Subscriber growth and revenue are accelerating even as revenue per user declines. Udemy built its empire on a simple idea: anyone could create a course, and anyone could buy one. That marketplace model made Udemy famous and made millionaires out of its top instructors. Now the company is deliberately killing it. In Q3 2025 earnings call, Udemy’s CFO admitted they are “intentionally reducing” single course sales to push users toward subscriptions. The logic is straightforward: Udemy keeps 82.5%

Confession: I used to think critical thinking meant being skeptical of everything. Question every headline, every claim, every source. Look beyond the face value. But critical thinking is structured evaluation, and knowing when to accept a good argument is as much a part of it as knowing when to reject a bad one. The people I know who are actually good at this are calmer, not louder. That’s what makes picking a course tricky. Two courses called “critical thinking” can teach almost nothing in c

In October, Class Central wrote about CreativeLive shutting down on December 31, 2025. That article led to a series of events that actually saved the platform. Just two weeks before the deadline, on December 15, CourseHorse, an online marketplace of live classes, workshops, and experiences, acquired it for an undisclosed amount. The website is no longer closing at the end of the year. In 2021, Fiverr acquired it for $11 million. Four years later, in May 2025, the platform stopped accepting new

In Q4 2025, Duolingo announced it would let go of $50M in bookings to reach 100 million daily active users (DAUs) by 2028; a strategy Class Central covered in detail last month.  2026 is its “investment year,” and Q1 was the first quarter of execution. So far, the plan seems to be working. The Expected Results: Low Bookings, High DAUs Duolingo is running multiple tests to improve the free experience: spoken tokens for speaking practice, Speaking Adventures for real-world conversations, and fla