AppLovin grows 60% to ~$20B in annual platform ad spend

Foroughi walked the audience through scale numbers that put the company’s growth in context. He noted that in January 2025 AppLovin reported $11 billion a year in platform ad spend; last week he said that figure has climbed about 60% Y/Y to approximately $20 billion. He also gave a wider ecosystem figure, saying ad spend across multiple ad companies in mobile games is likely around $50 billion annually. Foroughi highlighted the size of the audience behind those dollars: "over a billion people a day playing mobile casual games," many of them adults and heads of households.

The CEO framed advertising inside mobile games as a discovery mechanism that can surface products players didn’t know about. He called ads that appear as mini-game previews and short rewarded spots highly engaging, saying "people love the ads that we show" and that players often watch ads to earn in-game rewards. Foroughi argued that presenting relevant creative during a 30-second rewarded ad matters: if a player is watching 30 seconds for a free life, he'd rather see something relevant than "garbage," he said, and personalised ads can increase that utility and the possibility of "intent." He also pointed to mini-games and previews appearing in other games as examples of technology recommending relevant content to players.

On LLMs and advertising, Foroughi said the overall economic value of a large language model may be large, but that advertising is "a very profitable implementation of a deep learning model." He drew a distinction between searching for a product via Google or a chatbot and being shown a new product inside an app or on Facebook that the user didn’t know to look for. During the talk he warned that Apple’s privacy changes ultimately make it harder to precisely target iOS users, which he said degrades ad relevance. "If you could precisely target a user five years ago on iOS, and today someone says 'I don't want you to precisely target me', you group them in a bunch and you serve them a worse advertisement," Foroughi said, and he suggested some users will complain that they are seeing spam after such changes.

Foroughi also outlined his operational mindset and some company history. He said AppLovin runs lean, staffed with subject-matter experts focused on mobile gaming experiences and transactional behaviour. "We never think we won. We think, every day we wake up and we're probably going to get screwed right now and we better work hard," he told the summit. He revisited tougher years for the company, saying 2022 was a period of no demand and lots of supply when AppLovin's stock "went down literally every day," prompting a buyback and an "us against the world" mentality. The company later saw ad revenue grow and the stock recover from those lows, though shares remain below their December 2025 peak and AppLovin has faced short-seller reports challenging its practices.

Foroughi described part of AppLovin’s past M&A strategy as a data play: the company acquired studios because studios did not normally share data with third parties, and AppLovin used game data to train its first deep learning model. After building a successful model, Foroughi said third parties began to use AppLovin’s tech, and the company divested its games business by selling studios to Tripledot.