8 min read

Selling Online Courses on Marketplaces (and Why to Own Your Site Instead)

Shashank Dubey

Content & Marketing, Wbcom Designs · Published Dec 4, 2023 · Updated Jun 29, 2026

The phrase “best sites to sell online courses” gets used for two very different types of product. Course marketplaces - Udemy, Skillshare - are one category. Course platforms - Teachable, Kajabi, Thinkific - are another. And self-hosted WordPress solutions sit in a third category entirely. Most comparison guides drop all of them into a single list, which produces a specific kind of confusion: a creator joins Udemy expecting to run their own course business, then discovers they have been renting shelf space in someone else’s store.

This post covers course marketplaces only - the sites where your content lives alongside thousands of other instructors’ courses, and where the platform controls the student relationship. If you want a full comparison that includes hosted platforms and self-hosted WordPress options, those are covered in detail here:

What Makes a Course Marketplace Different

A course marketplace aggregates content from many instructors and sells access to students through a shared discovery interface. Think of it as a department store rather than your own shop. Students search by topic, find your course alongside dozens of competitors, and make a purchase. The marketplace takes a cut of that revenue in exchange for the traffic it brought you.

The single most important characteristic of a marketplace is who owns the student. On Udemy or Skillshare, the platform holds the email address, the purchase history, and the communication channel. You can see your enrolment numbers and watch time inside a dashboard, but you cannot export a list of students and reach them outside the platform’s messaging tools. You are not building your own list. You are contributing to theirs.

This is not a fatal flaw - marketplaces offer real advantages for certain situations, particularly for new creators who have no existing audience to sell to. But the trade-off is structural and it does not change over time. Understanding it before you commit will save a significant amount of frustration later.

Udemy

Udemy is the largest course marketplace by student count, with over 57 million learners across more than 210,000 courses. The scale is the main argument for it. A course on a high-demand technical topic - Python, data analysis, UX design - can reach students who would never have found the instructor on their own, without a marketing budget or a social following.

The revenue split depends on how the student arrived. If Udemy’s own promotional activity brought them in, the platform keeps 50 percent. If you sent the student through your own referral link, you keep 97 percent, minus a small transaction fee. In practice, most sales for new instructors come through Udemy-generated traffic, which means the 50/50 split is the normal outcome rather than the exception.

Pricing is the harder long-term problem. Udemy runs frequent sitewide discount events where courses listed at $99 or $199 sell for $9.99 or $14.99 for extended stretches. The platform’s ranking algorithm tends to favour courses that participate in these promotions. Over time, students have learned to wait for the inevitable sale rather than paying list price. This means your effective price per student decreases the longer you stay on the platform, regardless of the quality of your course or the price you list it at.

Where Udemy makes sense: instructors in high-volume technical categories who want discovery without managing their own marketing, and creators who want to test whether a topic has a paying audience before investing in a standalone platform.

Skillshare

Skillshare runs on a subscription model. Students pay a monthly or annual fee to access the full library, and instructors earn a royalty based on how many minutes of their content premium subscribers watch each month. There is no per-enrolment payment and no individual course pricing - everything is behind the subscription paywall.

This shapes what a successful course looks like on Skillshare. Short, project-based classes in the 20 to 60 minute range perform better than comprehensive long-form courses, because students browse the library rather than committing to a single course. The creative and lifestyle categories - illustration, photography, writing, surface design - get the strongest traction, partly because they match the platform’s visual identity and partly because subscribers in those areas are genuinely active.

The audience ownership issue is the same as Udemy. You cannot contact your Skillshare followers outside the platform. Your royalty rate also fluctuates with what every other instructor publishes in a given month: if a wave of new content goes up and total watch time on the platform grows faster than the royalty pool, your per-minute rate drops even if your own watch time is steady.

Where Skillshare makes sense: creators in creative categories who want a passive income stream alongside a main platform they own, and instructors who are comfortable with subscription economics where the per-student price is not theirs to set.

