Applovin Is ‘Building The World’s Best AI Advertising Model’.

Ultimately, it is the fundamentals, not the chart, which drive a share higher. Applovin has a great chart, but it will only go miles higher if the CEO and co-founder, Adam Foroughi, is right and the company is going to scale rapidly in the e-commerce market, which he says is 10 times the size of the gaming market, which is behind the existing success.

A new, more advanced product, Axon ai, is being launched on 1 October 2025, which the company expects to scale rapidly. The company is buzzing with excitement at the opportunity they see ahead.

I keep trying and failing to figure out what they do. I can’t get my head around it. It’s adtech, performance advertising, whatever those things are, and they do it very well.,

In March 2025, the company was the subject of a short-selling attack. You can see on the chart that the shares peaked at $531, fell to $201, and have since rebounded strongly. Foroughi came out swinging when the shorts launched their attack. (Short-sellers aim to sell shares at a high price and profit from buying them back more cheaply).

Today, a short report was published about AppLovin, questioning our e-commerce business and advertising practices. We haven’t talked much about attribution and analytics, which are standardized across advertising channels. As CEO, I want to take a moment to address these claims head-on, provide clarity, and reaffirm our focus on building a world-class platform that drives value for our partners and shareholders. Let’s dive into the facts.

Our E-commerce Business: Rapid Growth and Real Results

Our e-commerce advertising business has scaled at an extraordinary pace—reaching a billion-dollar run rate of spend in mere months. This isn’t luck; it’s a testament to our technology and execution. Advertisers in this space fall into two camps:

One-Time Purchase Advertisers—Think fire extinguishers or auto insurance. These are straightforward: either we drive the sale, or we don’t. Roughly 80% of the sales we can measure occur within 24 hours from when the user sees and clicks the advertisement, making incrementality easy to measure. The data speaks for itself—we’re delivering.

Recurring Purchase Advertisers—Brands who have repeat customers, where the question becomes: did our ad drive the sale, or would it have happened anyway? Proving incrementality here is trickier and often requires detailed studies. There have been numerous third-party incrementality studies that have shown that our traffic is very valuable. Because our session cookies expire, and we measure 80% of sales in 24 hours, we lack latent transactions we get to take credit for, which in many cases means advertisers get more value off our platform than what’s even measured.

Let’s be clear: our ad models and attribution systems are young—only a few months old. Are our models fully optimized? Not yet. But they’re improving fast. What takes other companies a decade to build, we’re tackling in quarters. The web advertising market is over 10x the size of our mobile gaming opportunity, and we’re just getting started.

Pixel 101: Nothing Unique Here

The report takes aim at our pixel, implying that it’s some outlier in the industry. Let’s set the record straight: our pixel functionality is standard, and we collect the same user behavior as Facebook, Google, and others. Don’t take my word for it—look at the data. Facebook’s pixel tracks events like page views and purchases, sending data back to optimize ads. Google does the same. Ours? No different. It’s a standard tool for attribution and optimization.

And here’s another fact: platforms like Shopify automatically append tracking data for merchants who opt in. Website owners choose to install these pixels—ours included—and share data with their advertising partners. This isn’t a secret formula or unethical practice; it’s an industry standard. The report’s bias lies in omission, not evidence.

Competition: Our Success is Built on a Solid Foundation of Innovation and Excellence

The report may suggest that our advertising stack is simple to replicate, but the reality is that we have already established ourselves as the largest marketing channel in gaming globally. We’ve also scaled our web business to a billion-dollar run rate in just a few months. This success comes from more than just good ideas—it is the result of our consistent execution, advanced AI, and cutting-edge technology. Despite competitors having decades of head starts, no one has matched our speed or scale. What we’ve built takes relentless focus and a commitment to innovation, which is why we remain the best in the industry.

Closing Thoughts: Opportunity Amid the Noise

Our business is technical, and we get it—it’s not always easy to understand. It’s also incredibly hard for some who don’t understand this technology to fathom that we are building the world’s best advertising AI model, so they need a simple narrative that we’re violating policies in order to comprehend our success. This complexity leaves room for short reports to stir fear and doubt. To investors, I’d say: dig deeper. Given the AI tools available today, it’s easy to discredit a short report like this in minutes. 

For us, the path forward is clear: execute relentlessly, seize the massive growth opportunities ahead, and ensure our investors, partners, and team thrive alongside us. We’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again. Thanks for sticking with us—let’s keep building something extraordinary together.

Applovin, A note from our CEO, Adam Foroughi, 27 March 2025

I see parallels between Palantir and Applovin. Both companies use AI to achieve great results for their customers and grow rapidly because those results are so great. What is unusual with Applovin is that we have some key dates ahead . On 1 October 2025, the group launches its new product, in time for Q4 2025, to be reported early February 2026.

It expects Q4 to be strong, fuelled by pent-up demand. We may hear something about how the launch is going in early November when the company reports its Q3 results. The company is also expecting a strong 2026 as the new product is rolled out globally.

Applovin is a data-based business, so the more data it acquires, the more powerfully its growth flywheel operates. The implication is that the business is at an early stage in a period of strong growth. Nobody, including Foroughi, knows how strong the growth will be, but they are expecting fireworks.

The shares have been volatile in the past and are likely to remain so in the future. Any hiccups in the growth path would make the shares tumble, but would likely be buying opportunities. Rome was not built in a day, and Applovin will need time to work its miracles.

I can’t predict the future, but they look very exciting to me ahead of what could be a historic period of growth.

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Strategy – Stick To Your Guns

It’s easy with a company like Applovin to have doubts. Even the best of us can have our bad moments, think St Peter. If you want extraordinary success, you have to nail your colours to the mast just as I am doing with Applovin. I don’t claim to understand how they do what they do, but the important point is that they do. This company feels right to me, and I think it is going to be a world-beater. It comes down to believing Foroughi. He is very clear on where he thinks the business is going and has an extraordinary record of achievement behind him.