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We analyzed 200K Udemy courses and discovered valuable insights on instructor earnings
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Boasting over 200,000 online courses and exceeding 800 million course enrollments, Udemy stands as a dominant force in digital education. Their user community has grown fourfold within just five years, expanding from approximately 200 million course registrations in 2019.
But the pressing question remains – are these courses generating substantial revenue? What income do Udemy instructors typically receive, and would creating courses on Udemy represent a worthwhile investment of your time?
To thoroughly address these inquiries, we conducted comprehensive research into the Udemy marketplace. We examined hundreds of thousands of available courses and their enrollment statistics to gain meaningful insights into creator earnings, emerging patterns, and additional relevant metrics.
Now, we’re prepared to unveil our discoveries.
This question frequently arises regarding the Udemy platform. The straightforward answer reveals that an average course creator earns $3,306 per year on Udemy.
However, we wanted to explore beyond surface-level statistics. How many instructors achieve sustainable full-time earnings? How is revenue distributed across the instructor community? Does Udemy support a “middle-class” creator economy?
Unfortunately, our extensive analysis revealed that merely 1% of Udemy instructors generate full-time income levels (exceeding $50K/year), and only 4% earn above the US poverty threshold ($14.5K/year). The vast majority of instructors (75%) earn less than $1,000 annually.
Yet a remarkably exclusive group, the uppermost 0.01%, manage to accumulate annual earnings of one million dollars.
This significant imbalance becomes further evident when analyzing the distribution pattern of instructor compensation. The platform’s top-performing 1% of instructors capture more than half of all available earnings, while the bottom 50% of content creators collectively receive just 1% of the total revenue stream.
This data reveals a stark reality where most instructors receive extremely modest compensation through Udemy, while an elite minority at the pinnacle enjoy substantial financial rewards. The platform lacks a thriving middle-tier creator economy, with its economic structure distinctly favoring those in the top percentile of performers.
The question arises – while course creators may not have profited financially, what resources have they invested?
Substantial time commitment and monetary investment.
Our analysis reveals over 73K courses with fewer than 100 enrolled students, effectively meaning these creators never generated meaningful revenue through Udemy.
Yet remarkably, these underperforming courses contain nearly 253K hours of educational video content. According to our calculated projections, developing this volume of content from the ground up would require an investment exceeding $500 million.
Consequently, these content creators experience financial loss by investing significant time and resources without receiving adequate compensation.
We further investigated whether instructors who recently joined could achieve financial success on Udemy. We conducted a comparative analysis of earnings between instructors who established their presence before 2020 versus those who joined afterward.
We selected 2020 as our benchmark year because it represented a transformative period for the entire digital learning industry, including Udemy.
The instructor population on the Udemy marketplace experienced remarkable growth, nearly tripling from 25K in 2019 to 70K by 2022, reflecting an average annual increase of 14.6K new instructors since 2020, compared to just 7.2K in 2019.
This substantial growth trend mirrors the expansion in course offerings available on the platform; the total number of courses provided on Udemy experienced a threefold increase from approximately 70K in 2019 to 200K in 2022.
Despite this impressive growth trajectory, the majority of these newly onboarded instructors struggle to achieve meaningful success within the Udemy ecosystem.
The financial reality shows annual revenue has declined significantly to merely $2.1K/year for instructors who joined recently, a stark contrast to the $5.4K/year average earnings enjoyed by educators who established their presence prior to 2020.
Evidence shows that 50% of Udemy courses developed since 2020 have attracted fewer than 100 total enrollments, whereas 85% of courses created before 2020 surpassed this enrollment threshold.
Multiple contributing factors potentially explain this downward trend, with a significant element being that student registrations and financial returns aren’t expanding proportionally with the rapidly growing course catalog.
While the platform’s course offerings expanded by an impressive 181% between 2019 and 2022, Udemy’s overall revenue increased by only 128% during this identical timeframe.
Additionally, another crucial factor involves Udemy’s diminishing revenue distribution model. The instructor compensation as a percentage of total platform revenue has contracted from 40% in 2019 to 31% in 2022.
Consequently, instructor earnings increased by a modest 76% throughout this period, despite the substantially larger growth in available courses.
The Udemy marketplace currently presents unprecedented competitive challenges while simultaneously reducing revenue allocation to content creators, making success as a newly joined instructor substantially more difficult to achieve.
Udemy initially launched primarily as a consumer-focused course marketplace, but has undergone a remarkable transformation in its business orientation in recent years.
In 2019, the platform’s corporate offering, Udemy Business, represented merely 18% of the company’s total revenue stream. Fast forward to 2022, and this figure dramatically escalated to an impressive 50% of overall earnings.
Looking ahead, Udemy has established ambitious targets for continued growth in this sector, with strategic plans to further expand Udemy Business’s contribution to 60% by 2025 and ultimately reaching 75% over the extended timeline.
Despite Udemy Business generating a substantial portion of the platform’s overall earnings, the vast majority of content creators fail to receive any advantage from this lucrative revenue stream.
