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

They mostly target lower income internet natives, who have heard of coding, not enough to do anything dangerous but certainly enough to long for the good money and great perks.

You are not really committed to switching up your life, but a "premium product" at 90% off down to 20$, how could you not give it a try? It's an affordable dream and makes for an easy sale.

Also Coursera has the whole system of problem sets and programming assignments etc.

That said - I'd be happy if someone could show me some decent Udemy courses?

One main issue is that most of the courses only cover bigginner and intermediate level tasks only. I think the reason for this is that an instructor needs thousands of sales to be profitable on Udemy. Even for relatively popular topics like Magento and Salesforce development, one sees very less enrollment numbers. Only core popular techonolgies like Python, Node.js, AI/ML, etc see thousands of sales.

Looking at their offering now, all of the courses are priced between 10 - 13 euros, but each one seems to be "on sale" with the actual price being in the hundreds of euros.

My own recommendations would be Stephen Grider’s React courses, and Chris Croft’s management courses.

Classic rent extracting platforms.

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.

For reference I've had some of my courses on their platform for years and it's not like I'm bitter because no one bought my courses. I've made a solid amount of money there over the years (6 figures).

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'll make nothing because no one will be able to find you and that defeats the entire purpose of using a marketplace.

But that'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.

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.

The hilarious thing is my course is even higher rated than theirs and I'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.

Every time I email Udemy asking about this they say they don'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.

For the last few years I'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'm not there yet, but one day I hope I'll never have to deal with that platform again and I wouldn't recommend using Udemy for both buying or selling courses to my worst enemy.

Oh, and one fun thing about being on Udemy too is, you can expect people to black mail you for unreasonable things. I've had more than 1 person on the platform email me saying things like I "MUST" help them with their custom project for free and if I don't then they they are going to give my course a 1 star review. I think due to Udemy's low prices, it attracts a certain type of person.

The sales part is definitely dishonest, but as far as people who make content, if they get more $$ on youtube, why dont they post on youtube?

Also, having visited Benesse House museum this winter, I'd be really excited to see content come out of this that covers more of the art on Naoshima in a highly accessible way.

I personally prefer Andrew Mead's courses as he actually waits for you to complete a part by yourself before moving on, which I don't see as concretely with other teachers like Girder or Schwarzmüller, who sometimes say to try it on your own, but Mead actually has a moment where you can pause the video and try it, built into the course.

With regards to not having informational density, I've solved this problem by downloading the courses locally [0] and watching them at 4x speed. In a browser, you could set `querySelector("video").playbackRate = 4`, but since the video changes every few minutes, especially at high speed, this isn't too useful. I've actually made a Chromium extension that changes the video/audio playback speed globally since I watch a lot of YouTube at 4x speed as well [1], but again it isn't smart enough to detect when an underlying video source has changed.

Therefore, I use a local player, SMPlayer in specific [2], which is an mpv-based player. The problem, however, is that Chrome is very good at allowing you to understand voices at high speed, and nearly every other player, such as Firefox [3] and others, do not. This seems to be because they saccade the audio, where they skip parts of it, so that it sounds tinny or not understandable (edit: looks like it's fixed in Firefox!). Chrome does not use this approach. I've tried loading playlists into Chrome for this exact purpose, to simply use it as a video player, but the tab crashes because the video files are too large. Now, we return to the local player, SMPlayer.

SMPlayer, as it uses mpv, is able to pass any command line options to mpv. In this case, we are able to change the time-stretching amount by ourselves instead of waiting for Firefox or another player to do so. To do so, go to Options -> General -> Multimedia Engine: mpv, and then Options -> Advanced -> MPlayer/mpv tab -> Options: --speed=4, Audio filters: scaletempo=stride=10. You can play around with the speed and stride, but for the stride, around 8-20 sounds good [4]. It's still not as good as Chrome but it's usable and understandable. I wonder if there's a full way to solve this bug.

Edit: Looks like from [3], someone figured out that you can use the following filters with mpv as well. This just adds the overlap and search arguments in the audio filters. This sounds significantly better than without the overlap and search arguments as above, Chrome level basically.

  mpv --af=scaletempo=stride=8:overlap=1:search=10 --speed=4 test.mp3

[0] Udeler - https://github.com/FaisalUmair/udemy-downloader-gui

[1] Speed - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/speed-global-video...

[2] SMPlayer - https://www.smplayer.info/

[3] Firefox bug with time-stretching - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427267

[4] SMPlayer solution for time-stretching - https://forum.smplayer.info/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9069

[5] Voice Audiobook Player fork - https://github.com/brandonocasey/Voice

[6] AntennaPod - https://antennapod.org/

For instance, I bought a course on mixing vocals in Ableton. I've watched dozens of YouTube videos on this topic and know enough, but none of my learning has been in a structured fashion. The Udemy course compiled all these lessons in a way that's better paced and structured.

Given that it was less than $10 compared to the hundreds of dollars higher-tier courses charge, I find it good enough value.

Seems to me they're increasingly targeting businesses, with their Udemy for Business offering that is a subscription service. I have a course published there and currently get about half of the revenue from the Udemy for Business share.

The TechCrunch article also mentions this: "It also has, in more recent years, expanded to enterprise services, where Udemy works with companies like Adidas, General Mills, Toyota, Wipro, Pinterest and Lyft and others — 5,000 in all — to develop and administer subscription-based professional development courses."

I say this because it's helped me do both of these things. When MongoDB came out and I was looking to start a new personal project that looked like it could benefit from a nosql db, I bought a cheap course and was able to quickly see that boring old MySQL was more suitable. There was also the time when I needed to get back into Android development after a couple of years of doing only iOS and back-end work. For $10 I was able to quickly get up to speed on what had changed and identify what I needed to do deeper reading on.

All that said, I have trouble seeing how they will be able to make this investment worthwhile for their backers in the long-run.

If people unsure about their path can get a taste for 20 bucks, then that's a pretty great deal!

The ai lectures on udemy are a bit weaker in my opinion. YouTube and university content is better.

In contrast, I have never paid for coursera, edx or audacity. A key thing is the price point of 15 bucks .. I don't feel bad at all blowing cash on the udemy courses .. it is like a movie ticket. A 100 usd course feels like real money.

Having used both I think they’re just different. Udemy has very neat short courses while Coursera is really long and for some purposes, overly long and detailed.

Decent courses - I did a pretty great drawing course and Unity programming intro courses on Udemy that I really really enjoyed.

Udemy has a 30 day refund policy as well, so you can try a course out with low risk.

https://www.udemy.com/course/create-web-apps-with-apex-5/lea...

You made me check, it's still 94% off at the 150 NOK price. Now it's some kind of offer that lasts until Feb 21. Will be interesting to see what the price is in two days..

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.

His Kafka course https://www.udemy.com/course/apache-kafka/ is highly rated and AWS courses get good feedback. A lot of effort gone in to the production and is knowledgeable on the topics.

Given the Kafka course has 56,023 registered students alone even at the lowest offer price minus Udemy fee's he's done alright out of it.

But according to some reviews it's also above average for Udemy content.

Definitely worth it if you’re looking into cross-platform frontend development.

I find it strangely easier to buy a course on either Coursera or Udemy because of seeming lack of pressure :-/

It's like all the other platform stuff: You're basically a contractor for Udemy. Their rules, their terms, and you're ditched when somebody makes them a "better" deal.