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And this is why the more it expands its user base, the healthier Duolingo will be financially.īlair Hanley Frank, technology analyst at ISG, explains that, as Duolingo successfully applied the mobile game formula to language learning, it ultimately brought in a large base of users. So how is Duolingo monetising itself? Well, it all comes down to the old saying: “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.” In other words, advertising. In that, Duolingo sets itself apart from all other digital language-learning companies: its main competitors Rosetta Stone and Babbel start at $179 (£145) and $6.95 (£5.60) a month. Users don’t pay to use the current app, and they won’t pay for the new literacy tool either. That’s because one of the things that Luis Von Ahn is famous for is his promise that he would keep education free. Read more: How Duolingo uses dirty gaming tricks to get you addicted to French And that’s not without reason: while making sure that users keep coming back is certainly important to achieve Von Ahn’s educational vision, it also is key to sustaining Duolingo’s current business model. (The app is set to launch in coming months, although an exact date has not yet been given). This gamified design is crucial, and keeping the tool fun was one of the main challenges in creating Duolingo ABC, he continues. “As soon as you see a progress bar that is half full, you just want to fill it up.” It offers incentives in the form of points and rewards it puts you in direct competition against other users in leaderboards and it sends you messages of encouragement every few minutes.

Whether you are a Duolingo aficionado or a casual learner who opens the app every so often ahead of a holiday abroad, you will know that its design is indeed closer to Candy Crush than it is to a grammar textbook. The main challenge in both cases is to keep people motivated.” “We learned a lot from gamification when it came to teaching a second language in Duolingo,” says Von Ahn, “and a lot of these learnings we applied to teach people how to read. To make sure that his new public effectively learns how to read and write, and even enjoys the process, the Duolingo founder also chose to invest a lot of his time to work with game designers. But it’s not all about the academic procedure.