I wanted to see what differentiates the most popular courses from the least popular courses in the Udemy platform. I would say that the most useful KPI to determine "popularity" would be the number of subscribers. This is common for many different platforms as many determine monetization for their subscriber base.
By this the top 10 most popular courses by their title are:
An Entire MBA in 1 Course: Award Winning Business School Prof
The Complete SQL Bootcamp 2020: Go from Zero to Hero
Stock Market Investing for Beginners
The Complete Financial Analyst Course 2020
Deep Learning Prerequisites: The Numpy Stack in Python (V2+)
Tableau 2020 A-Z: Hands-On Tableau Training for Data Science
The Complete Financial Analyst Training & Investing Course
The Complete Presentation and Public Speaking/Speech Course
PMP Exam Prep Seminar - PMBOK Guide 6
Introduction to Finance, Accounting, Modeling and Valuation
With the data provided there were several indicators which could help us predict success in terms of popularity (number of subscribers). I wanted to focus on things a potential course creator could control instead of other metrics such as number of reviews or average rating which their users submit. Instead, I wanted to see if what price point creators choose to sell their course at, have any signals of future success.
Using the aforementioned Top 10 subscribed courses, all of them with the exception of Stock Market Investing for Beginners cost money to subscribe. I was curious if there were patterns in this list about what price point these courses were priced at. The remaining nine courses were sold at between $400-$600. This price point is clearly something most people are comfortable with subscribing at for these types of courses. In fact, the most popular course that costs more than $600 is After Effects CC: Motion Graphics & Animation Principles which at 44,043 subscribers is less than an eighth of the course with the largest subscriber base.
I was also curious to see if any of these popular courses employed the sales tactic of offering large discounts to attempt to gain subscribers. Of the same Top 10 list of most popular courses all except one (Deep Learning Prerequisites: The Numpy Stack in Python (V2+)) had a discount of over $7,500.
Conversely, the Top 10 courses, aside from the listed deep learning course, that only offered $1,000 or less in discounts, only made up less than 20% of the subscribers than those of the overall Top 10 most popular. The final price of all these were in the ideal $400-$600 range but the low discount may have deterred several potential subscribers.
Based on this data, I would recommend to price courses between $400-$600 after discounting them by over $7,500. That pricing strategy is the one used by those courses that have the most subscribers.
In the future, I would wish to explore if the title of the course had any indication of it's potential subscriber success. Capturing the attention of potential consumers remains a tall task and having a catchy title goes a long way to accomplish that. Having a hook in place is important, but also demonstrating the value your course can provide in the title would help them convert to a subscriber.
Of that Top 10 list, 4 of them have the word "Complete" in their title. In addition, the number one most subscribed course, An Entire MBA in 1 Course: Award Winning Business School Prof, has nearly 10 times more subscribers of the next most subscribed course with MBA in the title (MBA in a Box: Business Lessons from a CEO). Of note that course has the exact same price ($455) with the exact same amount discounted ($7,500+). It seems people would rather subscribe to a "Entire MBA in 1 Course" than just an "MBA in a Box" even though a CEO would likely have more actionable real-world advice compared to a business school professor. I would be curious to see if language techniques such as these in titles correlates to more subscribers.
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