It was a pleasure to chat with @ericgoldenx about the mechanics of performance marketing and digital advertising on @joincolossus Making Markets podcast.

- Playtika acquires SuperPlay for up to $1.25BN (September) - MTG acquires Plarium for up to $820MM (November) - Miniclip acquires EasyBrain for $1.2BN (November) Mobile gaming M&A reactivating. Bodes well for category growth in 2025.

Podcast is live: Understanding AppLovin open.spotify.com/episode/3NIDL5…

My guest on this week's episode of the @MobileDevMemo podcast is @pbannist We discuss Google's AI Overviews and their implications for the open web. To listen to the episode, search for "Mobile Dev Memo" wherever you consume podcast content.

AppLovin released its Q3 2024 earnings yesterday: the company grew its ad platform revenues by 66% to $835MM with an Adjusted EBITDA margin of 78%. My take on the quarter is that the company’s AXON 2.0 engine continues to deliver on the promise of using the publisher data it…

I see pitches from companies building AI products for advertising frequently. It might be the most common category of pitch I see currently. Many invoke the innovator’s dilemma to explain why they can outmaneuver Google or Meta. My thoughts: - AI advertising tools must be…

Meta Q3 2024 earnings: 19% revenue growth, price per ad mostly flat Meta noted repeatedly in the earnings call that much of its advertising revenue growth can be attributed to the investments it has made into the AI systems that rank content, automate campaign optimization, and…

Unpacking Reddit’s $1BN advertising business Reddit published its Q3 2024 earnings yesterday: the company’s advertising revenue grew by 56% to $315.1MM, compared to 41% growth in Q2. But one obstacle that Reddit will face in expanding the adoption of its targeting and…

Snap $SNAP just released Q3 earnings: revenue increased by 15% to $1.4BN. Notably, ARPU was up in every reporting region and by 25% in North America. I'll publish a full analysis tomorrow on @MobileDevMemo

Google's gambit This is Google’s gambit: that it can seamlessly transition its core revenue stream, Search, from a distribution mechanic to an engagement sink without disrupting the product experience to the extent that it loses market share in search to new challengers. If…

Netflix Q3 2024 earnings: revenue beat but ad-tier growth flat Presumably, Netflix's intention with eliminating the Basic tier completely in Q3 was to drive subscriptions into its ad-supported tier, which produces higher ARPU than the Basic tier (and, indeed, per previous…

I’m participating in this panel about the changing data environment at the CODE@MIT conference today at 11:45 ET. The panel will be streamed live at the link below. You can also follow the conversation with the #codecon24 hashtag. web.mit.edu/webcast/ide/f2…

Netflix's $NFLX exuberance over its advertising business has grown more subdued / tempered in the past two quarters. In Q2, they revealed for the first time that ARM for ad-supported tiers is lower than for premium (contradicting their pre-launch projections). And this quarter…

Unpacking Uber’s $1BN advertising business Across UberEats and its flagship ridesharing app, Uber possesses a unique and likely unparalleled bank of real-world retail data that has enabled it to nearly quadruple advertising revenue run rate in less than three years. Uber’s…

Julian Runge (@julian_runge) & Bill Grosso (@wgrosso) have written an excellent guest article for Mobile Dev Memo about the shortcomings of observational causal inference modeling, with a particular focus on MMM: Combating Misinformation in Business Analytics: Experiment,…

As always, I enjoyed my discussion with Ben Thompson on today's episode of the @stratechery podcast. We covered a wide range of topics related to the digital advertising economy, with a specific focus on the transformative impact of AI.

How vulnerable is Google on Search? But a decline in Google’s share of the search advertising market is likely not caused by a shift in ad spend to retail channels like Amazon; rather, it seems that Amazon’s growth, in particular, is simply enlarging the market versus siphoning…

The judge in the Epic v. Google case has granted injunctive relief. Among other things, Google cannot pay developers to launch exclusively on Google Play, it cannot pay OEMs to not pre-install third-party app stores, and it must make the full catalog of Play Store apps available…

Apple is the third largest US e-Commerce retailer.

Google has unplugged the Open Web’s life support. Ads in AI Overviews — which Google stated plainly were imminent at I/O back in May — change the incentive structure of both Google Search and web publishing more generally. As I wrote when AI Overviews were introduced: “Google…