Busuu.com, the language learning community, is partnering with British publisher Collins to offer a range of grammar guides.
It represents the second traditional publisher tie-up for Madrid-based busuu following a similar arrangement with PONS Publishing Group, the second biggest publisher in Germany as part of the Klett Group. It’s also interesting as Collins already has a partnership with busuu’s much better funded and US-based rival livemocha.com ($14m vs approx. $1.4m), suggesting, perhaps, that busuu is punching above its weight.
The grammar guides from Collins will be available to busuu’s 1 million users priced at €7.99 for Premium users and €9.99 for those on a free account. They’re offered for Spanish, French, German and Italian, and the material is fully integrated with busuu’s existing interactive language courses. More material from Collins is planned in the near future.
The Collins partnership is more evidence of busuu turning on the monetization taps. Last month the company launched 7 iPhone applications targeting English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Russian wrapped around a freemium play. The free version of each app gives access to 20 learning units (5 units at each level), while the complete, paid-for content (€2.99 per learning level or €12 for each entire course) offers vocabulary units with more than 3,000 words and phrases, grammar units, 150 dialogues and “hundreds of interactive exercises”.
As we noted at the time, the “community” angle might bring in the punters – 1 million registered members – but it’s selling professionally-produced learning content that clearly pays the bills.