AppLovin Corporation (AppLovin) is a leader in the advertising ecosystem providing end-to-end advertising solutions that allow businesses to reach, monetize and grow their global audiences. The company also has a globally diversified portfolio of apps—free-to-play mobile games that it operates through its owned or partner studios.
The company provides end-to-end artificial intelligence-powered (AI) advertising solutions for businesses to reach, monetize and grow their global audience (Advertisi...
AppLovin Corporation (AppLovin) is a leader in the advertising ecosystem providing end-to-end advertising solutions that allow businesses to reach, monetize and grow their global audiences. The company also has a globally diversified portfolio of apps—free-to-play mobile games that it operates through its owned or partner studios.
The company provides end-to-end artificial intelligence-powered (AI) advertising solutions for businesses to reach, monetize and grow their global audience (Advertising). The company also operates a portfolio of owned mobile apps (Apps). The company’s scaled business model is intricately linked to the advertising ecosystem, providing a durable competitive advantage. The company generates revenue when its advertisers achieve their return on spend targets with its Advertising solutions, ensuring that their success directly fuels its growth.
AppLovin is critical to the success of advertisers and publishers seeking to solve marketing and monetization challenges. Through the company’s technologies and scaled distribution, advertisers are able to better place content so that it is discovered by the right audience, manage, optimize, and analyze their marketing investments, and improve the monetization of their content, and publishers are able to better monetize their gaming apps. The company’s Advertising solutions include a comprehensive suite of tools, including:
AppDiscovery, the company’s user acquisition solution, is the cornerstone of its Advertising solutions. AppDiscovery is powered by AXON, the company’s AI-powered advertising engine, and matches advertiser demand with publisher supply through auctions at vast scale and at microsecond-level speeds.
MAX is the company’s monetization solution, utilizing an advanced in-app bidding technology that optimizes the value of a publisher’s advertising inventory by running a real-time competitive auction, driving more competition, and higher returns for publishers.
Adjust is the company’s measurement and analytics marketing platform which provides marketers with the visibility, insights, and data needed to scale their apps marketing and drive more informed results.
Wurl is the company’s connected TV (CTV) platform that both distributes streaming video for content companies and provides advanced advertising and publishing solutions to attract viewers and maximize revenue.
The company generates its revenue from Advertising and its Apps. As more advertisers uses the company’s Advertising solutions to market and monetize their content, the company gains access to more data regarding users and user engagement1, further strengthening its scaled distribution. As the company’s distribution grows, it gains better insights for its AXON recommendation engine, which then further enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of the company’s Advertising solutions. The company’s Apps consists of a globally diversified portfolio of over 200 free-to-play mobile games across five genres, run by ten studios, some of which it owns and others that the company partners with. The company’s studios generally focus on the development of easy to learn and play games, which appeal to a broad range of demographics, but its portfolio also includes several games for other genres.
Segments
The company operates through two segments, Advertising and Apps.
AppLovin Advertising
The company’s comprehensive, end-to-end Advertising solutions deliver value by helping companies scale their businesses and maximize their revenue. Specifically, the company’s solutions enable advertisers to automate their marketing, engagement, and monetization efforts in three core ways. First, the company provides marketing technology that allows advertisers to reach more of the most suitable users with personalized content to increase the number of users who download and engage with their content. Second, the company provides advertisers with monetization and analytics technology to maximize the value of their advertising inventory by obtaining a high price for each impression. Third, the company provides developers, who are often also advertisers, a set of capabilities to optimize their apps and help streamline their businesses. Additionally, the company has entered the CTV advertising market with the integration of Wurl.
The company’s Advertising solutions also enable publishers to leverage real-time auctions that optimize the value for each impression, while simultaneously enabling them to attain an attractive value for each of the impressions from their advertising inventory. When these mutually reinforcing elements are combined, it creates a robust and successful marketing and monetization engine that both sells attractive advertising inventory to advertisers while monetizing it for publishers.
The company’s Advertising solutions are delivered through an integrated and seamless user interface, which provides the following benefits to advertisers to reach and attract users at scale; leverage proprietary data and insights; automate time consuming and manual processes; and seamlessly adapt to industry innovation.
The company’s Advertising solutions are primarily made up of four key products: AppDiscovery, MAX, Adjust, and Wurl.
