The Personal Plan pilot is expanding to new markets and languages

In April, we began piloting an individual subscription of some of our top English content for a limited audience. We believe subscriptions will complement our proven transactional model, maximize the value our most dedicated learners and instructors get from the platform, and help the platform continue to grow overall.

 

We’ve been learning and building over the last few months and watching the results closely. We’re monitoring how students preview, purchase, and learn within the subscription, and measuring the difference in business results between the groups with and without the option to subscribe.

 

Across all the metrics we’re tracking, subscriptions have met or exceeded our expectations in our English pilot markets. So, we’re ready to extend the pilot to more markets and more languages.

 

Which markets will get access to the Personal Plan pilot?

In the next few weeks, we’ll open up Personal Plan to a subset of learners in additional markets, with local language content available in addition to the English collection. This next stage of expansion will include Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and Turkish markets. Further out, we’re also exploring including Japanese, Polish, and Italian content.

 

The exact structure of the subscription offering will differ slightly in different markets to account for local regulations and best practices. These differences affect things like pricing, trial structure (including whether or not students have the option to trial before purchase), and refund policies. As always, we’ll also adjust how we market and package the subscription for local markets to drive the best possible results.

 

Which content will be included in the international collection for Personal Plan?

Today, our Personal Plan collection largely mirrors the Udemy Business collection. This content strategy may evolve over time as we see how individual learners’ needs differ from those of corporate teams. But for now, we’re seeing strong results from this approach, so we’re extending it to our Udemy Business language collections. If your content is currently curated for one of these collections, you can expect that it will be included in Personal Plan.

 

How do payouts work for Personal Plan?

Personal Plan payments work like Udemy Business. Each month, 25% of all net subscription revenue is designated for instructors, and you’ll earn a proportion of that instructor revenue equal to the proportion of minutes learners spent on your content. As with Udemy Business, revenue and consumption “pools” are global.

 

You may also receive monthly payments from the interim instructor promotions program, which ensures that earnings from your promotions stay strong while we’re still learning and testing this new subscription option.

 

When and where will I see earnings from Personal Plan? 

If your courses are consumed by Personal Plan subscribers, you’ll see earnings reported under a new “Individual subscriptions” label in your Revenue Report. These earnings will appear approximately 30 days after the close of the month in which the relevant consumption took place. For example, September 2021 earnings from Personal Plan will appear in the September statement toward the end of October, and be paid out a few days after.

 

This is a different cadence from other Udemy subscription offerings like Udemy Business, necessitated by local refund regulations. In some markets, Personal Plan may offer students the option to request a refund. When a student refunds their subscription, their payment and any consumption are removed from the overall instructor pool. Because instructors’ revenue is calculated as a proportion of the total subscription revenue, we need to allow time for resolution of all refunds from a given month before instructors’ revenue is calculated and displayed.

 

What’s on the horizon?

With Personal Plan available to a subset of learners in many of our major markets, we’re paying close attention to retention, which is an important success metric for subscription products.

 

In the coming months, we’ll be carefully looking at what makes learners stick to their goals in Personal Plan. We’ll run tests in our marketing and in the product to see how we can help get learners started and keep them engaged for the long term. 

 

We’ll also begin to explore the data and tools that could help instructors understand and engage subscription learners, and determine the right long-term strategy for the interaction between instructor promotions and subscriptions.

 

How long will the pilot run?

Since it takes time to understand long-term dynamics like retention, we expect the pilot to run at least through the end of the year. We’ll continue to keep instructors informed of progress and updates as it grows. 

 

As always, we succeed when instructors succeed. A key measure of the success of the pilot is that instructors overall earn more revenue when students can choose between direct purchase and subscription than they do with direct purchase alone.

 

How do I learn more?

If you’re curious to learn more about Personal Plan, we’ve compiled an FAQ based on instructor questions to date. If your question isn’t answered there, you can write to Instructor Support or share it in the Instructor Community.

 

Thank you for continuing to improve the lives of students around the world by teaching on Udemy.