AppLovin Growth Playbook
Grow your app.
Studios
Owned
Strategy
First Party
The Spark
Adam Foroughi realized that 'Ad Networks' were inefficient because they lacked a 'Feedback Loop' from the actual games to understand what made a user convert.
The Growth Engine
The 'Content-Fortress' Strategy & The 'First-Party-Data' Moat: AppLovin tacticaly won by 'Becoming the Customer'. Their growth engine is 'Vertical Integration'—buying 350+ game studios (Lion Studios, etc.) to run their ad network on. By owning the 'Real Estate' (the games) and the 'Ad Exchange' (MAX), they keep 100% of the margin and have better data than anyone else. Their growth relies on 'The AXON AI Engine'—using massive amounts of internal game data to train the world's most aggressive ad-performance algorithm, essentially out-bidding the competition through superior math.