듀오링고의 무료 언어 학습 모델 뒤에 숨겨진 경제학

듀오링고는 무료 게임형 언어 학습으로 수백만 명의 마음을 사로잡는 동시에 AI와 A/B 테스트를 활용하여 성장하고 있습니다.

### 듀오링고의 경제학: 무료 언어 학습 앱이 연간 5억 달러의 수익을 창출하는 방법
* 💰 듀오링고는 매년 약 **5억 달러의 수익**을 창출하고 있으며, 전체 사용자 중 **9%만이 앱 비용을 지불**하고 광고 수익은 **8% 미만**입니다.
* 🎮 진행률 표시줄, 생명, 스트라이크를 활용한 앱의 게임화 접근 방식은 처음 몇 년 동안 **300만 명의 사용자를 유치하고 유지하는 데 핵심적인 역할**을 했습니다.
* 🧠 사용자 참여와 수익을 최적화하기 위해 **10,000회 이상의 A/B 테스트**를 수행하여 AI, A/B 테스트, 앱의 지속적인 개선으로 성공을 거두었습니다.
* 🦉 부엉이 듀오의 유명한 푸시 알림은 **밴딧 알고리즘**을 사용하여 개인화되며, 효과에 따라 사용자마다 다른 메시지가 전송됩니다.
* 📊 듀오링고의 AI 알고리즘은 매주 **130억 개의 운동 데이터**를 제공받아 각 사용자에게 맞춤화된 학습 경험을 제공합니다.
* 💵 현재 구독률은 **8% 수준**이지만, 더 공격적인 수익화 전략을 실행하여 **구독률을 크게 높일 수 있지만** 이는 성장에 걸림돌이 될 수 있습니다.
* 🤖 플랫폼에서 실제 인간과의 상호작용을 주저하는 사용자를 발견하고, AI 봇과의 롤플레잉을 위한 **월 30달러 요금제인 듀오링고 맥스**와 같은 새로운 AI 기반 기능을 모색하고 있습니다.
* 🌱 현재 듀오링고는 대부분의 제품을 계속 무료로 제공할 계획이지만, **무료 사용자 증가세가 둔화**되기 시작하면 **유료 고객 수를 늘리려고** 할 수도 있습니다.

(upbeat music) - [Reporter] This is Duolingo. Around 34 million people use the language learning app every single day, some for well over a decade, making the company around $500 million annually and making it one of the top education apps in Apple's App Store for the past decade. And yet. - Most people who use Duolingo do not pay. - [Reporter] All of its lessons are completely free to access. Only around 9% of its users pay and less than 8% of its revenue comes from advertising. So, how does a free educational app manage to also have a valuation of $7.7 billion? And is the company's strategy sustainable? The answer lies in AI, A/B testing, and this little green owl. This is the economics of Duolingo. (phone pings) If you've ever used Duolingo, you'll have noticed it's less like a traditional language lesson and a lot more like a game.

Users have lives. Get five answers wrong in a day, and you'll run out of lives for that day. Lessons have progress bars and are laid out in a journey. Players gain experience points, and streaks encourage users to play every day. The company says that's part of what helped attract some three million users within the first few years. - When we launched, we had a thing that was mobile, free, and fun, and because of that, very quickly, it overtook all methods to learn languages. - [Reporter] But before long, Duolingo ran into an issue with its mission to try and deliver free language lessons. - One of our board members who had just invested in Duolingo, she said, Look, you can't continue doing this. You gotta make revenue. - We had not given ourselves permission to make any money from our app. It's hard to build up new capabilities in an organization. - We were in a bit of a pickle because we wanted Duolingo

to be a free way to learn languages. - [Reporter] So, in 2017, the company introduced advertising, which now accounts for under 8% of its revenue. It also launched a subscription tier where users could pay $10 a month to remove ads and get unlimited lives. The company went public in the summer of 2021 and saw a boom during the pandemic as users practiced languages while travel was limited. Today, analysts say Duolingo is around 12 times bigger than its main rival Babble by downloads with some eight million users who are now paying for the app. And while that's only a small fraction of its overall user base. - The majority of the money is made from this, you know, under 10% of the active users. They give us about 80% of our revenue. - [Reporter] But while Duolingo's growth through gamification and subscriptions may seem pretty simple, there's a lot more going on behind the curtain.

