alt Hacker NewsI was a Udemy instructor for ~10 years selling tech courses but focused more on delivering courses through my own site for the last ~5-6 years.
Something never felt right with how Udemy promoted courses. I used to have a top selling course there, selling thousands of copies a month and now it gets basically no sales but it's still one of the highest rated courses in that niche on their platform. It's just no longer ranked or promoted by Udemy, for years.
I have no evidence of this but my personal opinion is their ranking is probably not fully automated and they have special offers and deals with certain instructors and if you're not a part of this club, oh well.
Again, it's all speculation but I can only go by what my numbers are. They were small scale life changing and now nothing but the quality of the courses I produced didn't change. It doesn't make sense. Of course it could be one big coincidence too, but this has been tracked and analyzed over years.
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I also started teaching on Udemy in 2019 and even though the number of students was high, I quickly noticed that income was low and most enrolled students did not even start the courses they purchased (let alone complete them). I also decided to invest time and money in my own website/school and that was probably the best decision I've ever made. Also, I'm not sure most people know that Udemy was never profitable up until 2025. Before going public, Udemy had never been profitable despite good revenue growth. As of mid-2021 (around its IPO filing), the company had accumulated significant losses (hundreds of millions of dollars) and explicitly noted it had not generated a profit in its SEC filing. After its October 2021 IPO, Udemy continued to report net losses most quarters and years, even as revenue grew. Losses persisted through 2023 and into 2024. Finally, in 2025 they saw profits for the first time since its IPO.
I respect the restraint from self-promotion here but...
Your [Docker, Flask, HTTPS, AWS Docker, and DevOps courses](https://nickjanetakis.com/courses) look good and the price is fair. Bookmarked!
(the last two could use some more detail in the overview but the first three would give me enough confidence to take a chance)
I dropped Udemy years ago when they started to promote outdated versions of courses.
Try reloading new course with same videos, (or modified or updated version but honestly probably 90% is just new year label) saying 2026
Not sure if anecdata helps but when I worked at Quora udemy course link spam was one of the higher volume sources of spam. It’s possible other courses are doing better because they pay people to link spam.
Speculating, but perhaps it needs to be updated once in a while? Last modified might be a (dumb) factor.
Good for you for building your own garden.
Sites like Udemy and Coursera have many upsides but they are still anchored in earning in the past, while that world is finally changing rapidly.
Modern society totally devalues anything considered even slightly old. I used to notice it as a real lack of intergenerational knowledge transfer, but it's gotten so bad that it seems like more and more people react with "how do you know so much?" and "why would you do that?" over very basic knowledge that isn't even that old. For all the reading the average person claims to do, they sure don't seem to know very much outside of a 10-year window unless they happen to have studied history in college or whatever.
But I don't necessarily blame said people, at least in the proximal sense. The technological industrial complex continuously refines its understanding of the desire for novelty that's always been there and seeks to exploit it; and they've gotten unreasonably good at that. It doesn't matter if your intellectual property is just as relevant as ever, perhaps more so, if there's some hip new alternative. Udemy and of course social media sites know this, and I think there's a feedback loop that goes beyond mere exploitation of the human psyche, but in the actual training of the human psyche to have blindness towards the past.
The only answer right now, besides hosting your own courses (with hookers and blackjack), might be to periodically recreate your online presence from scratch in order to exploit the algorithm back. If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard. With the current state of AI, this may just be a cat and mouse game that can't be sustained.