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Analysis

202K Courses, 662M Enrollments: Breaking Down Udemy’s Massive Catalog

From course ratings to pricing, let’s have a look at some of the discernible trends of Udemy’s catalog.

Udemy — Growth of Courses

On Udemy, anyone can offer a course. Since the platform launched in 2010, this approach has turned Udemy into the world’s largest catalog of online courses: they host 202,000+ courses.

According to the company, they have 57 million registered users. In 2020, propelled by the pandemic, they raised $123 million and increased their valuation by over $1 billion. In 2021, the company went public, which gave us a peek at their financials.

In the most recently reported quarter (2022 Q3), their total revenue increased 22% year-over-year to reach $158.4 million.

Surprisingly, despite its magnitude, Udemy’s catalog seems to have seldom been analyzed. If you are looking for course suggestions, here is my Udemy’s 250 most popular online courses.

So in this article, we’re going to break down Udemy’s numbers a little further. My colleague @Suparn collected data about the provider’s catalog. And with the Excel skills I acquired a few years ago (albeit rudimentary), I dug into the data. 

This analysis was first published in January 2021 and then my colleague @Archisha re-ran the analysis on the updated Udemy dataset. In 2023, here’s what we found.

Udemy By the Numbers

Course Categories

Udemy — Courses by Category

More than half of Udemy’s courses belong to the fields of Business and Technology, but they account for 74.6% of all enrollments.

Udemy — Enrollments per Category

Technology courses are the most popular. They have on average 5340 learners per course, well above the 3270 average across the platform.

Course Length

Udemy — Course Length vs. Enrollments

The average course length is 7.7 hours, while the median is 2.3 hours. As course lengths increase, average enrollments also increase: learners gravitate towards longer courses.

Courses that are less than 1 hour long have an average enrollment of 930, while courses 15–20 hours long have average enrollment of 5,300. There are over 6,000 courses longer than 20 hours — their average enrollment is 12,875.

Course Price

Udemy — Course Pricing Breakdown

90% of Udemy courses are paid. Course prices range from $19.99 to $199.99 (without any discounts or deals). 

About 40% of Udemy’s courses cost less than $30, while 3% cost more than $100. When we analyzed the data back in 2021, 24% of the courses cost from than $100.

The changes in the list price doesn’t mean that the actual price that learners pay has changed. Based on the data in Udemy’s 2021 annual report, the average price a learner pays is $20.4, while the lowest listed price of a course is $19.99.

Udemy runs a lot of promotions bringing the cost of the courses down, though the frequency of these promotions has been reduced. It also localizes the prices in different markets, bringing the price down by a lot in low-income or emerging economies.

Monthly Average Buyers & Revenue
Monthly Avg Buyers Avg Revenue per Buyer
2022 1.336m $19.7
2021 1.345m $20.4
2020 1.439m $18.9
2019 0.962m $19.5

As you can see below, average enrollments increase as the courses’ list prices increase. This doesn’t seem to conform to the traditional supply-demand pattern: higher prices resulting in lower enrollments. This is because Udemy courses are rarely sold at list price.

Udemy — Average Enrollments per Course vs. List Price

Course Language

Udemy courses are available in 77 different languages. 59% of all courses are offered in English. Here are the most common languages on the platform:

  1. English — 59%.
  2. Portuguese — 9%.
  3. Spanish — 8%.
  4. Turkish — 4%.
  5. Japanese — 3.5%.

Course Enrollments

Udemy — Enrollments by Course Category

Combined, Udemy’s 202K courses have gathered ~662 million enrollments and average 3274 enrollments per course. What I found most surprising is that the median enrollment is only 240, which means that half of Udemy’s courses don’t reach 240 learners.

Currently, there are 718 courses with over 100K enrollments and 4 courses with over a million enrollments.

Do Udemy courses satisfy the Pareto 80/20 principle? I found that Udemy’s top-20% courses by enrollment account for 91% of all enrollments.

Course Ratings

Udemy — Average Rating vs. Course Length

In total, Udemy courses have received 53.7 million ratings. Class Central’s analysis found that 24K of Udemy’s 202K courses have no rating at all.

Ratings tend to be heavily skewed towards the positive side. 71% of the ratings are 4–5 stars. 1–2 star ratings represent only ~1% of all the ratings.

We also noticed that the rating is correlated with the length of the course. It might be just that the longer courses might be high effort and more polished.

[1] We combined Development and IT & Software.
[2] We combined Business, Marketing, Office Productivity, and Finance & Accounting.
[3] We combined Design, Music, Photography & Video into Art & Design.

Tags

Dhawal Shah Profile Image

Dhawal Shah

Dhawal is the CEO of Class Central, the most popular search engine and review site for online courses and MOOCs. He has completed over a dozen MOOCs and has written over 200 articles about the MOOC space, including contributions to TechCrunch, EdSurge, Quartz, and VentureBeat.
Archisha Bhar Profile Image

Archisha Bhar

I am a Civil Engineer from India. Other than engineering, I take interest in art, music, computer, psychology and creative writing.

Comments 8

  1. Mona

    Hey Dhawal

    Hope you’re well – happy new year!

    This is a great piece of analysis. We’re wondering if you know whether the Udemy for Business enrolments get counted in their total course enrolments?

    Best

    Mona

    Reply
    • Dhawal Shah

      Hey Mona! Unfortunately it is not clear whether Udemy for Business enrollments are included or not.

      Even if they are included, I am not sure they would make an impact to these numbers. Based on $100 million/year in revenue and $360/year plan, enrollments might be in single digit millions in the best case scenario.

      Reply
  2. Vincent Goln

    Could you please explain the source of your data? How did you get hold of the entire Udemy catalogue?

    Reply
    • Dhawal Shah

      We collected the data via their API.

      Reply
      • Greg

        Very nicely done — that’s exactly the right way to do it.

        Reply
      • Divya

        Can a researcher on MOOC development get access to API from let’s say Coursera, Udemy? Stats are convincing- I wish such data could be kept open for PhD scholars like me. Any suggestions here?

        Reply
        • Mark

          Head over to their Affiliate API, log in and request an API key. The rest is just Python. However, I wonder whether this analysis comprises all 200’000+ courses as the API request count is only 10’000.

          Reply
  3. Alison Lands

    Wondering if there’s a way to get one of your amazing spreadsheets of that top 20% courses by enrollment – could be of value to the aspiring course creators out there to know what plays with platform users (or to observe creators / creator patterns that push up enrollment). Really insightful analysis – thank you!

    Reply

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