The new Udemy Instructor Revenue Share Model adds all revenue coming from different channels. Here we compare Youtube & Udemy taxes.
Well, we’ll see about that.
Big changes are coming to Udemy that will affect instructor revenue.
Udemy is completely changing the instructor revenue share model so everything that you knew before about the revenue share model, will not be applicable anymore.
Udemy Instructor Revenue Share
So let’s talk about that. If you have gone to your Udemy dashboard from March 12, 2021, you would see the message pop up on the Udemy dashboard, telling you that some changes are coming. Clicking on a link will take you to a Udemy article explaining everything that is happening.
Let’s just break down this article to decide whether this will affect us Udemy instructors in a big time or not.
The biggest change they announce is the cancellation of paid and organic channels of sales.
No, they’re not eliminating it but they’re changing it big-time.
In the past, if someone would come to Udemy and search for the course and find your course and buy it you would get 50% of the sale.
Alternatively, if someone else would come from the Udemy ad or through affiliate channels you would get 25% from the sale but Udemy decided that these revenue models are actually not fair to instructors.
They decided to mix them completely.
Now they are introducing the mix of organic affiliate and ads channels which they call blended channels.
They will pay only 37% from the sale, from the blended channels effectively decreasing the revenue share from organic channels but increasing revenue share from paid and affiliate channels.
At first, this news scared us.
We thought that this would decrease our revenue significantly but after performing some calculations, we observed that it’s actually not that bad.
Here is an example based on my own revenue.
I did my calculations based on February 2021 revenue and some previous months as well.
They all gave me the same results.
So I’ll be talking about the February results because the results overall are the same with an old model of revenue share.
I made 499.50 USD in February approximately but if the newer model was active meaning that I would get paid 37 in organic sales and 37 on affiliate and ad sales, I would get 520, yes.
I would have made more with the new model than with an older one.
In every other month that I calculated I was making more with a newer model than with an older one.
Some months it was much more, some months it was just a little more.
Overall if you count all margins of errors, I think the newer model will generate the same amount of money if not a little bit more than compared to the older model.
By the way, your promotions will not change.
You will still get 97 from the sales coming from your own channel.
So this thing will not change at all.
However, one thing that bothers me is not the change in the revenue model, it’s the complete cancellation of the Udemy marketing boost program.
That means that Udemy will not promote your courses through ads like they used to anymore.
At least not in the same way.
It’s a little bit unclear how these promotions will work from now on and what they will change.
Still, the only thing that we can do is wait and see what will happen and one more thing that they added in this article is the expansion of the Udemy for Business program.
From now on they opened this program to the individual learners that mean that anyone who wants to pay for Udemy for business, now can do it.
This concerns students of course and instructors who are in Udemy for business program they will be paid based on the minutes watch.
That’s how they get paid so does this mean that Udemy for business is now worth it for instructors?
No despite Udemy for business opening up to a wider audience it still does not guarantee that your course will be accepted in this program.
Accept it or not, you will still be bound with an exclusivity requirement when you obtain this program.
So until they will guarantee your course acceptance in the program or until they will cancel the exclusivity requirement.
Before they would choose your course, it’s still not worth it.
Overall how these changes will affect us, to be fair based on numbers that I’ve seen it should not be a big effect on our world.
However, the cancellation of the marketing boost program complicates things a bit because we don’t know what it will be replaced with.
Here you can learn more about the Udemy Instructor Revenue Share Model.
I guess we just need to wait and see what will happen and trust that they will make sound judgments based on the interests of instructors.
All we can do now is just wait and see. Well, this will be the new Udemy Instructor Revenue Share Model.
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