You know that moment when you’ve finally got your course outline written, the slides are half done, and you’re sat looking at the Skillshare and Udemy signup pages with your finger hovering over the button… quietly wondering whether you’re about to pour six months of your life into something that earns you eleven dollars?
I get some version of that question in my DMs every few weeks. And honestly, I really get it, because that was me in 2017.
So let’s talk about it properly. I’ve been teaching online courses since 2017, I’ve done the self-hosted thing, and in a MUCH bigger way I’ve done the marketplace thing, with more than 150,000 students across Skillshare and Udemy. Which means I can give you real numbers instead of vibes.
Fair warning though – it’s not a clean yes.
The short version
Skillshare and Udemy are worth it if you treat them as a way to build an audience, and they’re usually a bit of a letdown if you treat them as your main income. They cost you nothing upfront, they market your course for you, and they deal with refunds and customer service. In return you give up control of your pricing, your student data and a big chunk of the money. Most creators do best putting short courses on the marketplaces and selling their bigger programmes themselves.
- My first month on Udemy in 2017 made $259.92, and my first month on Skillshare in 2020 made $940. Neither one was a full-time income for years.
- Udemy pays you 97% when someone buys through your own coupon or link, and 37% when the sale comes from Udemy’s own marketing.
- Skillshare pays you a share of a Teacher Fund based on how many qualifying minutes of your classes get watched, so there’s no price for you to set.
- From 16 July 2026, Skillshare tightened up who gets paid at all, and a lot of smaller teachers no longer qualify.
- Marketplaces are the fastest way to find out whether people actually want what you teach, and that’s worth a lot on its own.
You can watch the whole thing below, or keep reading, both cover the same ground.
Jump to a bit of the video:
1:29 What can you teach online?
2:18 Payment models explained
4:21 Researching profitable topics
7:00 How much I made when I started
9:20 Strategy for new course creators
12:18 Marketplaces vs self-hosting
14:33 Using courses to get clients
17:35 Time commitment
How do Skillshare and Udemy actually pay you?
They pay in completely different ways, and this is the bit most people skim past. Udemy is a shop. Skillshare is Netflix.
On Udemy, your course has a price and you get a cut of every sale. Which cut you get depends entirely on who brought the student through the door:
- 97% if they bought using your own coupon or referral link.
- 37% if the sale came from Udemy’s own marketing, their ads, or someone browsing the marketplace.
Now that 97% looks lovely, doesn’t it… right up until you notice it only applies to people YOU brought in. Which means you’re the one doing the marketing. Both of those percentages are also worked out on the net amount, so after taxes and fees, including the 30% that Apple and Google take on app purchases. Udemy keeps the current terms on its instructor revenue share page if you want to check them yourself.
On Skillshare, there’s no price for you to set at all. Members pay a subscription, Skillshare puts a portion of that money into a Teacher Fund every month, and your slice depends on how many qualifying minutes of your classes people watched compared with everyone else. That watch time gets adjusted for things like the member’s subscription type and where they live, so two teachers with exactly the same minutes can end up paid differently.
And two things catch people out here. Trailer views don’t count. Neither does anything watched on a free trial or through a free access link.
What changed on Skillshare in 2026?
Skillshare has quietly made it a lot harder for smaller teachers to get paid at all, and if you’re weighing up this platform right now you really want to know before you spend three months filming.
As of 16 July 2026, you need to clear two bars in the same month to get a royalty payment:
- Have at least 50 Skillshare followers on the last day of the month.
- Either publish a quality class within the past 18 months and get more than 400 qualifying minutes watched that month, or, if you haven’t published anything in 18 months, get more than 650 qualifying minutes.
Skillshare’s own explanation is that 90% of the teachers losing eligibility were earning under $5 a month, which… fair enough, honestly. But have a proper read of what that’s telling you. Upload one class and wander off, and you now get nothing at all. This is a platform that pays the people who keep turning up. All the detail is on Skillshare’s Earn From Your Teaching page.
There’s some good news in there too. Skillshare now pays a $100 engagement reward to Top Teacher and Rising Teacher members who pick up at least two positive student reviews in a month. Payments land on the 16th.
How much did I actually earn when I started?
Here are my real numbers, because vague chat about “passive income” doesn’t help anyone.
I put my first course on Udemy back in 2017. First month: $259.92. And it hovered around there for a good long while, I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
I didn’t start teaching on Skillshare until 2020, and my first month there was $940, then $1,321.90 the month after. It took off faster… but by then I’d already been making courses for three years and I actually knew what I was doing.
These days my courses bring in a multi six-figure income. But that’s taken years, and LOTS of rebuilt versions along the way. My two best sellers are 12.5 and 8 hours long, and I refilm big chunks of them roughly every 18 months to keep them current.
So if you were hoping to film something over a long weekend and then retire… I’d gently adjust that plan.
Can you make a full-time income from marketplaces alone?
You can, it’s just rare, and it takes years of steady work to get there. I’d plan for marketplaces to be one income stream rather than the whole business.
