This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.
Top 10 Udemy Instructor
Of course, I quickly discovered one of the harsh truths of online business. On Udemy, reviews were the biggest barrier to success because their poorly coded interface asked people to give both private and public feedback on a course. This led to a very low rate of reviews and made competing with existing courses insanely difficult even if your course was infinitely better. Giving away free coupons was an obvious strategy that often backfired because a lot of ungrateful people left one-star reviews, and competitors sometimes used the free coupons to sabotage my ratings and promote their courses in the reviews. I figured the only way to even the playing field was to offered incentivized reviews where I literally paid people to take my courses and leave a review. I thought I made it ethical by never telling them what rating to give.
When I asked Udemy’s team about my incentivized review system, they told me this was perfectly fine. They even pointed out that the top instructor on the platform was running a similar system and making tens of millions of dollars. With Udemy’s blessing on my incentivized review system, I’d launch new courses and immediately pay for 20 or 30 reviews within the first week. These reviews gave my new courses a huge boost in ranking and shredded all the competition.
I had no problems with this review system when I personally hired every freelancer and read every review. I eventually got too overworked and outsourced handling the paid reviews to a friend that I was paying $5,000 a month to help me with my online courses. While his work uploading my courses to StackCommerce singlehandledly returned me hundreds of thousands of dollars, his execution was sloppy managing the review freelancers. He hired people too fast and was not taking time to analyze their reviews resulting in obviously suspicious reviews filled with spelling errors and the same names across many courses. The competition I was destroying went through every review, screenshotted them, and reported me to Udemy. Unlike all the other top instructors, I was very open about what I was doing, and that openness turned into my downfall. Udemy chose to remove hundreds of my reviews including both reviews I had paid thousands of dollars for and hundreds of legitimate reviews from loyal followers that watched all my courses from free coupons.
From my perspective, the biggest mistake I made wasn’t the incentivized reviews themselves. If I had kept my mouth shut, everything would have been fine, but instead, I called Udemy out publicly for letting the top instructor cheat the review system on a far larger scale. He had ten times as many incentivized reviews as I did, yet none of them were removed despite a lecture in the very beginning of his course explaining how he would give students free web hosting for a year if they left a review on his course. I checked the course a month later and the free web hosting offer was gone. After I embarrassed Udemy publicly, their new trust and safety team privately made it clear they were coming for me even though I had zero policy violations.
That’s when I realized something important about the online world. Many rules aren’t designed to keep people safe or to ensure fairness. They’re designed to keep honest people from getting ahead. In fact, some rules seemed intentionally set up to be broken. Breaking them was proof that you were willing to do whatever it took to get to the top. The unspoken rule, though, was that you had to keep your cheating and rule breaking secret. You could never let the public see what you were doing. It was a harsh lesson, like something out of The Matrix. The rules weren’t there to be followed; they were there to be bent and broken.
After decades of video games focusing on being number one and doing anything to win, I took this mindset with me to Udemy despite their warnings. I pushed into every gray area I could find, although I was very careful to know every policy and never break one. For example, I joined Udemy’s affiliate program, put remarketing tags on my courses, and ran ads directly on keywords like “Udemy” in Google AdWords. That meant when you searched Udemy, you’d see an ad leading to my Udemy course link. When you clicked, I got a remarketing cookie, and from there I could run display ads following you everywhere online. The beauty of this setup was that if you bought any course on Udemy—whether it was mine or not—I got a percentage. I also built out my email marketing and created more courses than any other instructor. From December 2014 to June 2016, I made over $600,000 on Udemy in less than two years. Only a handful of instructors earned more than this during the same time period, and I was on my way to passing them all despite nothing but hostility from Udemy for the last year.
While I was on Udemy, I was consistently experimenting with other content such as live streaming games so that I could continue to expand my course offerings. I consistently sent people off Udemy to my YouTube channel and Facebook page to make sure if I was banned I could keep some of my audience. I would film long inspirational videos on YouTube and then blast them to hundreds of thousands of Udemy students. Then, I would experiment with all kinds of videos on my YouTube channel to see what stuck including a lot of gaming videos that viewers from Udemy mostly ignored. I had my studio setup to record my gameplay which I would then use to create highlight videos and upload to YouTube. One of the main games my friends wanted to play in 2016 was League of Legends even though I was terrible at it. If you would have told me at the beginning of 2016 I would be grinding League of Legends every day by the end of the year, I would have been horrified.
The League of Legends Coach
In the spring of 2016, I hired a League of Legends coach for what seemed like another throwaway experiment. Back then, almost nobody was paying for coaching. It was a niche idea, something only the most hardcore players considered. I found a coach who charged thirty euros for an hour session—an amount I could easily afford with my Udemy money. He was happy to get the work, and I figured it might make an interesting video.
I streamed the session live on YouTube without expecting anything unusual. I had done countless other gaming videos before, and most got the standard trickle of views. But this one was different. The title had a hook people hadn’t seen: “Can a Pro Coach Help Me Get Out of Bronze in League of Legends?” It combined a specific champion, the concept of professional coaching, and the relatability of being stuck in bronze rank. It clicked with people in a way none of my other videos had.
