Comment by bespoke_engnr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bespoke_engnr | Hacker News Reader

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Just an average Udemy creator here, but maybe what I've learned is useful.

I started doing Linux tutorials on YouTube a few years ago ( http://youtube.com/c/tutorialinux ) and then created a course on Udemy about a year ago. Affiliates make a decent percentage there (75%) but I suspect they have the same frustration that I do: Udemy has sales EVERY FEW DAYS.

Every few days there are sales that offer 90% off all courses, $10 courses, etc. etc. So a course with a $200 price tag will have an average sale price of $10-15, which leaves everyone (including affiliates) with pretty slim margins.

The simple problem is that they have the power to re-price courses as they see fit, and an incentive to do so (Udemy gets 50% of the revenue, possibly more from their promotions).

As it is, I make about the same amount of money from YouTube revenue (40k subscribers) as I do with one of the highest-rated Linux courses on Udemy (a few hundred dollars a month). It's really just a blip next to my salary; I can't see it replacing full-time tech work anytime soon.

I would second what Dave said, and have you look at this front pager from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14711492

Yeah, I'm not sure why I haven't started running AdWords campaigns yet, but I need to get on that. I'll try that; thanks for the kick in the pants!

Thanks for your reply. That's an interesting stat. I have a question on:

>>>As it is, I make about the same amount of money from YouTube revenue (40k subscribers) as I do with one of the highest-rated Linux courses on Udemy (a few hundred dollars a month)

How do you promote your youtube videos?

At the moment, I don't actively promote videos except by notifying subscribers on YT, twitter, and occasionally facebook.

Others in this comment thread have convinced me to start actively promoting via e.g. Adwords, though. I'll start looking at that over the next few weeks.

Have you thought about self-hosting the course or using a platform like Teachable/Thinkific? Do you do any advertising?

My engineering instinct says, "I could build a simple little video-course platform in a weekend or two," but I know where that kind of thinking leads :-D.

More practically, I'm thinking about using something like Teachable for the next course.

OTOH at this point I've got content in a bunch of different places (YouTube, soundcloud, a website, udemy, packt/safaribooksonline), which makes leveraging all of these different platforms' features and supporting students there time-consuming.

Aside from work, hobbies, side projects, relationships, and other pesky human endeavors, I only have between 5-8 hours a week to work on tutoriaLinux. Adding another platform, with its own learning curve and features, seems like it might waste time that I could be investing into content.

I've actually spent a fair amount of time doing AdWords campaigns in the past, but I haven't done that for tutoriaLinux or the Udemy course yet. Maybe I should -- thanks!

Sorry, rambling.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. If you bring the customer to Udemy I think the cut is ~97% so definitely worth a try. Looks like you have a great platform on YouTube, I've subscribed. Best of luck!

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