Udemy vs Uthena. Do you want to maximize your learning and earnings online? I certainly do and I think the best way we can do that together is to take a look at 2 websites i.e. Udemy vs Uthena that offer huge value both to students and entrepreneurs.
The students who want to learn new skills and use those skills to advance a career. As an entrepreneur or freelancer online and to earn by teaching the skills you already know back to others and then making money that way.
Udemy vs Uthena. What experience do I have with both of these? On Udemy, I taught from 2014 to 2016. I was one of the top 10 instructors with hundreds of thousands of students, 72 courses and millions of dollars of earnings before I left.
Leaving Udemy inspired me to create Uthena as a platform that's complementary to Udemy. Therefore, where Udemy is weak, Uthena is strong and where Uthena is weak, Udemy is strong. Comparing Udemy vs Uthena, my vision is that you can get everything you need to advance your career and to be successful in earning money online.
Let's take a look at a detailed comparison of Udemy vs Uthena. The first thing to look at is when were these funded?
Udemy was founded in 2010 and has raised over a hundred million dollars in funding since then. Udemy now 9 years later has the world's largest selection of courses, according to their website. You can choose from over a hundred thousand video courses with new ones added every month.
Many of the courses you will find are for a very low price with lots of reviews. Therefore, Udemy is the top choice I see in the world for on-demand learning in a format where you don't have paid ads like YouTube.
That said, you can find a lot of the information that's on Udemy on YouTube for free. On Udemy, you'd basically get a better user experience, more consistency, more focus and sometimes you would get better and more up-to-date information.
Uthena has 473 courses compared to Udemy which means, this is still very new and a small platform. We founded Uthena in 2019. We've got about 50 instructors whereas Udemy has according to their “Teach on Udemy” about 42,000 instructors.
That means Udemy has a massive instructor community where it can be easy to get lost in the crowd. It can be very difficult to get meaningful support from Udemy as an instructor and you can easily get banned from Udemy without violating any policies or with minor policy violations, you can easily lose everything overnight.
In Uthena, we've got a very small community of instructors and we do not ban anyone from the platform, we were able to work personally with every single instructor. On Uthena, we have video courses, bundles, memberships, and services which is something that's not available on Udemy.
I have my hourly service on it. We even have a Uthena Franchise where you can get us your version of Uthena and work with you to get new courses. You can put a mastermind course, design services, Facebook ad course/bundle, website advertising, etc.
Uthena even offers you the ability to put Private Label Rights (PLR) courses. This is something that you cannot do on Udemy. Udemy is very focused on just students and has a massive community of 30 million students.
Whereas, on Uthena, we've got about 20,000 students right now. If you do some basic multiplication, Udemy has about a thousand times as many students as Uthena does currently.
That said, on Uthena, we are on track to have millions of students within the next few years. We've got very ambitious growth plans and therefore, growing pains I imagine as well.
Udemy has courses in 50 different languages. We only have courses in about 2 languages right now on Uthena. Udemy has 190 million course enrollments and 190+ countries taught which is just an incredible statistic.
Udemy is a massive platform where you've got amazing choices in what you learn. One of the downsides of having so many choices is it can be difficult to figure out which course you want to buy.
Every single decision that you make in your mind requires a little bit of effort and trying to figure out exactly which one of these hundred thousand courses you could buy can be very difficult. What also happens in Udemy is that people buy courses just to essentially feel good or hope that they're going to learn that.
Often as a student, you can end up spending thousands of dollars on so many beautiful best-selling courses and then you don't even use 95% of them. You never even watch a lecture in 95% of the courses.
Therefore, it can be very easy to spend a lot of time and energy trying to decide which classes to buy on Udemy and then when you do buy them, not even start watching them because as a student, you've got no direct support, mastermind, networking or connecting outside of just discussing in the course itself.
If you want something like coaching or video calls, you need to go outside of Udemy for that. Udemy is outstanding as a marketplace. Udemy has a very high page rank where you put up a course, you get a lot of reviews. You will get a lot of coupons shared. You get a bunch of backlinks and you can rank first on Google even above other people who've put their whole career in and have their own course website.
You can just throw a course up on Udemy and rank number one on Google above them as I did a bunch of different times in several very competitive categories as Facebook Ads course ranked above people who had whole businesses just by throwing a course up on Udemy.
