Duolingo, the popular language learning service, today announced that it has now hit more than 300 million users worldwide. A year ago, Duolingo reported 200 million total users.
That’s great, but the number of monthly active users on the service remains stagnant. Duolingo reported 25 million active users a year ago — and that’s still the same today, a company spokesperson confirmed. The company argues this is due to its focus on revenue growth instead of user growth in the last year, but it did grow by 100 million total users.
Maybe that’s why the company is putting a bit more effort behind its marketing efforts now. As the company also today announced, it has hired Cammie Dunaway as its first chief marketing officer (CMO) to help it reach those next 300 million users.
Before joining Duolingo, Dunaway was the CMO of Yahoo for four years in the early 2000s before joining Nintendo in 2007. In recent years, she took on the role of president and CMO of KidZania.
“This is an opportunity to have mission alignment and work with great people,” Dunaway told me when I asked her what attracted her to the job. “And also to be able to really make an impact and an important point in the company’s history. But on the mission alignment: I am at the point of my career where I want to spend my talents and my energy really helping companies grow who I think make a difference in the world.”
But why did Duolingo decide to hire a CMO now and start to more actively go after new users? Dunaway argues that the company is now at an inflection point where it has paid services and a subscription product. “That gives us the opportunity to put a little bit more focus behind marketing because we want to ensure that we continue to grow so that we’re able to make the service free and accessible to people who need us,” she explained.
So going forward, you’re going to see a lot more brand marketing from Duolingo and see the company tell a lot more stories (and it’s already doing some of that), but it’ll also do some traditional performance marketing to acquire new users that it thinks will likely convert into paying subscribers. As Duolingo co-founder Luis von Ahn noted last year, the company is looking at its subscription product, which provides an ad-free experience, offline access and a few other perks, as a way to subsidize the product for those who can’t afford a subscription.
While it’s ramping up its marketing efforts, though, Dunaway promises that Duolingo won’t lose its focus on building the best product for its users. And sometimes those go hand-in-hand. Duolingo is about to launch a Hawaiian course, for example, to help tourists learn more about the islands they visit. But I’m sure that’s also going to generate quite a bit of buzz for the service.
What Duolingo really has to figure out now, though, is how to turn that huge install base into a growing base of active users. That, after all, is the group of people who will also buy subscriptions and support the service in other ways.
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