Advice to read before buying a course from Udemy | Hacker News Reader

Advice to read before buying a course from Udemy

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62 pointsyarapavan46 comments

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.

Udemy rubs me the wrong way. When I see courses that are supposedly several hundred to several thousand dollars, constantly marked down to pennies on the dollar, that seems like a red flag. I've tried a few of the tech courses and in my experience, a lot of them are outdated or outright worthless. Their micro-certification courses are about as long as a news article. As someone else said, there's definitely some good courses thrown in, you just have to be able to find them.

I've thought the same thing and figured it's A/B tested to hell and just produces conversions. I know it's worked on me.

I sell a poorly marketed (but well-loved) "Project-Based Linux" course on Udemy. Most of my business there comes from my YouTube channel. Since launching the course two years ago, the average price students have paid has hovered around just over $9.00.

I think of Udemy as the Packt of online course platforms. There are certainly some gems to be found, if you have the time to look for them and don't mind getting a few duds in the process.

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.

Thanks for that.

And just to clarify, I didn't mean to sound negative. I actually think it's a good thing -- I've picked up several really good courses on real estate investing, machine learning, and other stuff.

A few misses at $10/pop come out in the wash when you also get courses that can add tens of thousands of dollars' worth of knowledge to your life.

if you prefer proper instructor-led video courses, go with Udemy

That’s a bit of a stretch. There are plenty of video courses in EdX which are generally of a very high quality as they are produced by real institutions, with real lecturers, not random people off YouTube.

And EdX is free, you pay only for a certificate if you need/want one. With no pricing tricks based on web/app either.

I thought this was going to touch on how many Udemy courses are stolen.

Are there a lot?

Like people copying slides or such?

More like people reuploading entire courses.

>in 2015, we have received 125 DMCA notifications as well as 45 “Hey, this looks weird maybe you should look into this,” notifications

https://medium.com/@robconery/how-udemy-is-profiting-from-pi...

Interesting read, I didn't know anything about that. It seems like all would be solved if they put even a tiny bit of effort into vetting uploads. What type of educational site allows most any upload to make it through? They're approach seems to be reactive as compared to other sites being proactive, another red flag.

That's pretty terrible. Seems like even some basic effort would sniff out a lot of these ...

Not sure that all courses from youtube are being stolen.

I rather think that they when they find topical content on youtube they approach the content creator to put the course on their site as well.

Udemy's quality is mostly poor, but it's usually glaringly obvious when a course is rubbish. One or two courses are actually really good.

Even worse. There are people stealing entire courses from elsewhere (even the video content) and selling them shamelessly. There were article on this a while ago, let me see if I can find them.

I don't have the source, but I remember reading on Reddit that someone had his free programming YouTube tutorials series uploaded to udemy and behind a paywall.

I don't think I've ever seen a udemy course NOT on sale.

Here's an interesting tidbit from my experience. My son was looking at purchasing a Udemy course. He was asking my advice about it as we chatted over the phone (he lives a short distance from me). I visited the site and found the course he was referring to. "Oh, the one for only $11.95?"

"No, it's $19.95"

After going back and forth for a moment we verified it was the same course, but for him it was offered at a higher price. He was using an Android phone to visit the site, and I was on a Linux box. He had never visited the site before searching for this course, and I had never heard of it.

The difference? Not exactly sure? Is it profiling based on OS? Doesn't seem likely. I suspect the price was based on cookie residue he picked up or profiling based on prior surfing. He had been searching the web for a while looking at similar products. Was his surfing behavior calculated into his price, scoring a more likely chance for him to purchase at a higher rate?

I have not yet found out (does anyone here have a reasonable explanation?), but it's a definite turn off to use any more of their products.

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.

Someone linked an article elsewhere on this post and in that article it talks about how prices differ from mobile to PC for whatever shady reason.

Pretty simple - new users get a cheaper price.

