Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by hiram112 » Thu, Feb 20, 2020, 1:09 PM UTC

orangefarm wrote: post #7

blowski wrote: post #2

Anyone recommend any Udemy courses, on any topic? My experience is that there are very few where both delivery and content are good. My own recommendations would be Stephen Grider’s React courses, and Chris Croft’s management courses.

I studied Vue and Nuxt through Maximilian Schwarzmüller’s courses, which I liked. He has a very beginner-friendly teaching style, which was right for me at the time but might not work for everyone.

+1 for Max. I'm a backend dev who got thrown on the frontend, and i enjoyed his React course and also the CSS one with some other guy.

For $10, these courses are a much better value to me than the somewhat absurd process for tech books from Manning and O'Reilly that are often $50 and will be out of date in two years.

I used to be a huge tech book fan and would spend hours at Barnes and Nobles and Borders during their heyday, and they had massive sections devoted to programming and IT.

I'd hoped ebooks and cheap publishing would have brought down the price of books, especially those related to some software version that will be outdated in a short time, making the book worthless. But the industry refuses to give up their old pricing model, so maybe Udemy and similar sites can provide an alternative.

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

#62

Post by ChrisRR » Thu, Feb 20, 2020, 1:20 PM UTC

My issue with Udemy isn't their constant "sales" or the way they treat their tutors.

It's the 95% amount of crap on the platform. It's genuinely difficult to sort the good quality courses from the tons of bad courses. Especially the ones that have got tons of 5 star ratings but only because the tutor promised them another free course if they rate 5 stars.

Just because everyone can upload a course to Udemy, doesn't mean that they should and the platform suffers for it

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

#63

Post by barbecue_sauce » Thu, Feb 20, 2020, 1:21 PM UTC

citeguised wrote: post #10

blowski wrote: post #2

Anyone recommend any Udemy courses, on any topic? My experience is that there are very few where both delivery and content are good. My own recommendations would be Stephen Grider’s React courses, and Chris Croft’s management courses.

"JavaScript: Understanding the weird parts" by Anthony Alicea is a high-quality course which helped me understand JS on a more fundamental level. This is the main one I always recommend for folks who know JS, but would like to take a step further: https://www.udemy.com/course/understand-javascript/

That was the first Udemy course I bought, and was fairly surprised by the quality. Anthony Alicea hasn't released anything for a while, so I'm wondering if the relatively immense success of his courses has made him financially independent.

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

#64

Post by skinnymuch » Thu, Feb 20, 2020, 1:22 PM UTC

tvanantwerp wrote: post #54

Udemy's business model is, as far as I can tell, identical to Valve's: get digital pack-rats like me to buy a ton of stuff we'll never even open when it's on sale. Can't fault them for doing what works, though. Of the courses I've actually gotten around to taking, I thought they were pretty good.

Udemy stuff is always on sale for ~2 years now. Maybe 5-10% of the time they aren’t.

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

#65

Post by barbecue_sauce » Thu, Feb 20, 2020, 1:23 PM UTC

jmnicolas wrote: post #3

blowski wrote: post #2

Anyone recommend any Udemy courses, on any topic? My experience is that there are very few where both delivery and content are good. My own recommendations would be Stephen Grider’s React courses, and Chris Croft’s management courses.

I stopped bothering with Udemy a couple years ago, in my experience 90% of their courses were junk. Packt is OK but a few of their courses are unintelligible due to a strong foreign accent. Lynda (or Linkedin now) has good quality but seems more geared toward beginners, it's rare to find advanced topics. I like Pluralsight, they have advanced topics and their foreign instructors are intelligible.

I haven't been on Pluralsight in a while, but always found it to be high quality. Has anything interesting come out recently?

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

#66

Post by f18m » Thu, Feb 20, 2020, 1:24 PM UTC

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 it is true that price has an impact on low-income customers (especially from developing countries), even for developed countries (USA, Canada, Germany, Japan) Udemy still is leading the race in number of sales (at least if we use our database as a proxy of the market)

Much of their success stems from the fact that Udemy has by far the largest catalog of online courses on the web (something around 110k courses). And while some people may argue that this comes at a cost of providing low-quality courses it also naturally provides an extremely aggressive long-tail SEO strategy. The majority of potential customers don’t correlate e-learning platforms and quality (most of their customers are not high-profile HN users), so if you are googling for an online course chances are that Udemy will be ranked at the top (and on a global scale). This also explains why they have 10x more traffic than Pluralsight or 3x more than Coursera.

On top of that (an here is much more my personal intuition than data-based analysis), Udemy not only offers cheaper courses but also has not yet adhered to “subscription models”. Subscription models target specific users. Subscription models are awkward and feel totally unnatural to most “normal users”. Why on earth a normal user, seeking for a specific bit of knowledge will lock himself on a subscription? The subscription business model seems to work much better on B2B than B2C.

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

#67

Post by barbecue_sauce » Thu, Feb 20, 2020, 1:28 PM UTC

cbzbc wrote: post #51

blowski wrote: post #2

Anyone recommend any Udemy courses, on any topic? My experience is that there are very few where both delivery and content are good. My own recommendations would be Stephen Grider’s React courses, and Chris Croft’s management courses.

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, leaving elements out of lists of items, etc.).

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

#68

Post by NikolaNovak » Thu, Feb 20, 2020, 1:48 PM UTC

ChrisRR wrote: post #62

My issue with Udemy isn't their constant "sales" or the way they treat their tutors. It's the 95% amount of crap on the platform. It's genuinely difficult to sort the good quality courses from the tons of bad courses. Especially the ones that have got tons of 5 star ratings but only because the tutor promised them another free course if they rate 5 stars. Just because everyone can upload a course to Udemy, doesn't me…

I've bought ~20 courses on Udemy; variety of software engineering; music lessons; language lessons; and random; not a single one had reasonable "information density" - i.e., I'm sure if I watched all 20 hours I'd pick up some useful information, but probably only an hour's worth.

I've since moved to mostly either using free Youtube videos and just picking specific knowledge I need, or paying much more for targeted professional courses.

Mostly though, I've gone back to my preferred method of learning - books - where I can control the speed and repetition as it suits the moment :-/

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

#69

Post by Lucadg » Thu, Feb 20, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

blowski wrote: post #24

Lucadg wrote: post #21

I sell a course on Udemy for 189 Euros. They constantly sell it at around 9 Euronand keep a big chunk of it. The only way to make money is to bring in your leads but at that point it's just better to sell directly. Classic rent extracting platforms.

I always wondered who gets to decide what's on sale! How does your agreement work with them?

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 €.

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

#70

Post by strongbond » Thu, Feb 20, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

blowski wrote: post #2

Anyone recommend any Udemy courses, on any topic? My experience is that there are very few where both delivery and content are good. My own recommendations would be Stephen Grider’s React courses, and Chris Croft’s management courses.

+1 for anything by Stephen Grider.