Duolingo is a fascinating study in consumer "education."
The app is fairly useless for language learning* but is wildly popular.
88.4M Monthly Active Users
6.6M Paid Subscribers
$530M in FY 2023 Revenue
$93.7M in FY 2023 EBITDA
The kicker? $8.4B market cap.
2x bigger than Udemy + Coursera combined.
Shocking considering it is more edutainment than education.*
Lessons:
- Consumers often engage more with edutainment (competing with Candy Crush or TikTok) than education. There's a very weak correlation to effectiveness. (MasterClass is another example imho: low on learning, still very successful).
- Duolingo still has a HUGE impact on language learning for millions of people because they are 1000x bigger. Even if they are 100x less effective than another language learning app, they can still provide 10x more value to the overall population.
- Growth and EBITDA are significant better than Udemy/Coursera. The market loves profitable, fast-growing companies (why wouldn't they?)
*Sorry, but its true. Duolingo is a fun game, but you can spend years on it and not be able to have a conversation in your language of choice.