Why Many Instructors are Leaving Udemy

Udemy used to be one of the best sites for online course providers and creators looking to teach online. However, the way Udemy have changed over the years caused some creators to become disgruntled. There are noticeable reasons as to regards why, and concerns on what Udemy will be in the future. As for my thoughts, while I still think it is a great platform, there are areas where constructively I see them needing to improve.

For starters, many content creators are heavily inconvenienced by changes of their policies. This means Udemy can change its policy all of a sudden and a course published under the old policy can be unpublished if it doesn’t adhere to the new policy. There doesn’t seem to be enough clarity on whether the courses that need to be updated are chosen at random or this applies to everybody right away.

There are multiple problems in regards to this. The first problem is that Udemy can now favor some of the more elite instructors who rake up millions of users, limiting the growth opportunity that Udemy provided to newcomers or smaller instructors in the early days. The second problem is that this limits creative freedom, even in regards to your own content.

Part of the reason Udemy was so great in the beginning was the creative freedom. Now more and more instructors seem to be leaving in hoards or starting their own platforms/publishing other places as a result of that lack of creative freedom. As per requirements such as some courses needing to have constant updates or being more modern as one will call it, this can be problematic for many of the IT instructors who teach software from a specific year. Other policies to take into account are in regards to promotions.

There doesn’t seem to be consistency for some instructors on when they will be included in a promotion. Some instructors are rarely included in site-wide promotions, yet when they are, that single month could amount to 8 months of their regular sales. Outside of this issue, even another issue taken into account are when published or the lesser outdated courses get unpublished, or courses having been able to offer certificates for completes no longer being able to do that.

Currently, I run courses on Udemy that amount to over 93.5k unique students, and I run courses in various other places. I barely make money with the system Udemy has in place, and there are a handful of instructors with hundreds of thousands of students that barely make money. There needs to be at least some extent of consistency. Udemy is also heavily against you linking to third party sites or building an email list. This is a double edged sword because Udemy has become a great way to gain a following, but it is also not really “your following”.

That said, these criticisms are constructive. I still recommend Udemy as a great tool and resource for those who want to publish tutorials online. They are still one of the best sites out there, but I believe they can do more to push towards creative freedom and independence for content creators/instructors.