And the reason isn’t only the revenue split. It’s that you can’t really advertise into these platforms. You don’t own the site, so you can’t feed the sales data back to Meta or Google to say “this person bought, you can stop showing them ads now”. You do get some referral tracking on both platforms, but nothing like the clean picture you’d have on your own website.
Because here’s the thing – the fact that you can’t measure it properly is exactly what makes it a poor main channel and a really decent side one. You can’t grow it on purpose. You can only feed it good content and let it do its thing.
What can you actually teach on these platforms?
Almost anything, honestly. There is a course on Udemy about how to perform exorcisms, so I’d stop worrying that your topic is too niche.
Skillshare is a bit stricter and won’t take classes on things like dating, hacking or financial advice, so have a look at its topic restrictions before you plan anything out.
The bigger question is whether your topic will actually earn. Broadly speaking, Skillshare leans creative because that’s who subscribes to it, and Udemy leans business and tech. Once you’re signed up as a Udemy teacher you get research in the back end showing you top monthly income, average income and how much competition there is in each category, which is SO useful. Skillshare doesn’t have anything like that, so you’re stuck reading the top classes and making an educated guess. Outside tools like Eurekaa can give you a rough idea of what a topic earns across platforms before you commit to it.
Should you use a marketplace or self-host your course?
Use a marketplace when you want reach with no upfront risk. Self-host when you want control and better margins. And most people who do well at this end up doing both.
Here’s how they compare:
- Upfront cost: nothing at all on a marketplace. A monthly platform fee from day one if you self-host on something like Teachable, Thinkific or Kajabi.
- Who does the marketing: the platform will, if your course is good. If you self-host, that’s entirely you.
- Pricing: the marketplace controls it. Self-hosting, you control it completely.
- Student data: you don’t own it on a marketplace. Self-hosted, it’s yours.
- Refunds and customer service: handled for you on a marketplace. Very much your job if you self-host.
- Running paid ads: very hard to track on a marketplace. Straightforward on your own site.
- What you keep per sale: 37% to 97% on Udemy, or a share of watch time on Skillshare. Nearly all of it if you self-host.
That “refunds and customer service handled for you” one is worth so much more than it looks on paper. With 150,000 students to look after on a self-hosted platform, the admin alone would eat me alive.
How do you use a cheap course to get high-ticket clients?
Put a small paid course in front of exactly the people who’d eventually hire you, teach them properly, and then let them know at the end that working with you directly is an option.
People treat this as either-or, courses or services… and it really isn’t. Every business owner starts out with a DIY attitude, which is exactly why they end up in my marketing courses in the first place. So imagine someone finishing one and hearing: “brilliant, now you know what good marketing actually looks like, so even if you outsource it you’ll know what you’re paying for. And if you’d like that to be me, here’s how.”
It works in almost any niche too. I’ve bought courses on completely unrelated things, got to the end, spotted that the instructor offers 1:1 sessions, and booked one without a second thought. I’d already spent five hours learning to trust them, hadn’t I?
You’d be genuinely surprised how many people who’ll happily pay $15 for a course will later pay thousands for the advanced version.
How much time does it take to run marketplace courses?
Way less than most people assume. Last time I properly measured it, I was averaging around 3,964 new students a month watching roughly 442,562 minutes… and spending about two hours a week on student engagement. Call it 8 to 9 hours a month answering questions and marking projects.
Everyone assumes that going for volume means drowning in student admin. It really doesn’t. Every course I have online has a project component, some of them fairly involved, and I actively encourage questions… and very few people do either one. Which is a bit sad, if I’m honest, because the ones who do get so much more out of it.
The real time cost isn’t the support. It’s the refilming.
What I’d do differently if I were starting today
Full disclosure – my own setup is partly just a legacy of decisions I made back in 2017, and I wouldn’t repeat all of them.
If I were starting from scratch today, I’d put short 1-2 hour courses on the marketplaces instead of the 12-hour monsters I built. People actually finish short courses, and a finished course is what turns into a review, a follower and eventually a client. I’d use those to build my email list, and I’d keep the big signature programme self-hosted where I control the price and can properly advertise it.
One caveat on my own numbers though. Keeping affordable, high-quality marketing education available to people who can’t drop $1,000 on a programme has always been a big part of why I do this. So my long, cheap courses aren’t purely a business decision. If yours is purely a business decision… split it up.
So, are they worth it?
If you want a fast, free, low-risk way to find out whether people want what you teach, and you’re willing to keep publishing rather than uploading once and disappearing, then yes. Genuinely, yes.
If what you want is predictable income that you control, build that somewhere you own, and let the marketplaces quietly feed it.
And if you’re brand new to all of this and half these terms are new to you, don’t worry, I had no idea what any of it meant in 2017 either. Start with one small course on one platform and see what happens.
If you’d like to talk through where your particular course fits, I do affordable mentoring sessions for course creators, and I’ve also written up the lessons 150,000 students taught me about making courses people actually finish, which pairs really nicely with this one. You can see everything I teach here as well.
And if you do take the plunge on either platform, come and let me know how your first month goes. I’d love to know whether $259.92 is still the going rate.
Platform terms last checked August 2026. My own earnings figures are from my first months on each platform in 2017 and 2020, and my student and watch-time averages were measured in late 2024.
