Courses on Udemy cover a wide range of topics: music, history, design, fitness, and business. But the top instructors at Udemy teach technical skills: programming, data science, and cybersecurity.
A Winner-Takes-All Market
Because anyone can post a course on Udemy, there are tons of classes on the site. A relatively small number of top courses make most of the money. For example, the top earning Python course earns over $125,000 per month while the median course earns only $23 per month. So the top class earns more than 5000X the typical class! Most classes are buried in the search results.
The top instructors earn the “Udemy Partner” designation.
The Most Popular Instructors Teach the Most In-Demand Programming Languages
What are the most poplar programming languages? JavaScript and Python. So it’s no surprise that three of the six top instructors – Dr. Angela Yu, Maximilian Schwarzmüller, and Jose Portilla – teach those languages.
The Top Instructors
Stephane Maarek
Teaches AWS and Apache Kafka. As far as I can tell, his courses are only offered on Udemy. His top-selling courses are Ultimate AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 each of which has well over a half million students.
Dr. Angela Yu
Dr. Yu not only teaches on Udemy, but also offers courses on App Brewery. Dr. Yu teaches Python, Data Science, web and app development.
Maximilian Schwarzmüller
Maximilian Schwarzmüller is a full-stack developer with numerous courses focusing on JavaScript as well as popular JavaScript fameworks (React, AngularJS). He runs the site Academind where he offers a membership program that provides access to all his courses.
Jose Portilla
Jose Portilla focuses on Python including Python for data science. I went through some of his Python for Data Science and Machine Learning Bootcamp, which was alright but I thought the assignments for the class were too easy and too similar to the example code. I preferred the exercises in Udacity’s Data Science degree, but of course that was a more expensive program with more personal assistence from the teaching assistants.
Jason Dion
Jason Dion teaches 44 courses, primarily on cybersecurity certifications. He offers the same courses on his website, but when you sign up on his site you get a pass guarantee – see his FAQ for details.
Andrei Neagoie
Andrei teaches Python and other programming skills. He offers a membership program on his website, ZeroToMastery.io.
Instructors Teaching ChatGPT
We saw an explosion of inteterest in OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, so of course we see a lot of ChatGPT courses on Udemy! I profile three popular ChatGPT instructors in the infographic below – Lance Junck, Henry Habib, and Ardit Sulce.
Top Udemy Instructors Infographic
Most of the information here comes from https://teachinguide.com/, though some comes directly from Udemy.