Every move the company makes is meticulously crafted down to the pixel, tested on unknown users, and refined using AI, rigorous A/B testing, and constant tweaks to its app. Whenever people are using the app, we measure how long they use it for, do they come back the next day, et cetera. And we try a lot of things. We try, when do we send you a notification, what we say in the notification? Do we make the lessons a little harder? Do we make them a little easier, a little longer, a little shorter? [Reporter] Take Duolingo's push notifications. If you forget to do your lessons and risk ending your streak, you'll get a little notification from Duo, the company's mascot, reminding you to return to the app. The messages on the push notifications started out simple enough, but quickly evolved to become the stuff of memes, (bright music) including one particularly effective guilt trip.

- We decided that the last notification we would send you was telling you, Hey, these notifications don't seem to be working. We're gonna stop sending them for now. Sending that got people to come back a lot because they felt guilty. It's like your mother telling you like, Okay, well, I'll stop, like, guilt tripping you. - [Reporter] Duolingo says that this led to a 3% rise in retention. But crucially, the messages that you receive aren't the same as everybody else's. - AI is used to start figuring out basically, like, which ones of these are more effective for particular users or at particular times of day or whatever and letting the more effective ones rise to the top and then get sent to more people. - [Reporter] To figure out which messages work best, Duolingo built something called a bandit algorithm, named after a reference to a one-armed bandit,

a term for a slot machine in a casino. - Say there are, you know, several different slot machines. In this case, think of them as several different notifications we might send people. And we've tried each one some number of times and seen what it paid out each time. So, we have limited information about all these different options. And so the algorithm has to figure out, do I just go back to the one that has so far given me the most money and just go back to that one every time? Or how do I balance that with exploring different options to see maybe they're actually better, but I just got a little unlucky earlier? And each time we send out a notification, we track, did it work? Basically, did they come back to Duolingo, do their daily practice? - [Reporter] For example, the algorithm found out that the notification time for the language you're learning worked better on Chinese learners than English learners.

- It's mostly chosen by AI. We must have about a hundred different things that we can send you. They're written by people who are pretty funny, and some of them are also written by AI. - [Reporter] And that could be part of the secret to Duolingo's success. The company gets so much data back from those attempting its free lessons that it has a huge database of information that it can feed to its AI algorithms. - They do something like 13 billion exercises every week. We are throwing all that data to AI and using that to personalize the learning experience for everyone to make sure people are learning effectively and staying engaged. - [Reporter] At any given moment, the company is running hundreds of A/B tests like these, where one user is given a different experience to another to see which one wins out. Some of the tests are AI-powered, others aren't. And for most tests, around 5% of its user base act

as unknowing guinea pigs. I don't know how many A/B tests we've run at this point. It's probably more than 10,000. We've A/B tested our way into getting more people to pay us, into getting more people to use Duolingo, more people to recommend it to their friends, et cetera. So, without having run those, we would not be a successful company. I'm certain of that. - [Reporter] So, if Duolingo's algorithms and A/B testing mean that the company knows exactly what makes its users tick, why are subscriptions only at 8%, and could they be higher? After all, while the company may have 12 times more downloads than Babble, analysts say its revenue is only two to three times that of its rival. - We could tomorrow massively increase the fraction of subscribers by doing certain things. For example, right now, you get one ad

at the end of a lesson. We could play five ads at the end of a lesson. That would get a lot more people to subscribe. We could maybe even force people to subscribe. And it is true, we would have an amazing next quarter. However, that would also stifle our growth. - [Reporter] But analysts say that while Duolingo's leading market position may have been achieved by giving away much of its lessons for free, that growth strategy may start to slow, especially as some users leave the app after mastering a language or giving up on it. And that may lead to Duolingo trying to increase the number of paying customers. So, the company is exploring some new ways to get users to part with their cash. Its new AI-powered Duolingo Max tier costs around $30 a month and allows players to role-play with AI-powered bots, something the company had previously tried to offer with humans.

