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.
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
More than half of Udemy’s courses belong to the fields of Business and Technology, but they account for 74.6% of all enrollments.
Technology courses are the most popular. They have on average 5340 learners per course, well above the 3270 average across the platform.
Course Length
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
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 Avg Buyers | Avg Revenue per Buyer | |
| 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.
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:
- English — 59%.
- Portuguese — 9%.
- Spanish — 8%.
- Turkish — 4%.
- Japanese — 3.5%.
Course Enrollments
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
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.
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Dhawal Shah
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
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.
Vincent Goln
Could you please explain the source of your data? How did you get hold of the entire Udemy catalogue?
Dhawal Shah
We collected the data via their API.
Greg
Very nicely done — that’s exactly the right way to do it.
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?
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!