AppLovin Absorbs MoPub, Takes Aim at Facebook

I usually focus on trends in apps and games, but once in a while, a service provider makes a move I see as pivotal, and have to bring it up. This week it was Twitter selling its mobile ads platform MoPub to AppLovin, which went public and acquired an attribution network this year.

Twitter getting out of the services business isn't new. A few years ago, they sold Fabric, a mobile usage analytics platform Twitter has been running since 2014, to Google. Unlike Fabric, however, MoPub is generating hundreds of millions in revenue.

Comparing the sale price to the revenue gives MoPub a sad valuation and really shows how much Twitter wanted the platform gone. But one's loss is another's gain.

The winner here is AppLovin, who's growing in a fashion that should scare ad king Facebook. Why? Sheer scale.

Based on our SDK Intelligence, AppLovin is the #4 most installed ad SDK across iOS apps and games and 5th among Android apps. MoPub is 8th across both groups.

Once joined, AppLovin's network will eclipse that of Facebook among iOS apps and games by about 30%. Across Android apps and games, where Facebook's network is much larger (by an order of magnitude), AppLovin's acquisition will put a small but mainly unnoticeable dent in Facebook's dominance, leaving it in 2nd place, comfortably.

Android is where the real game is for ad providers right now, "thanks" to Apple's App Tracking Transparency update, which made life much harder for everything ad-related in the App Store.

On Google Play, AppLovin will maintain its 5th place after MoPub is absorbed, and faces strong competition from Unity's ad network and StartApp, which rank 3rd and 4th.

Wait, what about Google ads? I purposely left those out because Google's reach is so much wider than any other ad network, and by a lot. No one's challenging them any time soon...