Mobile apps also won't match up, the prices are controlled by their own tier structures. e.g. $10.99 on a website might translate to 13 euros for a dude on the app in France.

> He had never visited the site before searching for this course, and I had never heard of it.

This happens due to advertisment cost. Udemy share their profit to ios and adroid platforms this why price higher. To get any course with discout use coupon site: http://peakget.com/store/udemy/

yea, you can follow this simple process:

1. Register with site.

2. Wishlist any courses you might have in interest in.

3. Wait... Sometime soon, there will be a huge sale where every course is under $10.

Every Udemy course I ever bought was on a massive sale, usually in excess of 90% or so. There’s so many sales all the time nothing is worth buying at full price.

No course is ever on sale if every course is always on sale.

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.

My assumption was always that the full price is only there to act as a starting point for negotiations with companies buying courses for employee training.

I've bought a few courses from there and they've been great about refunds if I get into it and it's not what was expected.

My first experience was very good with a deep Mastering Ansible course that was released in March of this year and is totally up to date. Others have been a bit hit or miss, but I've had good luck trusting the highly rated ones.

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...

Udemy is great for new or niche content.

If you want to learn data science or machine learning or python, go with Udacity, Coursera or EdX.

But if you want to learn VueJS, you have to use Udemy.

Best part is that the $1 million course was 90% off, so I only had to pay $100,000 for it! What a saving!

The VueJS 2 course[0] is 95% off right now, marked down to $10 from $190. I wonder if it displays that for everyone.

I'm sorry, Udemy, but that's a suspiciously huge discount.

[0]: https://www.udemy.com/vuejs-2-the-complete-guide/

I have checked a couple of courses over the last months and they always offer 90% discount and only for a couple of days. But when the time expires, the discount gets automatically extended. So these 190$ are just a fiction

Likely the same thing that very expensive private universities do with "low income" students. They just have a massive profit margin and can cut it back as needed

They have some decent-ish stuff but I only buy their courses at the price of about $9.99 and like another commenter said, the "full price" of hundreds to thousands of dollars is ridiculous.

Would not recommend udacity for any reason. Their content is shallow and their certificates are one step above toilet paper.

i like these advices, thanks a lot. it's useful and can save quite a bit if you enjoy this platform for your learning needs.

off topic, but to my ear the “an” in the title is jarring. i’ve been wondering for a while now why “an” doesn’t feel right before some words, even though i learned “an before words that start with a vowel.”

turns out it’s “an before words that sound like they start with a vowel” regardless of how they’re spelled.

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/alt.usage.english/...

I suspect you pronounce Udemy as You-demy. The author probably pronounces it Oo-demy.

Arguably also off-topic, but the title of TFA is "Read This Before You Buy Any Udemy Course" (my emphasis), so it could be a typo by the submitter.

This is a common grammatical mistake that I see made by folks from certain countries. Usually, it's using an incorrectly before a word that starts with the letter u but where the u has a consonant /y/ sound.

/j/ is the IPA for the English consonant "y" sound, /y/ is a vowel.

Sorry, I wasn't intending on using IPA. I've been teaching my kids using Logic of English, which is how that sound is represented.

I get the marketing advantage of being able to say "90% off!" on your products and I guess that Udemy did their own A/B testing on that but when I discovered the website a few months ago it really made me think twice on the quality of the marketplace.

I bought a few courses since then and I don't regret it, it landed me a job, but the whole "eternal discount" thing really was a real turn off, how about just putting the right price from the beginning?

they actually tried a "normal" pricing model for a summer, but purchases dropped. very similar to the JC Penney price change. psychologically people like things on sale

because it works on dumb people :shrug:

I agree with this entirely. I think there is also a linking factor that leads to action. If I see a "sale" - I might link my friend with "Hey, there is a sale on that course you wanted." Without the sale, I would just tell them to check Udemy, which might delay action. It really is a cheap tactic, but we are still all using the site...

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