If you think programmatic advertising on the open web is opaque, well, it’s got nothing on the app economy.
Mobile ad network margins can run as high as 40% or 50%, said Felix Braberg, a mobile gaming consultant and ad monetization expert. And even when publishers negotiate contractual caps, there’s no way to confirm they’re being honored, he added.
It’s a problem that Jim Payne and Dan Sack, the folks behind MoPub and MAX, think they can solve through their latest venture, CloudX.
CloudX, which launched into general availability in February, uses AI agents to handle mobile monetization tasks, such as setting price floors, updating line items and managing SDK integrations.
It positions itself as neutral infrastructure, charging a flat fee rather than taking a cut on both sides of a transaction. Braberg is an early publisher partner. According to Payne, most publishers on the platform are already seeing double-digit revenue lifts, and one recently reported a roughly 30% increase on Android.
Now, CloudX is turning its agents loose on user acquisition.
On Wednesday, the company launched agentic buying, which lets publishers acquire users directly from other apps without going through an ad network. The capability is in a private beta running through Q3 with a small group of publishers.
Good timing
Typically, there are two things app publishers worry about, Payne said. One is monetizing their traffic, and the other is acquiring new users.
“The money they generate from monetization goes into growing their audience,” he said. And, of course, publishers can’t monetize without first attracting users.
One feeds the other; it’s a continuum.
Both Payne and Sack came up through the monetization side of that split. MoPub, Payne’s first act, was a mobile exchange that helped app developers manage and sell their inventory. Sack, who co-founded mediation platform MAX, was likewise focused on helping publishers squeeze more revenue out of their apps.
(Fun fact: Both MoPub and MAX eventually ended up at AppLovin. Payne sold MoPub to Twitter in 2013 which, in turn, sold it to AppLovin in 2022 before shutting the exchange down shortly thereafter. AppLovin acquired MAX in 2018.)
“But we never got to the buy side,” Payne said, referring to MoPub.
The timing is ripe now, though, because of agentic technology, which didn’t exist in any meaningful way three or even five years ago, let alone more than a decade ago. App publishers didn’t have agents that could sit on top of their stack, automate busy work, generate ad creative, measure results and flag bad setups before they hurt revenue, Sack said.
Recent progress in large language models and agents makes it possible to offer more flexible tools that are also easy to use, Payne added.
AI runs UA
That’s a shift from the way most user acquisition is done today, which is usually through bundled SDKs and networks that control both the auction and the spread.
To be fair, those bundles are convenient. A single SDK can handle mediation, monetization and performance. But they also make it harder for publishers to know what they’re actually paying for – and harder to walk away. The more a studio leans on network-run UA, the more its growth and monetization are effectively locked into the same opaque relationship.
CloudX is trying to chip away at that dependence rather than replace it outright. It charges a flat fee on campaigns that transact through its platform, and the agent’s work – things like generating creative and running models – is priced on a token basis, rather than folded into a take rate on media.
A publisher sets a goal and a budget, and an agent decides which apps to buy from on CloudX’s marketplace at what price and with which creatives.
“It’s almost as if you had your own DSP going out there into the world,” Payne said. “But you don’t have to create all that software, create all those connections or, crucially, operate it.”
Most early demand is coming from publishers that already have scale and want more control.
Sometimes, it’s two large, non-competing games that want to trade users directly rather than route those campaigns through a network. In other cases, big portfolio publishers want to lean harder on cross-promotion across dozens of titles. And sometimes it’s studios experimenting with AI-built games that need a faster “flywheely way” to launch new apps, Sack said.
To help build out the demand side, CloudX recently hired Janae Redmond, who previously worked with Payne at MoPub, to lead its marketplace efforts.
Getting creative
Meanwhile, on the product side, CloudX is also putting creative production on its agent’s to-do list. Alongside the agentic buying beta, it released a creative generation tool for publishers on its platform to produce video and interactive playables in bulk.
“It allows people to make and test thousands of different playable ad variations,” said Payne, who added that the output isn’t locked into CloudX. Publishers can take the ads they create and run them wherever they like.
But for all the talk of agents and new tools, the question remains: How much of this process can AI agents realistically automate?
Perhaps the better question, though, is why not automate whatever can be automated and leave humans to decide on the strategy? For example, optimizing a mediation setup alone can often drive a 15% to 30% uplift, Braberg said, which is something a publisher could easily delegate to an agent.
“The impact AI can have on ad monetization is huge,” he said. “Once your app reaches a certain scale, there is simply too much data for a human to process effectively.”
