belter »

laserpistus wrote: post #103
belter wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grounds for a lawsuit? "Price discrimination is a commonplace practice that is presumptively lawful, save under special circumstances discussed below. It occurs when a seller of products regularly offers lower prices to its preferred customers and higher prices to the others when selling them the same or similar products at around the same time." https://www.markhamlawfirm.com/law-articles/unlawful-price-d...

Already happening. From their S-1: In August 2021, a putative class action complaint captioned Williams v. Udemy, Inc., Case No. 3:21-CV-06489, was filed against us in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleging violations of California’s unfair competition and false advertising statutes as well as the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act in connection with the promotional “strike-throu…

Interesting. Thanks

Re: Udemy S-1 IPO

#110

Post by dang »

regressiveparty wrote: post #98
nickjj wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's why Udemy remains an attractive option (despite how badly Udemy treat authors as you say). It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. It is but at the same time it's not. If you make a course in a category where there's 500 other courses which is the norm for a lot of tech niches you'll be on page 30 and no one will ever find you. For new courses Udemy might decide to show your course to a tiny percent of tr…

Man, you are just a firehose of misinformation. It's really impressive. I started on Udemy with 0 people in my audience, and I still have 0 people outside of my Udemy audience. I don't do any marketing or drive any external traffic. When you launch your course, you have a 30 - 90 window that you get scrutinized on. The biggest metrics the system is looking for are thumbnail CTR, enrollment rate (%), total minutes wat…

Can you please make your substantive points without calling names or personal attacks? That's particularly important if the points you're making are true, because doing that then discredits the truth, which isn't good for anybody.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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