The data reveals that approximately 90% of courses remain excluded from the business program catalog, and these non-included courses generate considerably lower income compared to those selected for inclusion.
Courses that secure placement within the Udemy Business catalog average $2,795 in annual revenue, representing more than two and a half times the earnings of courses excluded from this premium offering. The latter category generates a mere $963 yearly on average.
Consider the implications when 90% of available courses receive no portion of 75% of the platform’s total revenue stream. The probability of these excluded courses achieving meaningful success becomes extraordinarily limited.
Additionally, a significant imbalance exists between different course categories regarding their inclusion in the business catalog.
While 19% and 15% of courses within the Development and IT & Software categories respectively gain acceptance into Udemy Business, the representation rate for courses in categories such as Music, Health & Fitness, and Lifestyle ranges between merely 1% and 2%.
This disparity aligns with market realities, as these latter categories typically don’t represent high-priority learning subjects for corporate clients.
Nevertheless, this selective inclusion dramatically impacts the average earnings across different categories. While Development category courses generate average revenues of $2,339 annually, and IT & Software courses average $1,494, the typical annual earnings for courses in Music, Health & Fitness, and Lifestyle categories hover around just $350.
Our analysis reveals a 93% correlation between the average earnings within any category and the percentage of courses from that category included in Udemy Business.
Consequently, instructors operating in non-technical and non-business subject areas face significantly diminished prospects for success, as Udemy’s corporate focus provides minimal advantages to these creators.
More broadly, Udemy’s intensified emphasis on serving business clients suggests the platform has shifted away from its original mission of facilitating direct connections between individual learners and educators.
The platform increasingly resembles a B2B training organization, transforming it into an even more exclusive environment and further restricting opportunities for emerging instructors.
Perhaps Udemy should implement more selective criteria when approving new instructors. Additionally, considering a fixed compensation model for course creation might represent a more equitable approach.
Nick Loper, Founder of Side Hustle Nation
The statistics likely mirror patterns seen across most marketplace environments — where a small percentage of sellers generate the majority of income. From my observation, instructors achieving greatest success on Udemy typically fall into two categories:
1. “Serial content developers” who consistently publish fresh material and have mastered student acquisition strategies.
2. Educators who leverage the platform as an entry point into their broader brand ecosystem.
Nevertheless, individuals without an established audience can still benefit from Udemy’s extensive existing student base by creating high-quality courses addressing popular topics.
Vasco Cavalheiro, Founder of OnlineCourseHost.com
For creators teaching business-relevant subjects, securing inclusion in the Udemy For Business catalog should represent your highest priority. My UFB revenue has experienced substantial growth recently, while my marketplace earnings have declined despite achieving higher course rankings than ever before.
Currently, my UFB revenue exceeds my marketplace revenue by more than 3 times. This represents a significant shift from earlier periods when UFB revenue constituted less than 10% of total earnings. Since UFB operates on an invitation-only basis, the most effective strategy appears to be pioneering comprehensive courses (ideally 10+ hours) on emerging topics.
Attempting to develop courses for established, saturated subjects with hopes of UFB catalog inclusion presents extremely challenging odds (I attempted this unsuccessfully), so I strongly recommend concentrating on emerging trends and business-oriented topics more intensively than ever.
The evidence clearly demonstrates that achieving financial success on Udemy presents substantial challenges for newly established instructors. For those teaching outside technology and business domains, the prospects approach virtual impossibility.
Therefore, if you’re beginning your journey as a course creator, we recommend expanding your perspective beyond Udemy to focus on building your independent audience and selling courses directly. This recommendation extends to established instructors as well, as income diversification represents a prudent strategy.
We’ve developed a comprehensive resource on creating and selling online courses through your own website, which merits your consideration.
This concludes our detailed analysis. We hope our examination of “potential earnings on Udemy” has provided valuable insights.
We welcome your feedback: What represents your primary insight from this research? Perhaps you have specific questions? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
For this analysis, we pulled data from Udemy’s platform between February and mid-April of 2023. To ensure accuracy, we excluded any courses published in 2023 since these may not have had sufficient time to accumulate enrollments.
These two figures were then combined to arrive at the average yearly earnings for each course.
Additional Sources:
Daniel NicFounder, SellingOnliceCoursesGuide.comis an entrepreneur and digital education specialist who founded sellingonlinecoursesguide.com, a platform dedicated to helping creators and educators successfully navigate the online course marketplace. Through his website, he shares insights and strategies for developing, marketing, and monetizing online educational content. His work focuses on empowering course creators to build sustainable online businesses while effectively sharing their knowledge with students worldwide.
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Copyright © 2024 by SellCoursesOnline
Daniel Nic is an entrepreneur and digital education specialist who founded sellingonlinecoursesguide.com, a platform dedicated to helping creators and educators successfully navigate the online course marketplace. Through his website, he shares insights and strategies for developing, marketing, and monetizing online educational content. His work focuses on empowering course creators to build sustainable online businesses while effectively sharing their knowledge with students worldwide.
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