Those can be outstanding opportunities as an instructor but all of these things make it easy to get lost, get on your own, be without guidance and direction.
On Uthena we have a business system that's all about helping you get the very most value with the least effort as a student and supporting you in your journey as a student. What we've got is a bundle on Uthena where you can get access to all of our courses unless any instructors opt-out.
So far we don't have any instructors that opt-out but you can get access to the majority of our courses on Uthena for $48 a month which is less than buying 5 Udemy courses.
In order to get approved as an instructor, if you're in Udemy, you need to have an average of 4 stars on your courses in order to put them up there.
Therefore, you get a lot more courses for a lot less price which if you're busy, you are trying to decide the best way to get an education, figuring out which Udemy course to buy, taking hours looking through courses and trying to decide what to buy can be difficult.
Uthena makes it simple. We also have a course bundle where you can buy all of the courses that we add for life to this bundle for one price today. I personally can't stand trying to look around and pick individual things to buy.
It takes my limited time, energy, and my decision-making power up and on Uthena, for those that would rather just drop one tuition payment essentially and get massive value for the rest of your life, we've got that up there for you which i think is really cool.
On both of these, we offer a lot more than just video courses and we're adding new courses to these almost every single day. As students, we have something that's extremely valuable in Uthena's daily workshops.
Daily video call workshops where you can jump into a call with someone like me, with another instructor on the platform, another YouTube or entrepreneur. My vision in the long term is that we're going to get hourly and maybe even multiple entrepreneurs available every hour.
We will have around the clock 24/7 workshops that as we keep getting more and more people on Uthena, we will be able to give you constant access where you can jump into a video call and talk to a real person.
What I've seen on Udemy is that it's very easy to get lost in the crowd. It's easy to get lost and to not have any support to just be learning, not knowing what you're doing and struggling. When you've got some support, when you can talk to somebody, when you can ask questions and figure out what you don't know you don't know, then you can go learn in the exact right place.
Therefore, to me, our primary value proposition on Uthena is when you join either of our big bundles. We've got daily workshops that you can go to and get help. The more entrepreneurs, the more students we get on board, the more we are paying other instructors, paying other instructors to show up for calls.
We even have the ability to schedule a call for free.
This is very complimentary to Udemy because you might need a specific course on a specific topic on Udemy but this is the place where you can really combine with that what you don't have on Udemy.
We also have a private Facebook group and you can even get 50% lifetime affiliate commissions selling access to this. In the Udemy affiliate program, you have a ton of courses you can pick from which is ideal.
However, the Udemy affiliate program only gives you a 7-day cookie where you only earn 12% to 20% selling courses.
If you're trying to sell a course for $11 or $12 and if you do the math real quick, even a 20% fee for a course like that will make you earn $2.40. In addition to that, customers have to buy one within 7 days.
On Uthena, we have lifetime affiliate earnings which give us an outstanding affiliate program where you join because you know the value of it and then you literally could sell 3 or 4 people you know and be earning $50 a month or so plus having your own membership paid for.
Currently, the Udemy affiliate program is free to join. You need to apply to Udemy in order to get accepted. However, on Uthena, our affiliate program is not free to join. You must be a member of Uthena Scholars or Uthena University or the Jerry Banfield Partners in order to gain access to our affiliate program.
Why? Because it's a pain to manage a whole bunch of affiliates that just spam links and don't make any money.
We want you as an affiliate to make some good money for us to really focus on what you're doing and therefore not just blow links all over the place. This helps us manage our affiliates with a lot more efficient systems and not have to do anything besides pay to prove ourselves.
In order to teach on Udemy, anyone could go to udemy.com/teaching and click on “Become an Instructor” as long as you can get your identity verified. Udemy will allow you to publish your course as long as it complies with their really long list and ever-changing list of terms and conditions.
On Uthena, we do not allow anyone to join when you click on “Teach”. There are 2 ways that you can become an instructor on Uthena.
First, if you want to become an instructor on Uthena, you need to have your Udemy profile already doing well. This means that we welcome you if you've already got classes on Udemy to come and teach on Uthena.
However, we ask that your courses be at least 4 stars on average in rating and generally, we approve instructors that have multiple courses on in-demand subjects as a priority before we approve instructors in other areas.
