TikTok Fave Duolingo Boosts YouTube Shorts Viewership 430% in One Year

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.”