Duolingo entered a crowded media network space last month with the announcement of its ad program, building on what already made the platform a phenomenon: Gamification, design discipline, and a deeply engaged audience.

“It's an interactive, gamified platform that creates a hyper, engaged audience, and that's paired with an attentive user base and really strong brand love,” said Andrew Guendjoian, Duolingo’s head of ad sales. "When you put those things together, it does an excellent job of creating attention, which is something that I think is really challenging marketers in such a crowded and overly abundant internet."

Introducing ads to an active community

The language instruction app boasts 47.7 million daily and 128.3 million monthly active users, and they are far from passive. Users log in to learn complete lessons, continue streaks, and earn rewards from a platform that has gamified education.

Guendjoian said that they didn't want to take that passionate audience for granted and so Duolingo extensively tested ads and creative to ensure they felt organic.

• Early campaigns delivered strong click-through and completion rates, with unexpectedly high engagement even after the click, he said.
• That performance helped prove to Duolingo that active app users will engage more with ads, according to Guendjoian.

"These partners really helped us shape things, and iterate the next phase of what this is going to be," he said. "What we are leaning into is that we reach an attentive audience, and we can actually help marketers earn attention with their customers and their cohorts."

Characterizing partnerships

In its testing, Duolingo partnered with travel companies that could connect with Duolingo's worldly users, as well as entertainment companies and tech leaders like Adobe.

"A big behavior for people coming into Duolingo is 'I'm going to this country, and I want to learn the language of the country, so that I can fit in, and I can ask for directions, and I can connect with the culture,'" he said "So travel was a big part of our account strategy when we were rolling this out, because we had that natural hook."

• US travel industry media ad spending will grow 2.9% this year to reach $10.62 billion, according to EMARKETER's August 2025 forecast.

To keep the ads feeling natural, the program matches partners with creative that includes Duolingo's cast of characters.

Duolingo features 10 animated characters with varied personalities who help deliver the app's lessons, including the queer art teacher Oscar, the snarky Lily, or the bear Falstaff.

"We try to pair the right character with the campaign's objective and the brand itself." said Guendjoian.

• Examples are pairing Oscar, who "likes the finer things in life," with Marriott Bonvoy, showing him sitting at a French café with a glass of wine.
• They also paired horror-movie-loving Lily with the Universal Pictures' release of "Megan 2.0."

But as for the company's owl mascot, Guendjoian said, "Duo is sort of off limits."

The right format for the audience

Since gamification is core to Duolingo, rewarded advertising was the obvious path forward, Guendjoian said.

"Rewarded videos are on a user's terms, and they're getting something of value in exchange for their attention,” he said. “All of the research shows that the value they get transfers back to the brand. And then advertisers get a benefit because it performs better than anything else."

• Some 65.0% of US marketers agree that users prefer rewarded ads to non-rewarded ones, and nearly half (46.3%) say they make users feel more in control of their ad experiences, according a September survey from EMARKETER and Discord.

Younger demographics tend to look upon rewarded advertising favorably and are familiar with how it works.

• Three-quarters of US Gen Zers will be digital gamers by 2028, according to EMARKETER's October 2025 forecast, making reward-based formats a natural fit.
• Some 77% of Duolingo's users are under 35, Guendjoian said

Even though it's early days, the ad program has already proven to the internal team what it can accomplish.

"We have 100% logged in user base," said Guendjoian. "There are things that we're going to be able to do with a logged in user base that, frankly, a big chunk of the internet is unable to."