New Revenue Stream with Udemy.com

I have noticed that this company is advertising heavily on Facebook, each time I login I see their ads so I guess you can give it a try and see..even if they take 30% ... u still have 70% and they do all the advertising for u.. you can't take everything lol

Something else to consider. If you used affiliates, you could expect to pay them up to 50%.

I sell courses on Udemy under different pen names for different niches, so I know it's a good deal.

Bayo

According to their site, they take a 50% commission, which probably isn't unreasonable, considering the traffic they bring. They also say the teachers get 100% of sales they bring in themselves.

And they claim "the average instructor earns $7k on Udemy", and that "96% of instructors make sales". Seems pretty decent to me.

I've been purchasing courses from there for a little over a year.

In that time, I've received so many discounts through their promotional emails for courses with all the way up to 90% off.

If it's the case where they take all the profits from their marketing, then I guess that would have it's upsides and downsides from you the seller.

Like you mentioned, more exposure and I'm pretty sure that you don't have to join in on those heavy discounts when they offer them.

They also have a mobile App that seems to have offers separately from their email offers.

I guess if you prepare a course with the fore-knowlege (is that even a word?) of heavy discounts, if you choose, you can base a whole series of courses off of it.

Is anyone teaching any courses on Udemy?

i do. i have my courses with them. i created around 20 odd courses along with my friends.
i also have signed up for their affiliate program.
when they started it was 70% teacher and 30% udemy.
now it is 50% udemy and 50% tutor with no marketing help.
if you list your course in their affiliate scheme. it is 75% udemy and only 25% teacher.
The margins have dried up substantially.
to give you an exxample

i recently sold a course for 99 $.
Guess what will i receive ? 22 $.

i have more than 20 courses listed and let me tell you i am not making even 1000 bucks.
They are keeping affiliates happy maybe but not the teachers.

Here is the issue I see with Udemy right now.

First, subscriber statistics are really hard to take at face value. I have about 130 courses I am enrolled in, many paid and many premium, guess how many I paid for? If you guess zero, then you are right.

Second, until Udemy can curate the courses better it will go south fast. Why? I took a course that was a rehashed WSO from 2011 that was being sold for $29. How relevant was most of the information, 90% was out of date. This is why Linda.com courses are more expensive since they curate the courses.

Third, no life time value of those customers. Unless you can convert them to your list the subscriber value is small. Converting them means leaving stuff out of your course and making people subscribe which just pisses me off. While its only anecdotal, guess how many Udemy emails I read since I get about 30 a day?

Four, no control over your brand. Ok if you are selling $6 WSO's over there but if you want to sell any premium courses, seeing a coupon for $19 for any course everywhere is certainly not going to make your high priced course look valuable.

Five - Mobile experience is lacking. Ever try watching a course on your iPad? You can't go full screen like you could if you hosted those with Vimeo. I like that they tried to do mobile but its just not there yet.

There are some OK programming courses I am taking but even those I have moved back towards books in many cases and the courses make a ton of assumptions.

Where I think it can be good, is if you don't have the money to buy the tools you need to run your own member portal, or your topic is obscure enough that you have little competition.