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Udemy runs an online marketplace where anyone can sell video courses and anyone can buy them.
Udemy is an online learning marketplace. It lets almost anyone record a video course and sell it to students around the world, covering everything from coding and data science to guitar, cooking, and public speaking. On the buying side are individual learners paying for a single course, plus companies that buy Udemy's business plan to train their employees.
The key thing to understand is that Udemy does not make most of the courses itself. Instructors create them, and Udemy provides the storefront, the payment system, the video hosting, and the reviews. It makes money by taking a cut of each sale, along with subscription revenue from its business customers. That marketplace model is a double-edged sword: the catalog is enormous, but quality varies wildly, and competitors like Coursera lean on university partnerships while free content on YouTube is always lurking. The company went public on the Nasdaq in 2021, and the stock has had a rough ride since. Udemy has been pushing its business-facing segment, Udemy Business, because companies pay recurring subscription fees and tend to stick around, which is steadier than one-off course purchases from individuals. It also rolled out AI features, including an AI assistant and skills-mapping tools meant to help companies figure out what training their workers actually need.
The big question hanging over Udemy is whether AI helps or hurts it. AI can generate course content cheaply, which threatens the value of generic recorded lectures, but it also makes personalized learning tools possible. Udemy's bet is that a huge catalog plus corporate training relationships still matter in a world where anyone can ask a chatbot to teach them something.
Saved answer · last researched 21 Oct 2026