AppLovin has been on a wild ride for the past couple of years.
Its shares traded at around $80 in 2024, reached $720 in late 2025 and now trade at $340.
In that short time, AppLovin has fought off short-seller attacks, navigated a downturn in casual gaming apps – its core market – and watched investors sour on SaaS stocks.
AppLovin’s market cap fell from roughly $245 billion to around $106 billion today.
The path back runs through advertising – specifically, expanding beyond its mobile gaming roots.
Advertising has long been AppLovin’s primary revenue driver. Until recently, though, its business was almost entirely mobile gaming ads, primarily app install campaigns for other game apps.
Four years ago, AppLovin launched an ecommerce beta program to bring in non-gaming brands, everything from general consumer apps and Shopify-based ecommerce to social media brands and mid-size national brands.
The logic is straightforward, said Sam Appelbaum, who joined AppLovin last December as director of its consumer segment, which is the evolved form of its ecommece business. Just because someone has played and downloaded numerous card or word games doesn’t mean they’ll only respond to gaming ads.
So why not serve them ads for other types of consumer apps, like Uber or DoorDash? Why not ads for clothing companies or dog food or anything else you can buy online?
New ad platform in town
AppLovin’s new consumer ads business works not unlike Google’s Performance Max or Meta’s Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, in the sense that it’s an AI-driven, algorithmic product. The platform controls the targeting, not the person.
In other words, setting up an AppLovin campaign is very straightforward. There are no audience controls, no keyword strategies, no platform bells and whistles of any kind, said Will Frank, senior director of growth at the makeup and skincare brand AS Beauty.
Advertisers choose between Discovery and Prospecting campaigns, “and that’s pretty much it,” Frank said.
But for many of the buyers AdExchanger spoke with, the simplicity is a feature, not a bug.
One advertiser, who requested anonymity in order to discuss platform partners freely, said he cares less about the lack of tools and toggles for campaign setup than the advanced measurement AppLovin offers on the backend. Amazon, by contrast, makes it very difficult to run incrementality tests or create holdout groups in its at platform, he said. Google and Meta, meanwhile, do both admittedly have platform-approved measurement partners and attribution products for incrementality measurement – but that’s all you get. Those platforms won’t bend to accommodate a brand’s particular measurement demands, the advertiser said. AppLovin will.
Even so, AppLovin’s consumer ad business faces a high wall of skeptical buyers.
For example, AS Beauty examined the traffic AppLovin was driving to its site and ran holdout tests to see if sales dropped in markets where AppLovin ads were turned off. “We definitely were trying to rip it apart at all different angles,” Frank said, because the finance and marketing group was dubious of AppLovin’s ad platform in comparison to the likes of Google and Meta.
But the traffic was legit and the campaigns were working – even though it’s hard to see exactly how.
Like every walled garden, AppLovin offers limited transparency. Advertisers don’t know who they targeted or which apps their ads appeared in. Appelbaum, a little obliquely, said that AppLovin discloses information along “the dimensions that actually drive results.” Meaning advertisers can see the operating system (iOS or Android, mainly), time of day and the type of creative unit, whether that’s a rewarded video ad or an interstitial ad between levels.
AppLovin is another black box, said one agency buyer who also exchanged anonymity for candor. But unlike the others, she said, AppLovin will actually work with you.
In fact, one of AppLovin’s main differentiators isn’t the platform itself, but the service. As a challenger platform, it simply tries harder. Numerous ad buyers said both AppLovin and Snapchat have excellent account service, in marked contrast to Google and Meta, which replaced much of their technical account service with chatbots.
(One advertiser compared Meta’s and Google’s customer service to “asking an empty mailbox for help.”)
Just a few weeks ago, the agency buyer said, Meta’s AI ad platform spent more than $50,000 in one day (double what was set as the daily spend cap) for one account and delivered seemingly useless traffic. Despite persistent efforts, the agency was unable to get ahold of a real human to address the issue, and eventually settled for being issued a partial refund in the form of ad credits.
And during Amazon’s recent Prime Day event, the agency was unable to reach account services to address an ad serving problem that was mucking up one of the biggest ad days all year.
AppLovin’s account services were inexplicably the only ones available on Prime Day, she said.
Short story
No AppLovin deep dive is complete without examining the company’s inveterate opposition.
AppLovin’s rise has caught the attention of a legion of short sellers who allege all sorts of malfeasance, from AppLovin executives meddling in global politics to ads that auto-click to game attribution.
Several ad buyers and two industry analysts – execs and operators who have their own blogs and have written about AppLovin – requested to remain anonymous for this story to avoid being dragged into the fray.
One analyst told AdExchanger that after posting his own investigation of AppLovin’s tracking practices, he was approached by short sellers who wanted to amplify and distort his findings.
When it comes to AppLovin’s opponents, “I’ve felt caught in the crosshairs often,” said Olivia Kory, marketing and strategy chief at incrementality and attribution vendor Haus, which recently published a mostly positive report on AppLovin’s new ad business. Kory said she’s been accused of being secretly affiliated with AppLovin or in some way paid to speak positively about its ad product.
Haus has combed through all the available data on AppLovin campaigns, Kory said, and run extensive geo-holdout tests. But there’s persistent pushback from buyers or reticence to accept the results.
“What’s the catch? There has to be a catch.” Kory said she hears those lines from AppLovin advertisers all the time.
Why the doubters?
AppLovin has a strong foundation for its consumer ad business.
