from Hacker News

Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse

by h4l0 on 2/20/20, 7:34 AM with 124 comments

• by ChrisRR on 2/20/20, 1:20 PM

  My issue with Udemy isn't their constant "sales" or the way they treat their tutors.

  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

• by jstummbillig on 2/20/20, 9:54 AM

  Udemy is selling a dream, more so, than an education.

  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.

• by alexgmcm on 2/20/20, 9:05 AM

  I prefer Coursera because I'd rather shell out 40 euros and get a high-quality course from say, Roughgarden at Stanford than pay 15 euros and get something worse than just scanning Youtube.

  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?

• by pritambarhate on 2/20/20, 10:55 AM

  I take a lot of Udemy courses. When I want to learn something new I generally buy a course (look for at least 4 stars and a minimum 500 votes, though popular topics will have thousands of ratings) and binge-watch the entire thing in a couple of days. It gives me an idea of what's possible with this particular technology. Later when I really need to use that technology I spend futher time doing code examples etc. Has worked really well for me to keep abreast of multiple technologies in my CTO job.

  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.

• by Pandabob on 2/20/20, 9:04 AM

  I've never taken an Udemy class, but am sure there's quality content on the website. However, I've always felt that the way they show their prices is a little fishy.

  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.

• by blowski on 2/20/20, 8:30 AM

  Anyone recommend any Udemy courses, on any topic? My experience is that there are very few where both delivery and content are good.

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

• by Lucadg on 2/20/20, 9:58 AM

  I sell a course on Udemy for 189 Euros. They constantly sell it at around 9 Euronand keep a big chunk of it. The only way to make money is to bring in your leads but at that point it's just better to sell directly.

  Classic rent extracting platforms.

• by jacquesm on 2/20/20, 11:10 AM

  They should send them $5M and claim they saw they were on sale at a 90% discount on the website. That would give them a taste of their own medicine, it is exactly how they treat their authors.

• by codextremist on 2/20/20, 1:24 PM

  Hi guys! I hope I’m able to contribute by bringing some of my own experience and real data to this discussion. I'm the founder of Classpert (https://classpert.com), a search and comparison site for online courses. In the last 6 months, we’ve managed to sell over 2000 courses, in 8 different languages and across 80 different countries (Udemy alone is selling around 200 courses each month through Classpert). So while it is true that price has an impact on low-income customers (especially from developing countries), even for developed countries (USA, Canada, Germany, Japan) Udemy still is leading the race in number of sales (at least if we use our database as a proxy of the market)

  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.

• by nickjj on 2/20/20, 12:56 PM

  Udemy is one of the most corrupt / worst marketplaces I've ever encountered in the world -- for the folks who make courses at least.

  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.

• by tvanantwerp on 2/20/20, 12:10 PM

  Udemy's business model is, as far as I can tell, identical to Valve's: get digital pack-rats like me to buy a ton of stuff we'll never even open when it's on sale. Can't fault them for doing what works, though. Of the courses I've actually gotten around to taking, I thought they were pretty good.

• by whatitdobooboo on 2/20/20, 2:51 PM

  I dont know what you guys expect. Its an opportunity to learn at $10-$20 a course. Yeah a course can be bad, but so can a book.

  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?

• by snorrah on 2/20/20, 11:38 AM

  Did Udemy get around to putting controls in place to stop course stealing? I remember Troy Hunt in particular had issues with people taking his material, narrating over the top of it, and selling it on their Udemy channels.

• by rasikjain on 2/20/20, 12:09 PM

  Udemy is a great platform for beginners who want to try different field or a niche without shelling lot of money (hey 90% off). They also have refund policy which is great too. I had purchased courses for photography, aws and newer javascript frameworks (e.g vue.js) in the past. There are many courses out there for the same topic, have to be careful in selecting quality course with good feedback.

• by chriscatoya on 2/20/20, 8:28 PM

  It makes a lot of sense for Benesse to get into online education, let's see if they can do something that works with Udemy. It might help Udemy as well to get Berlitz co-branding on some content on the platform and start a path that's almost like Masterclass but instead of curated around industry legends, it's brands and institutions.

  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.

• by livefastdieold on 2/20/20, 4:13 PM

  The change in Udemy's pricing policy after 2016 - applying aggressive discounts and setting maximum prices for courses - has affected many instructors in a bad way. This is directly related to the perceived low quality of their courses (obviously with exceptions). Many instructors today use Udemy to try to attract traffic to their own websites where they sell the "best versions" of their courses.

• by DrNuke on 2/20/20, 10:13 AM

  Content quality and personal goals do make the difference in continuing education, but people really need to be clear with themselves before purchasing courses, summaries or hands-on tutorials: none of these is a shortcut to a degree if you want accreditation, none of these is a shortcut to a portfolio if you want original case studies.

• by demadog on 2/20/20, 7:56 PM

  Don’t know if it’s a reaction to their new raise and they want to try to get full price signups with the new traffic, or what, but I’m seeing all courses full price at the moment.

• by clubdorothe on 2/20/20, 12:40 PM

  I've always wondered how japanese companies (looking at Softbank especially) had so much cash to invest? Why do they want to invest that money abroad?

• by chrshawkes on 2/20/20, 2:49 PM

  My issue with Udemy is they stole my Python videos from YouTube and sold them to 12,000+ students at $199.99 listed price .

• by satvikpendem on 2/20/20, 3:53 PM

  I love Udemy. I've learned so much from their courses, including React and Flutter most recently. Our employer has an unlimited subscription which is great for checking out a lot of these courses, I definitely don't watch every single one available however, but enrolling in a few courses of the same topic shows me what's possible with some technology and which teacher is the best.

  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
  

  Anyway, hopefully this helps others move through content faster. You might balk at 4x, but you need to start at something smaller, like 2x, before gradually moving up in speed. I like experiencing content at high speeds personally, and I use similar hacks for other media as well, such as audiobooks and podcasts. For audiobooks (on Android), I use a fork of the Voice Audiobook player [5] which supports speeds up to 6x because the original author did not seem to want to raise the maximum listening rate, citing simplicity concerns for most people. As well, it also seems like only AntennaPod goes up to 4x for podcasts, most podcast players I've seen only go to 3x [6].

  [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/

• by sfblah on 2/20/20, 3:22 PM

  Udemy is just like all sorts of things in the economy: it’s a stupid-people tax. You can learn the same information from free videos or just a book.