<2> Duolingo Grows, But Users Disliked Increased Ads and Subscription Pushes. Stock Plummets Again
<3> A Turbulent Year for Duolingo
Since last May, Duolingo’s stock has dropped 81%. The company faced a social media backlash that month after its CEO promised they’d become an “AI-first” company, favoring AI over human contractors. Duolingo did double its language offerings using generative AI, but that summer OpenAI showed how easy it was to just roll your own language-learning tool from a short prompt in a GPT-5 demo, while Google built an AI-powered language-learning tool into its Translate app.
<3> A Mixed Bag of Results
On the surface, many of the company’s most critical metrics saw decent gains for the quarter, including:
— Daily Active Users: 52.7 million (up 30% year-over-year)
— Paid Subscribers: 12.2 million (up 28% year-over-year)
— Revenue: $282.9 million (up 35% year-over-year)
— Total bookings: $336.8 million (up 24% year-over