That said, we're consistently approving instructors now almost every day as the word is getting out about Uthena and apparently there's some unhappiness among Udemy instructors with the recent changes.
The second way you can teach on Uthena is, if you do not have a course up on Udemy and you can't get one up there, don't know or don't want to figure it out, if you just want to be involved with Uthena know without making courses, you can put courses and services on Uthena via joining the Uthena Scholars or the Uthena University.
This allows us to offer things like services on Uthena in addition to courses and this is really valuable because if you buy a course with somebody, you might want to then go get services with them. Udemy as an instructor is very limited because all you can do is publish courses.
Now, if you want to get people out of Udemy and get them over, there's a great system and I'll tell you real quick. You just basically send people over to your YouTube channel, have an educational video and do that as an educational announcement repeatedly. That's how you can get your students off of Udemy somewhere else.
You can also send them to a Facebook group/page to help get your students off of Udemy but this is all very annoying. You work hard to do a course, get students and then you can't get them out of Udemy unless you do basically what I just said or a couple of other things like having a webinar. If it's done in the exact right format, you can do that.
If there are any inconsistencies or problems, Udemy will not think twice to get rid of your account completely and to remove everything that you've done online as I know firsthand.
As an instructor on Udemy, there are 42,000 instructors which means you are a number to Udemy. They have a lot of instructors to manage and it's difficult to get any meaningful support, especially if there is a problem.
Udemy instructor support does make good responses as if you email. They will do a good job answering questions and helping you out but if for some reason they don't like something you did or if they want to change the policies, they just do whatever they want to. It's their website, their rights and it inspired me to make a place that we really consider and work with you as an instructor.
We will not ban anybody in Uthena. We have a system set up even as we scale to maintain personal relationships with every one of our instructors because, to me, the weak point of teaching on Udemy is the lack of networking, the lack of the community as an instructor.
There are so many instructors. It can be difficult to do some effective networking. That said, Udmey’s community is so big. If you do it right and invest a lot of time in it, you can do a lot of valuable networking as a Udemy instructor.
I've networked with hundreds of other Udemy instructors. I have Udemy instructors that have hired me for coaching. I've done incredible networking through Udemy which has empowered me to launch Uthena.
In Uthena, our instructor community is still very small. Therefore, it's easy to network with us. It’s about 50 of us are in it right now. You've got a huge selection of talent on Udemy that if you can break through the barriers if you can get someone's attention and you can do a good job teaching it, you could have a lot of networking and connections you can make on Udemy.
Let's talk about how much money you can make on Udemy vs Uthena.
In Udemy, earnings are very limited in terms of how this can happen. You can sell courses on Udemy or you can sign up for the 12% to 20% affiliate program but almost no instructor does that because you currently just sell your course on Udemy.
What instructors do on Udemy to make the most money is to try and sell their courses and get the courses ranked higher on Udemy to get into the best selling spot and then give Udemy the most data that it can use to sell the course additionally.
The problem with this approach on Udemy is if you put all this time and effort into promoting your own course, you might as well have had it on a different platform and sold it for more money.
Udemy does not give you much control over the pricing of your course. Udemy runs discounts all the time regardless of whether you can opt into them or not the last time I checked anyway.
Udemy controls the pricing for your courses and Udemy also just made some very restrictive changes to coupons and discounting that a lot of instructors recently refreshed which is probably why so many instructors are applying to Uthena now.
On Uthena, you get full control over the pricing of your courses and you can offer services. You can even offer private label rights directly to Uthena and we will even do this for you. If you check it when you apply to teach on Uthena that you want private label rights, we will sell private label rights for you to your courses and just give you the earnings.
What Udemy does really well with if you want to earn as an instructor, Udemy does very well to get you some organic traffic to your course. For many instructors' views, just put your courses up on Udemy, Uthena, Skillshare, and StackCommerce.
Udemy will usually be the one that gives you some earnings pretty quickly and consistently. I just saw one instructor, he was earning a few thousand dollars a month on Udemy with 25+ courses with years of effort put into it. He was also earning a few hundred dollars a month on Skillshare and earning like $20 a month on Uthena.
That said, he is early in the game. Uthena is early in the game. His Udemy income does not have much room to grow because Udemy is so crowded.
