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Duolingo and its unhinged green mascot, Duo, is a quintessential TikTok marketing success. But against the backdrop of a potential U.S. ban or sale of the app, the language learning app has been finding its feet on YouTube Shorts.
Duolingo’s chief marketing officer (CMO) Manu Orssaud told ADWEEK the brand’s experiments on YouTube’s TikTok competitor have resulted in a 430% year-on-year boost in views.
In the first quarter of 2025 alone, Duolingo saw 300 million impressions on YouTube Shorts.
TikTok is where the language learning app “invented” its brand, said Orssaud. Since 2021, it has garnered 17 million followers and 444.7 million likes through organic content that taps into trending moments, like Netflix’s Squid Games launch or spoofing the bizarre morning routine of influencer Ashton Hall.
The CMO said TikTok is still “king” for short-form video. However, as the social ecosystem evolves, Duolingo has been diversifying its estimated $90 million marketing budget to reach audiences on other platforms—and YouTube Shorts has stood out as a particular success.
Sitcoms, spoofs, and short-form wins
Duolingo isn’t alone in testing the YouTube Shorts waters.
With 2 billion monthly active users at its latest count, the platform is quickly becoming a brand go-to for short-form content as TikTok’s fate in the U.S. hangs in the balance once more, thanks to another extension from President Trump.
Duolingo’s journey on YouTube Shorts started in 2023, before the Supreme Court’s TikTok ruling, with the launch of a Full House-esque sitcom, Living With Lily.
The series centers on the brand’s alternative purple-haried “emo mascot” and her inexplicably human parents, who live in “suburban hell.” Each episode is no more than one minute long.
Living With Lily’s first 10-episode run brought in 10.5 million views and 100,000 new YouTube followers.
“It worked well for us, so we kept going,” explained Zaria Parvez, Duolingo’s global senior social media manager. Once news of the ban broke, “the team was already set up there,” she said.
“I always joke that I love to work in the shadows and on the periphery; that’s how TikTok started for us,” she said. “Now I feel that space [for me] is YouTube. Its been our experimental channel.”
She added that original content has driven strong performance, noting that YouTube’s algorithm probably isn’t as “customized or as strong” yet as TikTok’s famous For You Page (FYP), which offers audiences a highly curated experience as soon as they open the app.
“That sort of works to the benefit of brands, because there’s just more space for people to learn, and they’re willing to learn and escape their own algorithms,” she said.
A long-form leap
Despite its TikTok success, Duolingo doesn’t market through a one-channel lens, Orssaud said.
“We try to create stories and distribute them across channels, and then use that as an experimentation ground to see what sticks across different channels, and then iterate from that,” he added.
Despite the uncertainty, YouTube still has some way to go to dethrone TikTok. The latest forecast from market research firm Emarketer puts the latter’s projected U.S. ad revenue for 2025 at $14.8 billion, well above YouTube’s anticipated $9.9 billion.
In 2024, U.S. TikTok users spent most of their time on the app (55%) watching short-form content, per intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Meanwhile, YouTube Shorts captured 26% of people’s time within the overall YouTube ecosystem.
It’s not all about short-form, anyway. As Duolingo looks to grow its 116 million monthly user base, it wants to diversify into more longer-form content on YouTube.
Orssaud believes longer videos can help “add more depth” to the stories the company tells. It’s already run some experiments, including hosting a eulogy read by CEO Luis von Ahn’s for Duo as part of a stunt that saw the mascot killed off in February.
Parvez added: “The next step with YouTube is figuring out what can make for bigger, longer pieces, versus what stays short-form. Also, how can we push narratives that we might not have been able to push with TikTok, which is so trend-dependent?”
