Language breakdown: English still dominates (58.5%), followed by Portuguese (8.3%) and Spanish (7.9%). Interesting to see Turkish and Japanese in top 5, showing Udemy's global reach

Tech & Business courses make up 50% of catalog but drive 76% of all enrollments. Tech leads the pack with nearly 5K students per course.

The length effect is real: Courses under 1 hour average 1.7K students, while 20+ hour courses pull in 11.9K students. Learners seem to prefer comprehensive content.

Interesting shift in course length: Average dropped from 7.7 to 4.7 hours in 2024. But here's the twist - longer courses (20+ hours) are booming, jumping from 6K to 9K courses.

And as for challenges, I will keep it short and save my rant for another day: it's Google's algorithms.

But we have faced that before and have emerged from it again.

What's interesting is Class Central's "Human Taxonomist" Bobby Brady was the one who did the prompt engineering for us. He was able to incorporate his decade of experience—thousands of hours of manual course aggregation and curation—into the prompts.

I have spent 11 of those years building Class Central full time. Every year brings new opportunities and challenges.

This year's biggest opportunity was GenAI. We built our own "AI Taxonomist" to help curate and grow our catalog to 330,000+ courses and videos.