When I was live, nothing special happened. There were 2 to 5 viewers concurrently for most of the stream and less than 100 views when it ended. Over the next few weeks, YouTube slowly started scaling the video to more viewers. After a month or two, YouTube starting pushing the video hard resulting in tens of thousands of views a day. By then, I had given up on League of Legends as a game I would never been good at and that was not fun. Meanwhile, the video went on to earn 800,000+ views and millions of impressions. This single video on demand from my live stream built an entire League of Legends audience on YouTube without me doing anything.
The unintended side effect of that first video was on the coach himself. During the stream, his Skype account accidentally popped up on the screen. Almost immediately, he was bombarded with requests from viewers desperate for coaching. At first, he was angry that his privacy had been exposed. He didn’t even want to talk to me again. Later, when he realized just how much demand was out there, he saw the opportunity. By the time I asked him for another session months later, his rate had jumped to 300 euros an hour.
I refused to pay that much and instead hired another coach. I went back to League of Legends just for the views but the magic never repeated. I spent thousands of dollars on coaching and in game items while playing almost every day. A few videos did well—one even hit a hundred thousand views—but most only got a few thousand. Collectively, the new coach’s sessions might have added up to the numbers of that one viral hit, but it wasn’t the same. The views were scattered and inconsistent. There was no breakthrough, no second lightning strike.
The truth is, even when those videos were doing well, I hated playing League of Legends. I had put hundreds of hours into it, and I still sucked at the game. Unlike Call of Duty, where I had real skill, or real-time strategy games, where I could hold my own, League of Legends felt like a constant uphill struggle. The mechanics never clicked, the grind frustrated me, and the matches left me feeling drained instead of excited. Yet here I was, building an entire audience around something I didn’t even enjoy. Millions of people watched me play a game I could barely stand. That contradiction ate away at me.
That coaching session taught me more than anything else about the fragility of success online. A single fluke—timing, title, novelty—can catapult you into the spotlight, but it doesn’t last. You can pour in ten times as much effort afterward and never see the same result. That was my story with League of Legends. One breakout video, and then a slow slide back into obscurity, all while forcing myself to keep playing a game I secretly hated. I ended up quitting gaming for the first time because I hated League of Legends so much … but before I talk more about that, first, we need to circle back to Udemy.
Banned and Confused
In June 2016, Udemy made a dumb ass policy change that prevented instructors from selling courses for under $10 which put the instructor community into a rage. I was one of the loudest critics and showed instructors how to sell free coupons on their own website for less to get around this idiotic policy. Meanwhile, I began helping instructors with shallow courses improve by having them add me as a co-instructor to their already published course. After they added me, I would add a minimum of 3 new video lectures and begin cross promoting all my courses together to hundreds of thousands of students resulting in more sales for everyone. It only took one butthurt and jealous co-instructor to complain to Udemy that I had tricked them into adding me onto their course just so I could send promotional announcements. This gave Udemy the exact ammunition they would use to take me down, especially when combined with my lambasting them over the $10 minimum price policy.
In the middle of June 2016, after not hearing from the trust and safety team for almost a year, I got an email suddenly banning my entire account for “severe” policy violations. The email specifically said they were banning me for two violations. One included statistics showing that less than 10% of my reviews had come from questionable sources such as Fiverr where people were selling access to free coupons to my courses. The other violation was for “improper co-instructor relationships.”
From my perspective, it was obvious bullshit. I had been extremely careful not to directly violate any policies. While I knew I was working in every gray area I could find, I was very intentional about not breaking the rules outright. The trust and safety team even admitted that the violation on the reviews was clearly ridiculous and easily explainable because I gave so many free coupons away. Even more ridiculous, the co-instructor that stabbed me in the back said she felt awful about the situation and would try to help fix it which reminded me of the kind of alcoholic that would steal your wallet and then help you look for it
Clearly, Udemy wanted me gone and they held all the power. Nothing had to be reasonable or justifiable. When they banned me, I was deeply hurt and shocked given how hard I was trying to follow all the official policies, and I had no violations. Any other instructor would have got a warning in this instance. The trust and safety team had not asked me one single question before banning my entire account despite me being the most well know instructor on the platform. Udemy’s actions outraged the instructor community which created the first time I got a taste of going viral.
I had been banned for being too open, too honest, and too much of a personality on their platform rather than for any real violation. Many other people saw this, and it was a brutal but eye-opening lesson. What I saw was that on these online platforms, the terms and conditions don’t matter. The team behind the scenes is all-powerful. They can and will do whatever they want. From what I’ve observed across many platforms since, many platforms allow certain insiders to blatantly violate the rules while punishing others who simply send messages they don’t like—even when those people don’t break the rules at all. Udemy was the first time I experienced this directly in my face, but it would not be the last.
After the Udemy ban, I felt lost, betrayed, guilty, remorseful, shameful, and resentful. I thought of suing them nearly every day but my ex-wife being an attorney finally talked me out of it saying that I would never win against a corporation with that level of funding and power. I experimented with everything I could online—gaming, live streaming, trying different hustles. The League of Legends stream was going viral right after I got banned from Udemy but the money streaming video games was nearly non-existent in 2016.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my YouTube Coaching playlist.