24 Udemy courses earning $1,500/month, $53,000 cumulative — the 3.5 years since switching to mass production once "$100 per course" became visible

On September 25, 2024, Daichi Ito (also known as Ryuji), an instructor on the online course platform Udemy, published the income figures shown in his instructor dashboard on note. Since debuting as an instructor in March 2021, 3.5 years, he has released 24 courses with about 15,000 total students. Monthly income “has its ups and downs,” he notes, but runs around $1,500. Cumulatively, it has reached about $53,000.

Note that the yen figures attached to dollar amounts throughout this article use the source article’s own exchange rate of $1 = ¥140. This differs from actual market rates.

The disclosed figures

Ito’s reason for valuing this income highly is not the raw amount but the fact that “once a course is released, there’s almost no ongoing effort required,” meaning “the income comes in as something close to passive income.”

Dividing the numbers reveals a different picture

Dividing the disclosed figures reveals a few structural facts not stated explicitly in the text.

• Monthly income per course: $1,500 ÷ 24 = about $62.50. This is lower on average than the target figure Ito himself cites: “once you’ve gotten this far, you can start to see roughly $100 per course in sales.”
• From the March 2021 debut to September 2024 is about 42 months. $53,000 ÷ 42 months = an average of about $1,262/month. The gap versus the current $1,500 is under 20%.
• Cumulative income per student: $53,000 ÷ 15,000 = about $3.5. Note that, as discussed below, students who received free coupons are included in this denominator, so the actual per-paid-student rate is higher.

The second figure is especially telling. If income had grown linearly from zero, the period average would settle at roughly half the current value. In reality, the period average reaches over 80% of the current value. That is: income reached a level close to current fairly early, and hasn’t grown much further even as more courses were added since — this is a reasonable reading. Stacking up to 24 courses did not multiply monthly income by 24. That said, this is a backward calculation from just two data points. Month-by-month progress hasn’t been disclosed.

What is being sold

Ito’s primary occupation is web marketing. He represents Tobira Marketing. His Udemy courses center on his own practical expertise, mainly SEO, and in September 2022 he released a 6+ hour “SEO Mastery Course.”

He also has a course teaching the very craft of earning as a Udemy instructor: “How to Create a Beginner-Friendly Udemy Course from a Best-Selling Instructor of 7 Courses.” Regular price ¥23,800, coupon price ¥1,800, 200+ students, average rating 4.7. Within his 24-course portfolio, one course is essentially his own results turned directly into a product.

The turning point was switching from “landing a hit” to “stacking up”

There’s a clear point in Ito’s account where the trajectory shifts. After the framework for gathering reviews and optimizing for search was established, he writes:

Once you can do this much, you understand how to sell courses on Udemy. From there, it’s simply about making good courses, over and over.

Immediately after that, he lays out the production pace: “I’ve released 11 courses in a year and a half, which works out to roughly one course every 1.5 months.” The nature of the work shifts from a phase of trying to land a hit, to a phase of stacking up volume on the premise of a reproducible per-course rate of roughly $100. The result, 24 courses over 3.5 years, reflects the pace stabilizing after this switch.

Because before/after monthly income figures aren’t disclosed, how much monthly income changed around this switch can’t be confirmed. What can be confirmed is that the production pace locked into a constant rate of roughly one course every 1.5 months.

Breaking down the mechanism

The six points Ito cites (have a specialty / make clear, results-oriented courses / gather 10+ initial reviews / raise Udemy internal search ranking / earn a bestseller badge / make a lot of courses) sound generic as tactic names. What makes them effective is that each one touches the structure of Udemy’s own evaluation algorithm.

Filling the stockout of zero reviews, for free. A course with zero reviews doesn’t sell, no matter how good the content. At course release, Ito recruits on X (formerly Twitter), offering: “Free coupons for the first 10 people,” and asking recipients for a review, because 10+ reviews is the threshold for eligibility for the top-rated badge. This is an act of forgoing sales to acquire the “review” inventory, placed deliberately before sales rather than after. Note that Ito explicitly states: “It’s not okay to induce people to leave a high rating.”

Exploiting the fact that badges are relative, not absolute. The Bestseller badge’s condition is “the course with the highest recent sales within the combination of primary topic and category.” It’s determined by relative rank within a segment, not absolute unit sales. Which means choosing a topic with fewer competing courses makes the badge easier to earn (what Ito calls a “hacky trick.” Category can’t be changed by the instructor after submission for review, but he notes that contacting support can get it changed) a practical workaround explicitly written into the piece.

Distribution closed entirely within the platform’s own search. Rather than external customer acquisition, the core tactic is naturally including targeted keywords in the course landing page, section, and lecture descriptions. Once reviews and keyword optimization are in place, “search ranking naturally rises,” per Ito. In exchange for not needing to build your own audience, exposure becomes subordinate to the platform’s own evaluation metrics.

The barrier to entry is effort, not price. Ito describes himself as a “latecomer” yet states, “even entering now, there’s still plenty of room in the market,” analyzing the reason as: “the hurdle people feel around filming and editing video keeps entrants low.” His reading is that the one-time labor of filming and editing is what’s keeping competitors away.

Where the risk lies

Income has “ups and downs,” as Ito himself acknowledges. $210,000 a month isn’t a fixed salary.

The average of $62.50/course likely doesn’t reflect 24 courses earning evenly. It’s natural to assume a handful of bestseller courses account for most of it, with the rest forming a long tail, but per-course breakdowns aren’t disclosed, so this remains speculation.

The source article also never discloses Udemy’s fee rate, the level of sale pricing, or the instructor’s revenue share. Since the figures are described as “the income shown in the instructor dashboard,” it’s natural to read this as the instructor’s own take, but the total gross transaction volume upstream of that isn’t known. The thinness of about $3.5 per student can’t be evaluated without accounting for this structure.

Lastly, “there’s still room in the market” is Ito’s own assessment as of September 2024, not a verified figure.

How far can this be replicated?

What’s replicable are the parts written as procedure. Gathering 10 reviews via a free coupon immediately after release. Embedding keywords into the description. Choosing a low-competition topic to shrink the denominator for badge eligibility. And setting a production pace target like “one course every 1.5 months.” None of these require special capital.

What’s harder to replicate is the underlying prerequisite. Ito states the minimum bar for specialization outright: “at least 2-3 years of accumulated track record in the field.” For an SEO course, that means “multiple concrete instances of having raised search rankings.” Those 2-3 years can only be built outside of course production itself. In addition, having an X account able to gather 10 free monitors at every release, and not finding the work of filming and editing 6+ hours of video burdensome, both become individual differences by Ito’s own account of what constitutes a barrier to entry.

And perhaps hardest to replicate is the judgment to keep stacking up course volume during periods when income isn’t growing. As the backward calculation above suggests, course count and monthly income likely aren’t proportional. That Ito was able to sustain one course every 1.5 months regardless, was it because of a foundation from his primary marketing income? That isn’t stated in the source, so it can’t be confirmed here.

Related reading

• A case of stacking up 24 Kindle books — small per-title revenue but near-zero ongoing effort after release, the same stacking model.
• The MENTA case — the structure of selling individual skills through a platform, and what the fee actually pays for.