Short answer: Udemy and Skillshare are useful for reaching a large audience — but they come with major trade-offs around revenue share, pricing control, and student relationships that every course creator should understand.
What Are Udemy and Skillshare?
Udemy and Skillshare are course marketplaces — platforms with built-in audiences of millions of learners. Instead of building your own course site, you publish your courses on their marketplace and they handle discovery, hosting, and payments. Udemy uses per-course purchases while Skillshare uses a subscription model with per-minute payouts.
Why Use Course Marketplaces?
Marketplaces have genuine strengths:
- Access to millions of potential students — Udemy has over 70 million learners. That's an audience you can't build on your own.
- No upfront marketing required — Students find you through marketplace search and recommendations. You can start earning without a marketing strategy.
- Built-in review and discovery systems — Ratings, reviews, and recommendation algorithms help surface your courses to interested learners.
- Established brand trust — Learners trust the marketplace brand, which reduces the barrier to purchasing from an unknown instructor.
Possible Concerns About Marketplaces
Some significant trade-offs:
- Heavy revenue share — Udemy takes up to 63% of sales they generate. On a $100 course sold through Udemy's promotions, you may only receive $37.
- No student email access — You can't build an email list from your marketplace students. Each sale is a one-time transaction with no follow-up possible.
- Race to the bottom on pricing — Udemy runs frequent $9.99 sales. Your carefully priced $199 course becomes a bargain bin item during promotions.
- You don't own your audience — The marketplace controls the relationship. If they change their algorithm or policies, your income can drop overnight.
How Does Your Own Platform Compare?
Running courses on your own platform (like Ruzuku) is fundamentally different from publishing on a marketplace:
- Keep all your revenue — Ruzuku charges a flat monthly fee with zero per-transaction fees. No revenue share.
- Own your student relationships — Export emails, build your list, nurture relationships over time. Every student is a potential repeat customer.
- Set premium prices — Charge what your transformation is worth, without marketplace price pressure.
- Live cohort programs — Marketplaces only support pre-recorded content. On your own platform, you can run live, interactive programs that command premium prices.
For the complete comparison, see Own Platform vs Marketplaces →
Alternatives to Marketplaces
If you're considering moving off marketplaces (or starting fresh), here are some self-hosted platform options:
- Teachable — Marketing-focused with native mobile apps (full comparison)
- Kajabi — All-in-one with email and funnels (full comparison)
- Thinkific — Feature-rich with deep customization (full comparison)
- Podia — Simple and affordable for digital products (full comparison)
- See all platform comparisons →
Bottom Line
Course marketplaces like Udemy and Skillshare are useful if you have no existing audience and want exposure to millions of learners. But if courses are more than a side project — if you want to build a real business with premium pricing, student relationships, and repeat customers — your own platform is essential. Many successful course creators start on marketplaces and eventually move to their own platform as they build an audience.