Udemy income could disappear at any time as my income on Udemy disappeared with an email. I was making $1,000 a day. They sent me an email wiping everything out despite no policy violations within the last 6 months and only citing the most minor arbitrary which was not even a clear interpretation.
They said that my co-instructor relationships were not appropriate despite me having videos in every single class I made. Despite a lot of other instructors being added on to courses after the fact, Udemy allowed that in the interface they didn't say you couldn't do it.
Thus, Udemy is an unstable platform for earning.
I made $90,000 a month on Udemy. What’s nice about Udemy is that it has huge upward earning potential. Even if you don't do much more than creating a course, you can essentially occasionally get lucky and metaphorically win the lottery on Udemy.
You can just make a course that for some reason fits in exactly the right niche at exactly the right time. I've heard stories of people just basically putting a course up and making $20,000 on it. On Udemy, you do have the opportunity to get one of those home runs just by putting a course up.
Udemy has so much organic traffic from Google search, from their search, and from all the ads they run, the downside of this is that there is a lot of competition on Udemy.
If you put a course in probably the best-selling courses category, you almost have no chance to make any decent income because everyone is going to look at that best-selling course. If you want to be one of those best-selling courses realistically, you're probably going to need to hire me to coach you on how to get a best-selling course on Udemy.
Because often, this is a very involved and difficult process. Therefore, I always recommend poor courses on Udemy. Always just throw your courses on Udemy. To me, the best approach is to get your course on Udemy, take whatever money they give you and then promote it somewhere else.
Where I see most instructors going wrong on Udemy in terms of not getting a very good return on your investment is trying to push people and promote their Udemy courses with the hope that they're going to get a best-seller without realizing they have almost no chance to get into that best-selling category.
The bestsellers often have such incredible systems, I know from helping them set them up, you're not going to just hustle, work hard and get into the best-selling category. You will need to have things like YouTube videos, rankings, organic traffic, ads, email lists and a Facebook group that has thousands of people in it.
If you want to take one of those bestseller categories, you will probably need a lot of help to do that and this is where Uthena comes in and is extremely helpful because on Udemy, if you are putting courses up and your earnings aren't going anywhere, there's not much you can do without sacrificing the majority of the return on your investment.
Uthena is set up to complement Udemy for instructors who want to make more money and have the ability to promote their own courses and want to get more involved with selling things like services. For example, as a Udemy instructor, you could either promote your Udemy course and maybe make a few dollars off of it when you sell it and then struggle to maintain contact with the student once you sell it or you could sell the entire course bundle and membership on Uthena and you get half of the earnings for life on it.
Therefore, Uthena is set up as a platform intended to replace your self-hosting because most Udemy instructors that I know who are doing well have their self-hosting. This means that in addition to putting all their courses on Udemy, the instructors are also putting all the courses on their self-hosted account as well as other places and then trying to promote all of that which is a messy disaster.
When you use Uthena, you can eliminate the need to set up your self-hosting and the intention is that you can make more money selling on Uthena than you could be selling your courses on your self-hosting because when you send someone with your affiliate link to Uthena, you could make $500 on a single sale and you're providing a very small amount of the total value.
You can make $500 selling one of the lifetime bundles and you're giving a student a massive value because this bundle is on its way to having over a thousand courses within a year and over ten plus thousand courses eventually all with the one-time payment today.
When you communicate the value, you can say, “Hey, you'll get access to all of my courses for life in this bundle”. Then you make 50% selling that as an affiliate whereas all of the instructors in the bundle make a combined 25% selling that as an affiliate sale same as on Udemy.
Then you have the ability to make some really good money by helping sell other courses on Uthena.
Now you've got a good look at you Uthena vs Udemy. I hope it's helpful for you to know about both of these different websites, how they can help you as a student and how they can help you earn as an entrepreneur online.
I'm grateful for the chance to present this to you today. I trust if this has been helpful, you'll subscribe to my YouTube or you can go follow me on Facebook as well.
If you'd like to become a teacher on Uthena, click on “Teach” and do your instructor application today. Make sure you read all the terms there and this way we can start helping you earn as an instructor.
You may also love to read this: Take New Udemy Courses Free Every Day with Lifetime Access!
Thank you very much. I love you. You're awesome and I'll see you in the next post/video.
Love,
Jerry Banfield
