Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse
Udemy is one of the most corrupt &#x2F; worst marketplaces I&#x27;ve ever encountered in the world -- for the folks who make courses at least.<p>For reference I&#x27;ve had some of my courses on their platform for years and it&#x27;s not like I&#x27;m bitter because no one bought my courses. I&#x27;ve made a solid amount of money there over the years (6 figures).<p>The problem is they constantly sell your course for $10 and then take 50%+. Any traffic coming from Google results in them taking 50%+ too. If you opt out of their controlled pricing then your course will be hidden from all search results, in which case you&#x27;ll make nothing because no one will be able to find you and that defeats the entire purpose of using a marketplace.<p>But that&#x27;s only the tip of the iceberg. Udemy heavily hand tunes search results and cuts behind the scenes deals with instructors in certain niches, and when those deals happen, other people in the same niche get completely fucked over night.<p>For example, I was selling close to 50+ courses a day, then Udemy signed a contract with another person in the same niche (they told me directly). A few days after their course went live, the traffic to my course dropped by over an order of magnitude and my sales dropped by 20x. My graphs literally looks like a nose dive and I went from being able to sustain myself to having to stop creating courses.<p>The hilarious thing is my course is even higher rated than theirs and I&#x27;ve had people message me privately saying they took both courses and much preferred mine, yet it sits barely on the first page with a 4.7 average rating and like 1 sale a day with little to no traffic.<p>Every time I email Udemy asking about this they say they don&#x27;t modify search results, but then every time I show them screenshots of very strange ranking behavior they change what they say and usually I get in a bump in sales for a day and then it drops off.<p>For the last few years I&#x27;ve spent a lot of time (and a lot of hard work) attempting to build my own audience instead of making new courses so I can drop Udemy all together. I&#x27;m not there yet, but one day I hope I&#x27;ll never have to deal with that platform again and I wouldn&#x27;t recommend using Udemy for both buying or selling courses to my worst enemy.<p>Oh, and one fun thing about being on Udemy too is, you can expect people to black mail you for unreasonable things. I&#x27;ve had more than 1 person on the platform email me saying things like I &quot;MUST&quot; help them with their custom project for free and if I don&#x27;t then they they are going to give my course a 1 star review. I think due to Udemy&#x27;s low prices, it attracts a certain type of person.