After all, AppLovin has already proven itself as a major mobile performance marketing channel. It’s the engine behind the majority of mobile game downloads.
“I wonder why there’s such skepticism [of the new consumer ad platform] given their success in mobile apps,” Kory said.
One challenge is that, unlike the competitive set of Google, Meta and Amazon, AppLovin is not also a consumer business or a household name. It’s a decentralized network of gaming apps connected by mutual SDKs.
Last week, during the company’s Q2 earnings call, Wells Fargo analyst Alec Brondolo pressed AppLovin execs on whether they had any major promotional plans. “Because it seems to me that in the long tail, advertisers are choosing their ads platforms based on the platforms they know as consumers,” he said.
And being a recognized consumer brand might also help when it comes to accepting attribution, not just signing up new advertiser accounts.
One early marketer participant in the ecommerce beta program said his CFO was reluctant to accept AppLovin campaign results.
It’s an accepted fact that Google, Meta and Amazon massively over-attribute their own platform conversions, he said, with post-campaign reports that routinely show more attributed sales than a brand sees in its CRM. “But they buy it,” he said of CMOs and CFOs.
Marketers and finance execs alike know the ad platform numbers are inflated, but they use the information to plan their budgets because they’ve all shopped or discovered products via Google, Amazon and Instagram, he hypothesized.
For the other big search and social platforms, there is a gut-level trust that already exists – and AppLovin is still trying to earn it. Part of that means matching the way the big platforms operate.
“The way that we do attribution is very close to or at parity with how most of the other platforms do it,” Appelbaum said.
Although matching the big platform standards often means clearing a very low bar.
One apparel marketer suggested that AppLovin has changed its mobile ad setup to expand the clickable area of ad units, making it easier to rack up attributable clicks from users who are trying to swipe through or just resting their thumb in a normal spot on the screen. Meta recently did the same thing with a quiet change to what it called “safe zones” in Reels ads.
AppLovin is also the most aggressive third-party data collector in the online ad ecosystem, according to one mobile analyst.
Through its SDK – and regardless of whether users reject tracking via Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency – AppLovin collects data on the mobile carrier, available memory, country code, screen orientation, status bar height, monotonic clock, battery flags and dozens of other data points. AppLovin complies with ATT by zeroing out its own cross-app ID when users opt out of tracking but, according to the mobile analyst its platform still creates an identifiable fingerprint in the background, Those fingerprinted IDs can still be passed to programmatic bidders.
If AppLovin were the only platform to use such tricks, it would be a major problem. But they’re following a well-thumbed playbook. Meta, for example, also concocted a workaround for tracking after Apple introduced ATT, directing advertisers to its server-side integrations and conversion API.
The same apparel brand marketer said that AppLovin’s minimalist campaign reporting looks generous compared to the other walled gardens.
For marketers or CFOs who are dubious of AppLovin’s practices, he said, the next question ought to be: “Why do you accept the same or worse from Google and Meta?”
The hopers
One interesting aspect of the skepticism with AppLovin is that marketers genuinely want the platform to succeed. They may not believe the ROAS numbers and try to tear the results apart, but they’re also rooting for AppLovin to work because they want more major ad platforms to diversify their spend.
Every few months, Kory said, there are platform meltdowns or glitches on Meta, which ends up precipitating inbound interest in AppLovin. Marketers are “so desperate to diversify out of Meta and Google,” she said.
In fact, many AppLovin advertisers aren’t even hunting for incremental new audiences. They just want to protect the long-term health of their businesses by becoming less reliant on Google and Meta.
AppLovin was about a one-point share of overall online ad spend around two ago. But Kory said that AppLovin’s share increased to 5% by the beginning of 2026 and stands at roughly 8% as of August.
But now comes the hard part, the long uphill plateau.
The novelty of being the new platform has worn off and “performance is cooling off a bit,” Kory said.
AppLovin also opened its consumer ads platform to all advertisers olnly a couple months ago, which drives up costs. When there were just a few cosmetics brands in the ecommerce beta, for example, each one could excel. AppLovin is now open to all cosmetics brands, but the overall demand for cosmetic products across AppLovin’s audience hasn’t grown.
Meanwhile, the big platforms have endless new types of media and formats: streaming TV, podcasts and streaming audio, retail media, digital out-of-home, online video, social media, search and AI search, mobile and desktop web banners.
AppLovin serves ads in mobile game apps. That’s it.
“I like the focus to be honest,” Frank said. Gaming is already a huge part of people’s daily attention, he said, but it’s not been effectively tapped for advertising.
As Appelbaum put it: “There’s so much juice to squeeze inside of this mobile gaming environment. It’s one of the last unconquered frontiers” for online performance marketers.
CEO Adam Foroughi told investors last week that AppLovin would expand into new media eventually. A video ad that drives makeup sales from AppLovin games “should port really well to television,” he said.
But he added that right now AppLovin is driving efficiency and gains in its core in-app gaming inventory. When the company does expand, he said, AppLovin’s likely first step will be into other on-device inventory, like non-gaming apps.
So far, AppLovin has been successful because its technology is built for mobile performance marketers. Its consumer business doesn’t change that fact; it only broadens the definition of who AppLovin considers a “performance marketer.”
In the meantime, though, everyone – advertisers, mobile game developers, Google, Apple, investors, publishers and most of the ad world – has a strong opinion on how AppLovin’s ad business should work.
But AppLovin has just one directive.
“If you tune everything out and just relentlessly focus on building the most performant product possible,” Appelbaum said, “good things happen on the other side of that.”
