Company
I have been spending a lot more time with advertisers lately. For most of my time leading AppLovin, my closest relationships were with gaming executives. We grew our businesses together over many years. But as we expanded beyond gaming into e-commerce and other categories, I began working with a broader set of founders, operators, and marketers.
One consistent theme in these conversations is that despite our scale, many potential customers do not fully understand how our business model actually works. There are very few examples of scaled advertising businesses like ours that do not rely on owning a consumer traffic property, so the confusion is understandable.
As a result, I still hear the same questions surprisingly often. Are we focused only on gaming? Are we large enough to matter? And does advertising on Axon expand purchaser behavior beyond what advertisers already achieve through social platforms?
I am proud of what we have built and the impact our advertising solutions deliver, so this post is meant to provide a clear and direct explanation of how the Axon engine works and why it is critical for advertisers. Going forward, we’ll post more regularly on business, product, engineering, and culture topics.
Here is the reality. Advertisers on our platform are currently spending well over $11 billion dollars annually on media, and that number has grown meaningfully since we disclosed it in Q1 2025. To put that into perspective, advertisers spend more on AppLovin than they do on Pinterest, Snapchat, and Reddit combined. More importantly, the vast majority of dollars on our platform are spent on a performance basis. Advertisers are acquiring customers and generating revenue that exceeds their advertising costs. If they do not, spend stops immediately. This distinction matters. Axon is not optimized for budgets or reach. It is optimized for advertiser profit.
Most Axon ads are delivered through our own mediation platform. MAX reaches over one billion daily active users. This audience consists primarily of adults who play casual mobile games such as Candy Crush, Solitaire, Mahjong, and Crossword games. The social power user is not the same user as the user playing a puzzle or a crossword. This creates space to reach this different consumer and create more shopping intent than would be possible if only focused on social.
Given the strength of Axon, we are a major player in the MAX auction. The ad impressions we win are exclusive to us, and benefit solely the advertisers on our platform. If an advertiser is not buying through Axon, they are missing access to a significant portion of premium mobile supply.
This leads to a fundamental misunderstanding regarding DSPs (demand side platforms). Occasionally, an advertiser will tell me they are already accessing our inventory via a third-party DSP. Our business is likely larger than most of the DSPs combined. Access to inventory on MAX reflects competitive auction outcomes; said differently, when our advanced models predict high purchaser intent, it’s very unlikely that any other bidder can bid as competitively as us for that user. This closed loop between supply, demand, and optimization is one of the primary reasons our advertising opportunity for our partners has grown so much in the past couple of years.
For most of our history, Axon focused primarily on games. That was not a strategic limitation; it was a choice to stay focused while we built our technical capabilities. We became experts in helping game developers grow their businesses, and that focus, paired with technology, helped us become the largest user acquisition channel for mobile gaming in the world.
However, accurately valuing consumers playing games for offers that aren’t games requires predicting an even more complex chain of behaviors. We have to predict ad engagement, click-through rates, app or site engagement, conversion likelihood, payment probability, purchase size, and repeat behavior over time outside of the contextual relevancy of games. Advertisers require Axon to give them a return. If they spend $1,000, they must generate meaningfully more than $1,000 in lifetime value. Even small inaccuracies in prediction break the economics.
In April 2023, we rolled out Axon 2. While Axon 1 performed this task well for gaming, Axon 2 significantly expanded our model capacity in gaming and unlocked every other major advertiser category. These models now predict expected value distributions many days into the future with enough precision to support real-time capital allocation across e-commerce, subscription services, and other verticals.
Performance is not only about prediction. It is also about attention.
Axon primarily delivers full-screen video ads that users cannot scroll past. Roughly half of impressions occur between game levels, and the other half are rewarded video placements where users choose to watch an ad in exchange for in-game rewards. These ads are viewed with full attention. Average watch time is over 35 seconds, and viewability is guaranteed.
What makes this format especially powerful is how different it is from where most advertising dollars have historically been spent. Search and social ads are often brief, easily skipped, and consumed passively as users scroll through feeds. Many brand messages are reduced to a few seconds of attention before disappearing.
Axon operates in an attention-rich environment. These ads are intentionally viewed, watched for extended periods of time, and give advertisers the ability to deliver a complete brand message with certainty that it will be seen.
When this level of attention is paired with Axon 2’s predictive models and massive audience scale, the result is not simply better performance. It creates a large, incremental growth opportunity for advertisers that complements search and social rather than competing with them.
I have sometimes heard comparisons of us to legacy ad-tech companies, but that comparison does not hold. Many older ad-tech models relied on opaque arbitrage and misaligned incentives where revenue was driven by spreads on impressions, not by advertiser outcomes. Axon is structurally different. If advertiser performance declines, spend immediately contracts. There is no delay or budget smoothing, and the system self-corrects in real time.
Many of our advertisers are profitable, self-funded businesses where cash flow is critical. If Axon did not deliver measurable returns, these advertisers would stop spending quickly. The persistence and growth of spend is the strongest validation of the business model. Axon scales because it allows advertisers to become arbitrageurs themselves. They deploy capital, the system prices opportunity, and profits are shared.
Early in our existence, we were one of many ad networks in mobile gaming. Then we built the market’s most powerful mediation, MAX, and helped the majority of the sector monetize. Then we leveled up growth opportunities for developers with Axon 2. Now, inside mobile gaming, we are the leader in user acquisition and monetization. Without efficient advertising and monetization, many free-to-play games would not exist at their current scale. We are proud that we can see the direct impact of our innovations: revenue and profit growth at our partners' businesses, which translates into jobs and economic growth.
As Axon expands into new categories, we are seeing similar effects. Businesses grow faster, customer acquisition becomes more efficient, and entire segments of the digital economy become more economically viable. Advertising, done right, expands consumer behavior across categories. It is measurable, powerful, and one of the biggest catalysts for economic growth globally. We have created tens of billions in economic expansion over the life of the company, and as more businesses adopt Axon, we will see much more.