Why Your Udemy Revenue Plateaued (And What to Do About It)

You checked your Udemy dashboard this morning, didn’t you?

Same numbers as last month. Maybe a little lower. You scrolled through the reports, looked at the graphs trending sideways or downward, and felt that familiar knot in your stomach.

You’re not alone.

I’ve talked to hundreds of instructors over the past few years—instructors who came to me after training more than 39,000 students in my career as a dean and education leader. The story is almost always the same:

“I launched my course, got some initial traction, maybe even had a good quarter or two… and then it just stopped growing.”

Here’s what I need you to hear right now: The plateau is real, and it’s not your fault.

You didn’t suddenly become a worse instructor. Your content didn’t get worse. What changed was the platform beneath your feet.

Let me show you exactly what’s happening—and more importantly, what you can do about it.

The Five Reasons Your Revenue Plateaued on Udemy

1. Algorithm Changes — The Moving Goalposts

Udemy constantly tweaks what gets promoted. One month, they’re pushing new courses. The next, they’re favoring courses with high engagement metrics. Then they shift to promoting courses that convert well from ads.

You didn’t change anything. But the algorithm did. And suddenly your course that was getting 50 organic sales a month is getting 12.

This isn’t speculation. It’s the reality of building your business on someone else’s platform. You don’t control the algorithm. You don’t even know when it changes. You just wake up one day and your traffic has evaporated.

2. The Subscription Shift — The Real Revenue Killer

This is the big one that most instructors don’t fully understand.

Udemy now generates 65% of its revenue through subscriptions. But here’s the part that hurts: instructor payout share on subscription revenue dropped to just 15% in 2024, down from 25% the year before.

Let that sink in.

When a student buys your course for $89 through an organic search, you might get around $33. When that same student watches your course through a Udemy Business or Personal Plan subscription, you get pennies on the dollar.

The subscription model is great for Udemy’s stock price. It’s terrible for your bank account.

3. Course Saturation — The Rising Tide of Competition

Udemy added 54,000 new courses in 2024 alone. That’s not a typo.

Every day, more courses enter the marketplace competing for the same students. Every day, your course gets buried a little deeper. Every day, the organic discovery that used to drive your sales gets diluted.

You could have the best course in your category, but if it’s competing against 400 other courses—and Udemy’s algorithm is rotating visibility among them—your slice of the pie keeps shrinking.

4. Price Compression — The $9.99 Reality

Udemy’s regular promotional sales cycle means the “real” price most students pay for your course is between $9.99 and $14.99.

Sure, your course might be listed at $89.99 or $129.99. But students have been trained to wait for the next sale. And those sales come around every two weeks like clockwork.

At $12 per sale with a 37% organic share, you’re making $4.44 per student. You’d need 23 organic sales just to make $100.

5. Instructor Payout Cuts — The Trend Line Is Down

Here’s the data that should concern every Udemy instructor: Total instructor payouts dropped by $30 million from 2023 to 2024—despite Udemy’s overall revenue growing.

Read that again. The company made more money. Instructors made less.

The instructor community is in what I’d call “massive unrest” about this. And it’s not going to get better. With only 1% growth projected for Udemy in 2025, and rumors of Coursera potentially acquiring them, the pressure to squeeze instructor margins will only intensify.

Udemy is explicitly shifting resources toward their highest-performing courses. If you’re not in that top tier, you’re feeling the squeeze.

Why “Just Make More Courses” Is Bad Advice

When instructors hit a plateau, the default advice from the Udemy community is simple: “Make more courses.”

It sounds logical. More courses means more surface area for discovery, more potential revenue streams, more presence on the platform.

But here’s the trap: You’re doubling down on a model that’s actively working against you.

Every new course you create on Udemy is subject to the same algorithm changes, the same subscription share cuts, the same price compression. You’re not diversifying—you’re concentrating more of your time and energy into a platform that’s demonstrating it will continue to reduce your share of the pie.

The average revenue per course on Udemy is now under $100 per year. If you spend 100 hours creating a course and it makes $87 in year one, you’ve essentially worked for less than $1 per hour.

Making more courses on a failing model doesn’t fix the model. It just makes you more dependent on it.

Why “Optimize Your Current Course” Only Gets You So Far

The other common advice is to optimize: update your title, refresh your description, add new lectures, improve your thumbnail.

And yes, these things can help. But there’s a harsh reality here: diminishing returns.

You can optimize your way from page 3 to page 2 in search results. Maybe even to the bottom of page 1. But you’re still competing in a saturated marketplace where the platform controls visibility and takes the lion’s share of revenue.

I’ve seen instructors spend 40 hours “optimizing” a course to squeeze out an extra $30/month in revenue. That’s not a strategy. That’s a hamster wheel.