- We would say, Okay, so you're telling me that if you could, on Duolingo, press a button and you could have another human on the other side, be able to practice, you would use it? And they'd say, Sure, I would use it. We even asked, Would you pay for it? Like, Oh, sure, I would pay for it. And then came the very revealing question. We'd say, Okay, do you want to do it right now? 100% of people would say, No, no, no, not right now. What I love about AI is that people don't feel like the AI is judging them, even though it actually is judging them. But who cares, right? It's an AI. It's not another human. - [Reporter] But for now at least, Duolingo says it will continue giving away most of its product for free. (gentle music)

How Duolingo Turned a Free App Into a $7.7B Business | WSJ The Economics Of

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듀오링고는 매일 3,400만 명의 사용자가 이용하는 무료 언어 학습 앱으로, 연간 5억 달러의 수익을 창출하고 77억 달러의 기업 가치를 달성했습니다.

생명력, 진행률 표시줄, 경험치 등 게임과 같은 앱의 구조가 빠른 사용자 증가의 핵심이었습니다.

이러한 성공에도 불구하고 전체 사용자의 9%만이 유료 서비스를 이용하고 있어 수익 창출에 어려움을 겪고 있습니다.

듀오링고는 2017년에 현재 매출의 8% 미만을 차지하는 광고를 도입했으며, 월 10달러의 구독 티어를 출시했습니다.

이 회사는 2021년에 상장했으며 팬데믹 기간 동안 상당한 성장을 경험하여 현재 800만 명의 유료 사용자를 보유하고 있습니다.

듀오링고의 성공은 세심한 테스트, AI, 지속적인 앱 개선에 힘입은 것으로, 푸시 알림은 사용자 참여에 핵심적인 역할을 합니다.

듀오링고의 효과적인 알림 전략

듀오링고는 비효율적인 알림 전송을 중단하여 사용자 리텐션이 3% 증가했습니다.

이 회사는 AI와 밴디트 알고리즘을 사용하여 개별 사용자에게 가장 효과적인 메시지를 결정합니다.

이 알고리즘은 각 알림의 성공 여부를 추적하고 전략을 조정하여 궁극적으로 다양한 학습자에게 도달하기 가장 좋은 시간을 찾아냅니다.

AI와 A/B 테스트로 이룬 듀오링고의 성공

듀오링고의 성공은 무료 레슨에서 얻은 방대한 사용자 데이터베이스를 바탕으로 학습 경험을 개인화하는 데 활용하고 있습니다.

이 회사는 최고의 사용자 경험을 결정하기 위해 수백 개의 A/B 테스트를 실행하며, 전체 사용자 중 약 5%를 테스트 대상으로 삼고 있습니다.

대규모 사용자 기반과 다운로드 수에도 불구하고 Duolingo의 구독률은 8%에 불과하여 경쟁업체에 비해 수익에 대한 의문이 제기되고 있습니다.

듀오링고의 성장 전략과 새로운 서비스

듀오링고는 구독을 늘리기 위해 레슨이 끝날 때 광고를 재생하는 것을 고려하고 있지만, 이는 장기적인 성장을 저해할 수 있다는 점을 인정하고 있습니다.

무료 레슨 모델은 성공적이지만 사용자 이탈로 인해 유료 고객 증가로 전환할 수 있습니다.

현재 듀오링고는 사용자 참여와 수익 창출을 위해 월 30달러의 새로운 AI 기반 티어인 듀오링고 맥스를 도입하여 AI 봇을 활용한 롤플레잉을 제공하고 있습니다.