Advice to read before buying a course from Udemy

Thats great about refunds and since I read the comments before the article on this I thought the article might about refunds.

Coursera had very poor service when I asked for a refund on a ~$500 course before the course actually began. Used to do heaps of free and paid courses online and that experience actually turned me off them completely...

Yeah I've seen that for sure. I'd be chatting with someone and be all "yeah it's 9.99" and they're "no it's 11 something".... same class, we each saw something different on different platforms.

Keep in mind instructors don't really ever get paid 97% of their list price.

Let's say I give you a coupon to buy my course for $19. Technically I would receive 97% of that, but that never happens because Udemy constantly puts it up for $10 and as soon as you reach the course's description page you will see Udemy's "better" deal, and naturally you'll click that.

So instead of receiving 97% of $19 as an instructor, you'll end up with $5 (50% of $10 because you normally only get 50% revenue).

Also Udemy tries to push instructors to make 7-8+ hour video courses which could easily take 3 to 4 full time months to create.

Then of course they play favorites with certain instructors. For example it's not uncommon for Udemy to reach out to certain instructors and then go into a bounded contract with them which basically says "look, if you make a top quality course, we'll promote the shit out it for you. We'll even give you a direct internal contact and resources to help you make the best course possible for this niche." which essentially means if you're NOT part of this, it will be impossible to compete with someone who is because the biggest factor in ranking well is number of sales + number of positive reviews.

Long story short, I've spent a few years teaching on Udemy (and even made decent $ on it without any special treatment on Udemy) but I'm slowly trying to remove myself from them because of how poorly they treat instructors.

Two points of context:

1. I have a friend with a well performing Udemy course and he's doing about the same price/unit sale as you are. I think it's just a volume thing.

2. Udemy courses are so inexpensive and as a result does it matter if there are a few duds? Again from the stats my friend shared, about 80% of the people buying the course don't even start it.

I have used Udemy for programming and music courses. Some programming courses have been mediocre or outdated for sure but I have always looked back and noticed that it was my fault for not reading more about the current state of the subject and referenced that with the course description.

I've also used Coursera but i'm just not a fan of the online classroom approach nor do I care about the certifications but all the courses I have taken were awesome material-wise.

What I do know is if I ever meet Stephen Grider or Maximillian Schwarzmüller in a bar I will be buying them a beer.