Optimization has a ceiling. And on Udemy, that ceiling is getting lower every year.

The Strategic Decision: Diversify or Double Down

This is where we are. You’ve hit a plateau. You understand why. Now you have a choice to make.

Option A: Double down on Udemy. Accept the lower margins, the algorithm dependency, the lack of control. Hope that things improve even though all data points suggest they won’t.

Option B: Diversify. Start building something you actually own. Something where you control the pricing, the marketing, the customer relationships, and the revenue share.

If you’ve been following this series, you know where I stand.

The Case for Platform Ownership

This is the argument I’ve been building toward for ten articles.

When you own your platform, you keep 95%+ of every sale instead of 15-37%.

Let’s do the math on that. If you sell a course for $499 on your own platform through a tool like GoHighLevel, you keep around $474 after payment processing. To make that same $474 on Udemy at the average organic share and price point, you’d need approximately 107 sales.

One hundred and seven sales to equal what you can do with a single transaction on your own platform.

But it gets better. When you own the platform:

• You control pricing. No more $9.99 fire sales. No more race-to-the-bottom competition.
• You control marketing. You build email lists you actually own. You run ads that benefit you, not Udemy’s brand.
• You control customer relationships. When someone buys from you directly, you get their email address.
• You’re immune to algorithm changes. Your course doesn’t disappear because Udemy decided to promote something else.
• You’re immune to revenue share cuts. No one can unilaterally decide to pay you less for the same work.

One $499 sale on your site equals 125 organic Udemy sales at the current average payout. If you can figure out how to sell ONE course per month on your own platform, you’re outperforming what most Udemy courses do in a year.

If you haven’t already, I walk through exactly how to set this up in Set Up Your Course in GoHighLevel. It’s not as complicated as you think.

Your Transition Plan

I’m not telling you to delete your Udemy courses tomorrow. That would be foolish.

Here’s the practical transition path:

Phase 1: Keep Udemy as a lead generator. Let your Udemy courses continue doing what they do. But shift your mindset—these aren’t your main revenue driver anymore. They’re a discovery channel.

Phase 2: Build your own platform. Get Set Up Your Course in GoHighLevel and create a premium version of your offering.

Phase 3: Create a product suite. Your Udemy course might be the entry point, but you need upstream and downstream offers. Check out Create Your Product Suite for the framework.

Phase 4: Drive traffic to your platform. Use content marketing, social media, email lists, or paid ads to send people to YOUR site, not Udemy’s.

Phase 5: Gradually reduce Udemy dependency. As your own platform revenue grows, you can make decisions about whether Udemy still serves a purpose in your business.

If you’re just getting started and haven’t launched anything yet, Validate & Launch Your First Course will help you do it right from day one—on a platform you own.

Udemy’s Role Going Forward

Here’s the shift in thinking that changes everything:

Udemy is a stepping stone, not a destination.

It’s a fine place to validate your topic, test your content, get some initial students, and build confidence. I’ve said this throughout this series, and it bears repeating: marketplaces have their place. Sell on Udemy, Skillshare & Marketplaces covers how to approach them strategically.

But if you’re treating Udemy as the foundation of your course business, you’re building on sand.

The platform has made it clear through their actions—revenue share cuts, subscription model shifts, resource allocation toward top performers—that instructor interests are secondary to company interests. That’s not a criticism; it’s just business. But it means you can’t trust them to prioritize your success.

When you Pick Your Platform, you need to pick one that aligns with YOUR interests. And that’s always going to be a platform you control.

The Bottom Line

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this series. We’ve talked about how Udemy works, how to optimize for it, how to market your courses, and how to think strategically about platform choice.

But if there’s one takeaway I want you to carry from this final article, it’s this:

The most valuable thing you can build in the course business is not another course. It’s a platform you own.

Udemy taught you how to create content. It gave you a taste of what’s possible. It showed you that people will pay to learn from you.

Now it’s time to take those lessons and apply them somewhere that actually rewards your effort.

That’s exactly why I created course.coach. Every free course here is designed to help you build something that belongs to YOU. Not a platform that can cut your pay on a whim. Not a marketplace that can bury your content with an algorithm change. Something you control.

Start with Validate & Launch Your First Course if you’re beginning. Move to Set Up Your Course in GoHighLevel when you’re ready to own your platform. Build out your offers with Create Your Product Suite.

The plateau you’re experiencing on Udemy isn’t a sign that you’ve failed. It’s a sign that you’ve outgrown the platform.

The question isn’t whether you can make more money elsewhere. The math on that is clear—you absolutely can.

The question is whether you’re willing to make the transition.

I think you are. And I’m here to help you do it.