Before we start, I need to say, that everything what is going to be in this video, is just
my own opinion.
It's going to be serious.
Today I received an email from Udemy
and the most interesting part from the email is this:
Starting on July 15 2019
any content available on Udemy for Business must be hosted exclusively on Udemy.
Wow
Are you serious?
You know,
I create a lot of free content and to be able to do it,
I need to create also
paid content.
One of the ways how I can make a little bit off extra money and how I can find more people
who may be interested to buy my courses is using Udemy.
Udemy is a platform where you can find and take many different courses.
It looks like this
and
advantage of Udemy, is that the courses
are very cheap.
Udemy almost always sells all the courses
in price range between 10-20 USD or 10 to 20 euros.
mostly, ok sometimes they increase the prices to the original price, but
no one is buying
this courses for the original price.
Everyone who buys a course on Udemy
buys it somewhere between 10-20 dollars
and
here you can see my course, yeah, you can see
it's discounted from 150, almost 150 dollars to 12 dollars
This is really cool, this is really great, no?
For students, definitely, for me as an instructor, not really.
Now
Why I am creating this video? Why we are talking about Udemy and Exclusive content?
For myself, as an instructor and creator of content, Udemy is quite an interesting platform.
They have many, like, many many students
and basically Udemy can help me to find people who may be
interested to buy also my NON Udemy courses.
Why I need to sell NON Udemy courses?
Because that is where I make my income from.
And
I need this income from NON Udemy courses to live
and I need this income to create new content,
including the free content for example youtube videos.
Without this income, from NON Udemy courses
I can not create any free content.
Now,
why I need my own platform, why I simply just can't sell
all my courses on Udemy?
What a great idea
What do you think?
Money, of course.
The biggest issue with Udemy
here,
is that instructors get
extremely low profit from the sale on Udemy
actually the profit
from selling courses on Udemy is so low, that in most cases
the profit from Udemy will not even cover expenses for creating a real good and professional courses.
To be specific,
and it is not a secret,
that instructors are getting on Udemy approximately
4 USD per sale or per student.
ok?
So from selling a course for 12 dollars
or for selling a course on Udemy usually the instructor will get
4 dollars
Now,
for some people this may look like wow!
4 dollars per sale …
hmmm
if I have 1000 students
I make
4000USD …. yes! yes!
I am going to teach on UDEMY!!
This may be just fine for example
if you are doing this as your side job, it's perfect.
However if
you are a full time instructor
creating a professional content,
4 dollars
is nothing.
I am going to give you a real example, so you get the idea how much it actually cost
creating a good course.
Many people think, that to create a course is just about
sitting down in front of camera
hit the record button,
and then talk and talk and talk, finish recording
post it online
and
you are making money.
It's not like that.
For example,
creating Advanced PCB layout course, this what you can see here
it took us
1,5 year of full time work
and it cost
to create this course it cost us almost
100 000 DOLARS.
If I was selling this course on Udemy,
I would have to sell
how many courses
I would have to sell this course to 25000 students just to cover expenses for creating this course.
And I mean, 25000 students, that's a lot …
1000 students is a lot,
5 000 students is a lot
… 25 000 that is really a lot of students.
Now, you may ask …
come on,
creating a course can’t cost 100 000 dollars?
Yep ….
for this Advanced PCB Layout course,
we had to design a real working product
which is then used for teaching.
So we had to pay an engineer for 1.5 year
to work on this product, we had build the product
and go through all the certifications and testing and it all cost a lot of money.
We had to develop the product,
because
we needed to own the full IP (intellectual property),
we needed to have the full know-how,
we needed to
own the rights
to share everything about the product with our students.
So, that's the reason why we had to create the product.
And once the product was finished,
only then after 1 year
of work
on the product
we could start creating the course itself
you know, prepare the scripts, record the videos,
cut the videos,
put everything together,
place it on our website
and after 1,5 year of hard work
we had to hope
that it’s going to sell.
So when I received this morning the letter from Udemy
where they want full exclusivity on the content I post on Udemy for Business,
I was like ….
What?
Are you kidding me?
I know, that Udemy
has included my FREE Starting with Altium Designer course
in their “Udemy for Business”. This is
the email what I received from Udemy some time ago.
Yeah
Hi Robert, we really like what you have been doing on Udemy
so we have chosen the following course
for inclusion in our exclusive
Udemy for Business enterprise learning solution
Starting with Altium Designer
This is the course, I am going to show you the course
[doors slaps]
ups
This is the course Starting with Altium Designer
it's a free course
They are making money
on placing my free course
on Udemy for business which is not free
and they have never ever
paid me anything from this course.
Now, they want exclusive rights
for that content?
They want exclusive rights for this course?
I have no words ….
BTW: This is the course
what I have also on Youtube.
Yeah, this is the course.
Does it mean, that in future
I can not post my Udemy courses on youtube?
Maybe it does
So
I believe, this is a very very bad step from Udemy.
Myself as a professional creator
I am absolutely
NOT interested to give UDEMY any exclusive rights for my content. In my opinion,
simply to say,
providing Udemy the exclusive rights
for my content is not worth it.
In my opinion,
Udemy should be just one of the ways to share content. Udemy must not be the ONLY way to sell content!
If instructors are only selling their content on Udemy,
they will be trapped
they will be building Udemy,
but they will not be building their own independent brand.
These instructors
will be fully dependant on Udemy
and Udemy will have full controll
over the content what these instructors create
… so if you are an instructor on Udemy,
be very very careful.
If
you can create
high quality content,
you can earn much much much more than a few hundreds of dollars a month
You can easily earn thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars a month.
I know that, because I have been doing this for last 5 years as my full time job.
yeah
Now, Udemy is perfectly fine as additional platform for your content,
getting audience and using it for your promotion.
But, giving them exclusivity,
no.
Think very carefully about this.
Immediately after I received the email from Udemy
I asked them to remove
all my courses from “Udemy for Business”
as I do not agree with the new “Exclusivity clause”.
I am
I am very curious how many instructors will like
their new terms.
I am going to watch this very closely.
Because this is going to impact
content what is created and shared online
and
it may easily impact
number of free educational videos which you
can for example find on youtube
it's a very interesting topic
it impacts my youtube educational videos.
so
let's see where it goes.
Let me know what do you think, leave comments and please share
this video. I really hope,
that by sharing this video,
you tell Udemy,
that what they are doing
is wrong.
They can not
ask for exclusivity
for content which people are creating. It's wrong.
Thank you very much for watching and see you next time.
Bye