AppLovin reported its Q4 2025 earnings last night: AppLovin provided Q1 2026 revenue guidance of between $1.745 and $1.775BN. AppLovin beat consensus estimates on revenue, earnings, and revenue guidance, but the stock declined by as much as 10% in after-hours trading following its earnings report. As I write this, the stock is down by 13%. I'm not […]
Comments:
Following this company for 18 months this call felt rich. On ecomm, I think the precondition to GA is satisfactory genAI for ads so these smaller advertisers don’t churn when performance is not immediately compelling with low ad volume. Would you agree?
On Meta/Cloudx, seems like a new permanent dark cloud regardless of what’s on the 10-day forecast. But what would you flag as a clear sign Meta/cloudx are not dethroning Axon/MAX?
That seems to be one condition from the commentary. Gaming inventory is wholly distinct from eg., social, so advertisers either need to adapt their creative production processes or have creative generated on their behalf. Building full suite of generative tools is no small feat, though.
Eric - very curious on your thoughts on two points:
Firstly, the last paragraph where Adam is saying that nothing has changed for Meta on IDFA-based traffic, but competition/AXON has gotten better. Is he implying that AXON outperforms Meta for IDFA-traffic?
Secondly, my understanding is that AppLovin only let you run certain ROAS campaigns through AXON if you are also using MAX as your mediation platform. Isn't that the biggest lock-in factor for MAX?
This is the main thing that people don't really get. In order to use Axon you have to run MAX as your mediation platform. That is the single biggest ecosystem lock that APP has.
Yes, numerous structural mechanisms exist for lock-in. I speak to that in the Twitter thread I linked in the piece.
I don’t have any helpful thoughts on the first point. On the second: that could be one factor. I don’t know how to rank it against other factors.