The upcoming shutdown of Livemocha comes hardly as a surprise; one could argue that the language learning community has been on life support for almost three years after its acquisition by Rosetta Stone. One Twitter user stated that Rosetta Stone simply left Livemocha dying in a ditch.
Yet, pulling the plug for good is always a moment of reflection and essentially a point of no return.
What went wrong with one of the world’s biggest language learning communities? Livemocha had it all: sizeable funding, impressive user growth, partnerships with big publishers. Sadly, it ended up as an acquisition target for the company it had aimed to dethrone and got overtaken by its smaller, less funded competitors busuu and Babbel. I am going to publish an in-depth article in the coming weeks but here are some initial thoughts.
Off to a good start
I was a Livemocha user right from the beginning. As an online language coach and emerging edtech blogger I was interested in what way language learning communities would affect my tutoring business. One of the key premises, besides free language courses, being the interaction with community members, helping each other to learn a foreign language for free. Therefore, the questions to me were a) if learners now get (more or less) qualified feedback from native speakers for free would they still look for paid lessons with tutors and b) will the freemium model have a negative impact on hourly rates for us tutors.
Ignoring the Future
Based on the growth of user numbers compared to then existent live lesson marketplaces, like Myngle, eduFire or WizIQ, it was obvious to me that Livemocha and co. were on to something. Of course, back in late 2008 / early 2009 we could not imagine the impact of smartphones on the language learning market as the iPhone was still a luxury item and Android devices were for early adopters and geeks only.
Unfortunately for Livemocha the management totally ignored this emerging platform, probably happy with its growth rate consisting of traditional PC users. busuu and Babbel, on the other hand, were quick to jump on the new platform which resulted in a surge in user numbers. Even after a management shakeup, Livemocha did not try to catch up with its competition but chose to target Rosetta Stone instead. A decision I could hardly understand back then.
The thing is that it was not too late for Livemocha at that point. Both app stores were still fairly new, hence competition in the language learning space was low compared to today. A language learning application that could profit from positive reviews / downloads from its 16 million user base would have ranked easily in the top ten in most regions, hence driving a ton of new users for free towards the service. But Livemocha chose to invest money in classic banner ads and also did not integrate social triggers into other social networks, something busuu did with Facebook and its busuu berries.
Burned Out
After Rosetta Stone acquired Livemocha there have been some minor efforts to revive the community. Just last year the company launched a brand new version of Livemocha, but apparently it was too late as the patient’s heart, the community, stopped beating long ago. There are no detailed numbers available but Rosetta Stone paid around $0.50 per user if we don’t include the IP. This tells me that even in 2013 the Livemocha community was far from being healthy. It is also noteworthy that out of the three edtech startups that started out as language learning communities, busuu is the only one that is still dedicated to the concept and apparently makes it work for its 50+ million users. Babbel is a premium service that targets self-paced individual learners and juggernaut Duolingo also does without a community feature for now.
In the next post I will take a look at communities in the language learning market.