Adam Foroughi, Applovin CEO: Surviving a 92% Drawdown, Ads as ML 1.0 & the $50B Game Ad Market
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Who is Adam Foroughi and what does AppLovin do in the mobile gaming ad market?
Adam is probably the best founder no one's ever heard of. There's an ad platform hiding inside 100,000 mobile games and is quietly outperforming Facebook ads for e-commerce brands. Of all those thousand plus IPOs, the number one most valuable is Appleven. App11 CEO, Adam Korughi.
The founder mentality's gotta be chase winning. They're gonna print something like six billion dollars in cash this year. In a world where things don't make sense, people think you're cheating. Instead of realizing you built one of the cooler technologies the world's ever seen.
Please welcome Adam Farrugi.
Fucker Adam. Big man. How you doing, bro? Good to see you. Like us.
Adam, thanks for being here. Um we thought it'd be really great to chat because a lot of people don't talk as much about you're not in the headlines all the time with your business. You're operating your business almost like absent media, you don't do a lot of press, you don't get out there a lot talking about the the company, but it's such an incredible business. Can you just tell the audience kind of what AppLovin is and maybe also frame up the market a little bit for us?
Yeah, totally. I think the the fact that we were able to build a very big company without having VC funding at the early stage. Created this world where we just had to build quietly. And then obviously the goofy name didn't help us all that much as well. But what we are ultimately is an advertising company that's helping mobile game developers monetize that space. Now, what people don't realize is just how big the mobile gaming universe has become. You've got over a billion people a day playing mobile casual games. These are all adults, heads of households, and the scale of the opportunity. Is just humongous. We disclosed last January, so nearly two years ago, that on our own platform there was $11 billion a year of ad spend.
Since then, we've grown 60% year over year, roughly. And so if you gross that up to a nice round number today, you get 20 billion. Now we're not the only player in this marketplace. This is a market that's monetized by a lot of other ad companies as well. So then you'd probably more than double. That again and round it off and say there's probably about $50 billion of advertising being spent every single year in this mobile gaming ecosystem. It was not very long ago that social was a $50 billion opportunity. Space is growing really quickly, a lot of audience. These people watch ads. They a lot of times they watch the ads to get rewards. And so that dynamic creates this possibility to create intent. For the most of the company's life, we've been creating that intent to drive a user to take one game's experience and go to the next game's experience.
And what's really gotten investment. Excited about our company and just us excited about the opportunity that we we have in front of us is that deep learning models have gotten so so powerful now that you could take that same space and try to take that adult and give them a shopper behavior experience. And that allows us to tap into much larger economies, make more of an economic impact in the world, and that's why our team's just really, really pumped up on what we're doing.
The first wave of internet advertising was in many ways the spark for a lot of critical technologies that then sort of diffused out into the world. So like if you think what Google was able to do with AdWords, AdSense, Applied Semantics, all of that whole range of technology.
How big is the mobile‑gaming advertising ecosystem and why is it worth $50 B annually?
Is that true in this generation of internet advertising? Are there Are there technologies and things that are being birthed here that are consequential and foundational now to the rest of the internet?
Yeah, I mean advertising is like ML 1.0, but really was the first implementation of all these technologies that now are driving AI today. And the the economic value of a large language model and what it's doing in our society today is much greater than advertising. But advertising is a very profitable implementation of a deep learning model. Now, recommendation systems are structured differently.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Adam Foroughi and what does AppLovin do in the mobile gaming ad market?
0:00–3:24
2
How big is the mobile‑gaming advertising ecosystem and why is it worth $50 B annually?
3:24–6:52
3
Why does the host call advertising “ML 1.0” and how is deep learning reshaping ad performance?
6:52–10:04
4
What privacy and Apple‑iOS changes are challenging AppLovin’s targeting model?
10:04–12:16
5
How did AppLovin survive a 92 % market‑cap collapse and turn it into a massive share‑buyback?
12:16–14:54
6
What is “ML 2.0” for AppLovin and how did the new deep‑learning model drive rapid growth?
14:54–17:36
7
Will agent‑driven commerce replace traditional ad interfaces and what role does AppLovin play?
17:36–21:05
8
How does AppLovin maintain 84 % EBITDA margins and stay ahead of giants like Meta and Google?
21:05–23:49
Speakers
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