AppDiscovery
AppDiscovery is a suite of marketing solutions that enables developers to automate, optimize, and manage their marketing efforts. AppDiscovery is powered by AXON's predictive algorithms to enable advertisers to match their apps to users that are more likely to download them. This form of personalized advertising focuses on the end user, enabling the advertisers to find the right users and delivering to users more of what they are likely to be interested in. Advertisers set return goals for their campaigns and AppDiscovery targets users to match those goals. Return on advertising spend is measured based on third-party attribution, Advertisers are charged for advertising dynamically based on the revenue they receive from acquired users, rather than a simple fixed price per impression or per action (click or installation). Advertisers are not only able to attract users that download, but also find a high volume of users that stay and engage with their apps for greater retention and ultimately, increased opportunities for better monetization. Revenue from AppDiscovery consists of a vast majority of the company’s Advertising Revenue.
With AppDiscovery, advertisers can define the framework of their campaigns in the following ways:
Reach: Advertisers identify what they are willing to pay to acquire their target users. The company’s technology finds the users at that value who are most likely to download and engage with the app.
Global scale: Advertisers can choose to connect with users in different regions around the world, and the company’s technology suggests the best locations based on their parameters.
Retain and engage: The company’s system is built around optimizing to the advertiser’s revenue so its algorithms automatically adjust based on the likelihood users will engage. The company’s clients can analyze by retention periods from initial app download onwards, so that advertisers understand the effectiveness of their marketing investments.
Targeted returns: Advertisers set their goals and target return on ad sales and the company’s algorithms adjust cost and campaign specifics to meet them.
AppDiscovery includes the following features:
Advanced Campaign Management: An interface to create, manage, and automatically optimize campaigns based on return on ad sales goals.
Real-time Analytics: An interface to see results and optimize against them with the company’s ROI-based analytics environment.
Lifetime Value (LTV) Reporting: A tool that breaks down campaign results by source and location, allowing advertisers to make real-time, informed decisions about the value and longevity of their campaigns.
High Quality and Quantity Creatives: Advertisers can make and test as many creatives as needed. They also have access to the company’s in-house creative team, SparkLabs, for expert ad creation and testing strategies.
MAX
MAX is the company’s in-app bidding solution that optimizes the value of publishers' advertising inventory by running a single unbiased, real-time competitive auction, driving more competition and higher returns for publishers. MAX auctions are more effective than historical tools and approaches because MAX yields more targeted users for advertisers and enables publishers to achieve better competitive prices for each impression. Many developers who integrate MAX has experienced a measurable increase in their average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU) over traditional monetization tools and save countless hours because they are able to automate manual monetization work through its advanced feature set. As a result, MAX has become the preferred in-app bidding solution for many publishers worldwide, helping drive meaningful growth and momentum for AppLovin.
MAX includes the following features:
Advanced In-App Bidding Technology: MAX’s competitive auctions happen in real time with most bidding platforms in the industry bidding simultaneously for developers’ inventory at high volume. The competitive global demand helps maximize average revenue per user on each impression with many developers experiencing a measurable increase when moving to MAX.
Automated Monetization: MAX saves developers time through its extensive suite of APIs for automation.
Ad quality Assurance and Review: MAX drives superior user experience with exclusive features that automatically flag risky content to keep developers’ brands safe.
Powerful Insights: MAX helps developers better understand the LTV for each user and increase revenue to maximize yield for each ad opportunity.
Adjust
Adjust is the company’s measurement and analytics marketing platform which provides the visibility, insights, and tools marketers need to grow their apps from early stage to maturity. The company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform is an end-to-end solution for optimizing ad performance and maximizing returns, powered by accurate attribution data and in-depth reporting that are essential for meeting business goals. Adjust allows clients to better understand their users’ journey while allowing marketers to make smarter decisions through measurement, attribution, and fraud prevention.
The Adjust product solutions allow customers to benefit from the following key features:
Impact through measurement: Drive results faster with accurate, timely measurement on marketing and ad spend across channels.
Insights through real-time data and reports: Easily share timely, actionable insights with stakeholders to drive their business forward.
Strategic growth with automated attribution solutions: Scale profits with automated solutions that attribute sources and help customers work smarter and accomplish more.
Wurl
Wurl is the company’s connected TV (CTV) platform which distributes streaming video for content companies and provides advertising and publishing solutions to maximize Advertising Revenue, grow their CTV viewership, and strengthen their brand value. Wurl focuses on driving the streaming industry forward with market-leading solutions that help connect the right viewers to the right content. It brings data-driven advertising and measurement to Connected TV. The technology helps companies engage with the highest-value viewers, and ultimately increase their revenue.
