Udemy Business Earnings Example + Tips of an Instructor Who Got into Udemy Business and Loves It!

If you follow regularly, you know that I love Udemy! There are so many great courses that are inexpensive. The $9.99 sales are my favorite!  A few months ago, I started helping a friend to market their Udemy course better and learned a lot about how much she earned from Udemy and Udemy Business. I'm going to share that insight today about how much she earned per student and per Udemy Business minute watched in the most recent month!

First, let me start by sharing that I love Udemy!  I jumped on the chance to volunteer to help my friend who was creating a course and love that she's feeling happiness from people signing up, completing the course, watching a map that shows how her students are from around the world, and sometimes receiving sweet messages from people who really make her day special!

The course that I helped her with was her first course.  It's currently her only course. I knew nothing about the topic, but I watched her one-hour course, took the quizzes, and completed the homework assignments. I was impressed that she could make a difficult topic so easy to learn! While I have tips of minor changes for her to augment the course, in this post, I'll focus on the marketing and earnings that I did to help her.

For the first several months, her course was a regular course just like everyone else. If someone bought the course, she received a share of the purchase price. If they used her link that she advertised, the share was larger. If someone found the course on their own, the share was smaller.   The range of commissions was  .92-cents for the lowest Udemy commission (a student in Turkey where the conversion rate is not as favorable) to $5.02 for the highest Udemy commission (a student in the U.S.) that she received.  One thing that is really cool about Udemy is that they market all around the world, accept currency in different locations, and convert it to U.S. dollars.  This meant that there was a greater reach for her course and Udemy handled all of the payments!  It also allowed me to observe that the worldwide reach meant that her commission varied by country.  She sold a lot to students in Turkey which was cool, but the amount of commission per student was often less than $1. On the other hand, the commission from Scandinavian students was often more than $5 per purchase.  

Here is a summary of her profits during those first months before her course was admitted to Udemy Business (rounded to nearest dollar). That is, this is the dollar amount of commissions that she received each month from people paying for the course:

Month 1: $19

Month 2: $42

Month 3: $5

Month 4: $24

Month 5: $11

Month 6: $2

Month 7: $22

In addition to the funds above, she received instructor payments for Udemy Business.  This was an additional stream of revenue. 

Month 8 (which was the first month in Udemy Business) resulted in an increase in Udemy Instructor revenue for her.  

Udemy Business payments for instructors are based on the number of minutes that Udemy Business customers watch. They basically take 25% of the Udemy Business fees and distribute the funds to Udemy Business instructors based on the portion of minutes that customer watch. This is a nice way to do it because it rewards good courses with engaging videos.  They pay does not include time for quizzes and exercises which also makes sense because it avoids rewarding busy work. The videos have to be engaging with valuable content to keep students watching. This means that the pay will vary based on number of Udemy Business subscribers that are paying into the pot of money and the number of minutes watched each month. One good thing about this is that perhaps there are slow times of year such as fewer people watching Udemy courses over Christmas or summer vacation. Conversely, there may be higher consumption months. My splitting the pool of money among instructors based on minutes watched, it seems fair to me!

She had slightly more than 1,000 minutes by 45 students in her first month of Udemy Business. That's an average of 22 minutes per student. The course was 60 minutes total. We could see that some students would complete a module, take a break, and come back to it later. Since she's still in her first month of Udemy Business and many of these students signed up around Christmas and New Year's, we are hoping that these students will come back after the holidays to watch more minutes. Fingers crossed!  

Her first month in Udemy Business was actually a partial month since her course was selected 1/4 of the way into the month, so we consider that her pay was approximately scaled to 3/4 month and hope to see an increase next month!

The Udemy Business Instructor payment for her first month was around $30.  We consider a couple of metrics:

December 2023 Udemy Business Payment Amount by minutes and students

• Total Udemy Business Payment for the month was approximately .024 dollars  per minute
• We calculated the Udemy Business payment based on number of minutes to be approximately .024 dollars per minute, or that is 2.4 cents per minute
• We calculated the Udemy Business payment based on 1,000 minutes watched to $24 per 1,000 minutes
• We calculated the Udemy Business payment based on number of students. The payment was around $30 for the 45 students which was $0.67 per Udemy Business Student.  Again, it's not really paid by number of students, but by minute watch, so this metric will probably have a lot of variation per course.

January 2024 Udemy Business Payment Amount by students and minutes

• Total Udemy Business Payment for the month was approximately .017 dollars  per minute
• We calculated the Udemy Business payment based on number of minutes to be approximately .017 dollars per minute, or that is 1.7 cents per minute
• We calculated the Udemy Business payment based on 1,000 minutes watched to $17 per 1,000 minutes
• We calculated the Udemy Business payment based on number of students. The payment was around $19.99 for the 44 students which was $0.45 per Udemy Business Student.  Again, it's not really paid by number of students, but by minute watch, so this metric will probably have a lot of variation per course.

As of now, the course has not broken even with her time investment in the course, but we are hoping that things will increase now that the course is in Udemy Business! Her reviews are great and she's seeing regular enrollments. She's a talented instructor and getting into Udemy Business was a big accomplishment!  I will post more about this experiment in upcoming months.

Finally, let me share a way that I helped to market her course. First, I created a free Udemy coupon to give people access to her course. I didn't expect what happened next.  This increased enrollment in by the thousands! These were pros and cons of giving free Udemy course coupons in our personal experience:

Pros of Udemy instructors giving a free course coupon:

• She had thousands of students sign up with the free code!
• she reached students from around the world!
• Some students had a great experience and left a nice review!

Cons of Udemy instructors giving a free course coupon: 

• The majority of people didn't watch a single minute of the course, so now the course shows a large enrollment, but without many reviews.
• The only negative reviews that she has received have been from people who got the free coupon for the course. They left 1-star without any comments. On the other hand, every paying customer left a score between 4-stars to 5-stars. 
• Those 1-star ratings tanked the average and didn't include any constructive feedback. In fact, those students didn't make it far in the course. We hypothesize that they weren't really interested in the course content and just signed up when they had the free code. On the other hand, perhaps those who paid for the course had a stronger interest in the course and appreciated the material more. 

We tried the free coupon code a couple of times and the same thing happened each time. As a result, I advised her not to generate more free course coupons because it seemed to hurt her ratings.  She was conflicted because it was very cool to see students around the world taking the course for free and showing appreciation. It's just a few that ruined it.  So, we'll see what she wants to do in the future!

Finally, let me share that this was just one course. There are so many different factors that may impact the results. Results by others will probably vary a lot, especially based on course topic, duration of course, and many other factors. I'll post again in a few months to share whether the course breaks even and makes a profit for her time!