American digital-advertising company, founded in 2012. AppLovin helps app developers reach new customers, chiefly by matching advertisers (usually games companies) with ad slots (usually in games on smartphones). A client pays for installations of its app; AppLovin's AI model targets the players likeliest to download a new game and bids for the relevant ad space through a digital auction. In 2024 this advertising business brought in more than 80% of the company's revenue of $5bn, according to JPMorgan Chase estimates.
AppLovin entered the S&P 500 on September 22nd 2025. Over the preceding three years its share price climbed more than 30-fold, the biggest rise of any company in the index—ahead of Nvidia in third place and Palantir, which held second until September 2025. At $200bn, AppLovin is worth more than Uber.
Whatever powers AppLovin's algorithm, it has proved potent: ad revenue tripled between 2022 and 2024. JPMorgan Chase estimates AppLovin is behind 40-45% of ads served to mobile games. More than 1bn people see its ads each day. In June 2025 AppLovin sold its game studio to focus on ads. The firm is lean, with just 1,500 staff.
In February and March 2025 four short-sellers—Bear Cave, Culper Research, Fuzzy Panda and Muddy Waters—published reports criticising AppLovin, raising concerns from privacy to data practices that allegedly broke Alphabet's and Apple's app-store rules. In October 2025 Bloomberg reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission was probing the firm's data practices. Ben Edelman, an independent researcher, published a report claiming there was evidence AppLovin sometimes installed games on users' phones without full consent. AppLovin called the reports "littered with inaccuracies" and said the code Mr Edelman examined was "a test product" that had been shut down.
AppLovin has been running pilot programmes selling its ad-matching capabilities to retailers such as Wayfair and Dr Squatch, a soap-maker. Expanding beyond games would put it into more direct competition with Meta and Alphabet, which together account for about half of global digital-ad spending.
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