Coursera and Institutional Marketplaces

Coursera appears in most “best sites” roundups, so it is worth a brief note: it is not realistically accessible for independent course creators. Coursera partners with universities, governments, and large companies to deliver credentialed learning. You cannot sign up as an individual instructor, upload content, and start selling in the same way you can on Udemy. The pathway requires institutional affiliation or a direct partnership application that is not open to solo creators.

If you are an independent instructor and you see Coursera in a comparison guide, that section does not apply to you.

When a Marketplace Is the Right Starting Point

Marketplaces work best as a validation tool, not a permanent home. If you have no existing audience and no marketing budget, Udemy’s search traffic gives you a shortcut to finding out whether anyone will pay for your content. You can publish a course, track enrolments and reviews over a few months, and decide whether the topic warrants building your own platform around it. That is a legitimate use of the marketplace channel.

Marketplaces also make sense when the primary buying behaviour in your subject is search-driven discovery. Someone needs to learn a specific software tool, searches Udemy for it, and lands on your course. In categories where that pattern holds, the marketplace’s aggregated demand is working for you rather than against you.

The problem is staying on a marketplace past the validation phase. At that point the structural trade-offs start compounding: you still cannot reach your students directly, pricing pressure keeps revenue per student low, and the platform can adjust its algorithm or commission structure at any time without your input.

What You Give Up by Staying on a Marketplace

The clearest way to see the long-term cost of a marketplace is to list what you cannot do while your course business depends on one.

Email your students directly. The student list belongs to the platform. You cannot export it or reach people outside the platform’s own messaging tools.
Set a price that holds. Sitewide discount events, algorithmic promotion preferences, and students conditioned to wait for sales all push your effective price toward the floor over time.
Build a brand students remember. Most students remember the marketplace. Some follow individual instructors, but the discovery interface centres the platform, not you.
Link to your own products or services. You can create course bundles within the platform, but you cannot promote your own coaching offers, direct people to your mailing list, or link out to your own site from within course content.
Keep your audience if the platform changes terms. If Udemy changes its revenue split or Skillshare restructures its royalty pool - both of which have happened before - you have no portable asset. The audience stays with the platform.

The Exit Ramp: Build a Course Platform You Actually Own

The natural next step after validating on a marketplace is moving to a platform where the student data, the pricing, and the business belong to you. That means either a hosted course platform (covered in the sibling posts linked above) or a self-hosted WordPress solution.

Learnomy is a WordPress plugin that handles the self-hosted route. It gives you a full course and membership platform on your own domain - no ongoing SaaS fees, no revenue sharing, no platform intermediary between you and your students. You install it on any WordPress site, build your courses, set your own pricing, and collect payments directly. Student data lives in your own database, not in a third-party system.

The comparison to Udemy is direct. On Udemy, you keep 50 percent of a marketplace-generated sale, you cannot contact the student afterwards, and your course page sits next to competitors. With Learnomy on your own domain, you keep everything after payment processing fees, your students are in your own database from day one, and your course page has no competing listings on it.

Setup is simpler than most self-hosted options. Learnomy handles course structure, student enrolments, progress tracking, and access control as a single install rather than requiring you to combine multiple plugins. There is a live demo at app.instawp.io/launch?s=learnomy&d=v2 where you can explore both the student and instructor experience without any configuration.

Choosing the Right Path

If you have no existing audience, starting on Udemy to validate your content is a reasonable move. The platform’s built-in traffic will tell you faster than your own site whether students will pay for your topic. Once you have a few hundred students and some reviews to show that demand exists, migrating to your own platform gives you ownership over the business you have been building.

If you already have an audience you can reach - a newsletter, a social following, a community - starting with your own platform is almost always the better decision. You build your email list from day one, you keep more revenue per sale, and you are not subject to changing marketplace terms.

For a detailed comparison of hosted platforms like Teachable, Thinkific, and Kajabi - with pricing breakdowns and feature-by-feature analysis - these two posts cover that ground directly:

Marketplaces are a starting point, not a destination. Use them to confirm that someone will pay for your content, then build something you actually own.