Wurl has built the following products to meet their customers’ needs:
AdPool is a monetization solution that connects CTV supply with top advertisers and access to exclusive demand.
TVBits is an AI-powered interactive, personalized, short-form CTV application that allows viewers to discover content and content companies and streamers the ability to increase viewership, engagement, and revenue.
BrandDiscovery is an AI-powered CTV advertising tool that identifies contextual segments based on genre, brand safety, and the emotion of each scene to help advertisers deliver the right ad at the right time.
ContentDiscovery is an AI-powered advertising solution that grows audiences, increases engagement, and reduces churn for streaming platforms and apps.
Global FAST Pass (GFP) is a distribution solution that makes it easy to launch Free Ad-supported CTV channels, monetize them instantly, and access data to grow and retain audiences.
AppLovin Apps
The company’s Apps consists of a globally diversified portfolio of over 200 free-to-play mobile games across five genres, run by ten studios located worldwide with a deep bench of talented developers. The company’s studios have developed and published games across a number of genres including casual, match-three, card/casino, mid-core, and hyper-casual. A large portion of the company’s portfolio are casual, match-three and card/casino games that have a lower risk of development and generally has more predictable revenue streams and return. These games can be played a few minutes at a time and appeal to a wide range of users across many highly attractive demographics. The company’s studios leverage live ops to quickly iterate and increase in-game monetization by optimizing app economies and improving in-game conversion on items and offers. The studios operating the company’s portfolio of Apps utilize its Advertising solutions to market, scale, and monetize the company’s Apps.
Strategy for Growth
The company has a comprehensive strategy to continue the company’s growth and further enhance its market position in the advertising ecosystem: existing market expansion; enhance and extend AI-based technologies; new market expansion (such as non-gaming mobile app segments and industries, other content industries and industry partnerships); and pursue strategic investments and partnerships.
Customers and Developer Community
The company’s globally diverse customers range from the largest enterprises to small and independent businesses and individuals across a variety of industries. The company’s customers comprise multiple groups within the advertising ecosystem, including advertisers leveraging the company’s platform to find users and advertising networks using its mediation solution to purchase advertising inventory. The company’s Apps also work with advertising networks who purchase advertising inventory and consumers who purchase in-app products. The company also works with the mobile app publisher community who leverages its mediation solution to monetize their advertising inventory.
Competition
The company faces competition from providers of developer tools that enable developers to reach their audiences or manage or optimize their advertising campaigns. These companies vary in size and include Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Unity Software as well as various private companies, several of which are also its partners and clients.
Additionally, the company competes with businesses that develop online and mobile games and other mobile apps, which vary in size and include companies such as Activision Blizzard (Microsoft), Tencent, and Zynga (Take-Two Interactive), as well as other public and private companies, many of which are also its partners and clients. As the company expands its global operations and mobile app offerings, the company increasingly faces competition from high-profile companies with significant online presences that may introduce new or expanded offerings, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Snap.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company owned the following trademarks related to the business: 58 registered trademarks in the United States, 16 pending trademark applications in the United States, as well as 400 registered trademarks in non-U.S. jurisdictions, and 31 pending trademark applications in various non-U.S. jurisdictions. The company also has registered domain names for websites that it uses in its business, such as www.applovin.com. As of December 31, 2024, the company owned seven patents related to its Advertising solutions and four related to the company’s Apps business.
‘AppLovin,’ the company’s logo, and its other registered or common law trademarks, service marks, or trade names are the property of the company.
Data Privacy and Security Laws
The data the company collects and otherwise processes is integral to its Advertising solutions and Apps, providing the company with insights to improve its AI-powered advertising engine AXON and the company’s developer tools, to optimize app discovery and monetization and to improve its Apps. The company’s collection, use, receipt, and other processing of data in its business subjects it to numerous U.S. state and federal laws and regulations, and foreign laws and regulations, addressing privacy, data protection and the collection, storing, sharing, use, transfer, disclosure, protection and processing of certain types of data. Such regulations include, for example, the European Union General Data Protection Regulation, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, Section 5(a) of the Federal Trade Commission Act, and the California Consumer Privacy Act and similar U.S. state laws.
History
AppLovin Corporation was founded in 2011. The company was incorporated under the laws of the state of Delaware in 2011.
