AppLovin (NASDAQ:APP) reported second-quarter financial results on Wednesday. The transcript from the company's second-quarter earnings call has been provided below.
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The full earnings call is available at https://applovin.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_AtrPhDH-SD2YZieV3VS-eQ#/registration
Summary
AppLovin reported Q2 revenue of $1.92 billion, a 53% year-over-year increase, though just below the midpoint of guidance. Adjusted EBITDA was $1.61 billion, up 58% year-over-year.
The company cited a timing issue with model improvements as a reason for missing guidance but noted that improvements are now live and Q3 is off to a strong start.
AppLovin's consumer segment saw advertiser spend grow 28% above Q4 2025 levels, indicating strong performance despite seasonality.
Strategic initiatives include improving core models, advancing architectural work to scale compute, enhancing creative tools, and forming partnerships to attract more advertisers.
The company opened its platform under AppLovin Ads Manager, focusing first on mid-market advertisers to optimize platform performance.
AppLovin expects Q3 2026 revenue between $2.055 billion and $2.085 billion, with adjusted EBITDA between $1.71 billion and $1.74 billion, reflecting 46%-48% revenue growth year-over-year.
Management highlighted strong cash generation, ending the quarter with $3.05 billion in cash and $3.7 billion in total debt, and repurchased $551 million worth of shares.
The SEC inquiry into AppLovin concluded with no recommended action, resolving any regulatory concerns.
Management expressed confidence in the long-term growth trajectory, anticipating the business can compound at roughly 30% annually.
Full Transcript
David Hsiao, Head of Investor Relations
Welcome to AppLovin's earnings call for the second quarter ended June 30, 2026. I'm David Hsiao, Head of Investor Relations. Joining me today to discuss our results are Adam Foroughi, our co-founder and CEO, and Matt Stumpf, our CFO. Please note our SEC filings to date as well as our financial update and press release discussing our second quarter performance are available at investors.applovin.com. During today's call we will be making forward-looking statements including, but not limited to, the future development and reach of our platform, our expected growth opportunities, the expected future financial performance of the company and other future events. These statements are based on our current assumptions and beliefs and we assume no obligation to update them except as required by law. Our actual results may differ materially from the results predicted. We encourage you to review the risk factors in our most recently filed Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended March 31, 2026. Additional information may also be found in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended June 30, 2026 which will be filed today.
We will also be discussing non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be superior to or a substitute for our GAAP results. Please be sure to review the GAAP results and reconciliations of our GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures in our earnings release and financial update available on our Investor Relations site. This conference call is being recorded and a replay and transcript will be available for a period of time on our IR website.
Now I'll turn it over to Adam and Matt for some opening remarks. Then we'll have the moderator take us through Q&A.
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Thanks everyone for joining us today. I'm going to get right to it. This quarter we delivered almost $2 billion in revenue, which was just below the midpoint of our guidance range and our adjusted EBITDA was just below the range. We've always managed this business with the goal of outperforming our own expectations, and this quarter we fell short of that standard. What matters is that we know what happened and it's already been addressed. Q3 is off to a strong start and the business is back on the trajectory we expect.
Let me explain. Gaming is still the majority of our revenue and the single biggest driver of its growth is model performance. When our models improve, advertisers can profitably deploy more spend at their target return on ad spend goals and budgets naturally step up. This quarter came down to timing: our pace of meaningful model improvement was lighter than normal during the quarter and the next step up in model performance landed just after quarter end.
Importantly, nothing we saw suggested weakening advertiser demand or a change in the competitive environment. In fact, MAX publisher earnings grew double digits quarter over quarter and our share of publisher waterfalls remained consistent. With those improvements now live and heading into what is a seasonally stronger part of the year, the business is re-accelerating. Now let me talk about consumer which had an outstanding quarter. Advertiser spend set another record finishing 28% above Q4 2025 levels.
And remember, Q4 is the seasonal peak for these advertisers. Growing well past peak season levels in a seasonally slow quarter tells you how steep this curve is. Consumer isn't yet large enough to fully smooth a quarter like this, but that will change as we continue to ramp up our consumer business every quarter. Stepping back, I want to put our long term growth in context—how we think about the next decade. We built gaming into a far larger business far faster than we believed possible and gaming keeps improving.
What consumer adds is runway. We run one auction across multiple advertiser categories and every category we bring in extends the opportunity in front of us. Over the longer term, as we continue improving gaming and expanding consumer, we believe this business can compound at roughly 30% annually. Now on EBITDA: adjusted EBITDA grew to a bit over $1.6 billion, up more than 50% year over year. While this result lands just below our guidance range, the incremental investments were exactly where we believe they should be—in our technology.
We've been investing in architectural changes that let us build more complex models, models that benefit far more from additional training compute. That investment includes additional compute spend on the model improvements now live in Q3, and every dollar of it is dependent on return—when additional compute produces substantially more revenue through better model performance, that's a trade we'll make every day. These higher training and inference costs are built into our guidance for next quarter.
During the quarter we also opened up our platform to the public under its original name, AppLovin Ads Manager. As we said last quarter, we never expected the public launch to change the business overnight. We're sequencing deliberately—mid-market advertisers first, where the platform performs best today, with the long tail unlocking as our data compounds. The same way gaming developed, we'll execute on this through partnerships and you'll see us continue to invest there.
Before I close, here's what we're focused on as a team. First, improving our core models, which is the primary driver of our near term growth. Second, advancing the architectural work that lets us benefit more from scaling compute, which we believe unlocks meaningfully larger gains over time. Third, improving our creative tools and ad formats so advertisers can optimize their use of our platform to achieve even better outcomes. Fourth, bringing more high quality advertisers onto the platform through strategic partnerships.
Let me close with this. We've spent years building an advertising platform whose economics improve as our models improve. Advertiser demand is healthy. Our models continue to improve. Consumer is scaling rapidly. Nothing we saw this quarter changed our conviction in the long term opportunity ahead. With that, I'll turn it over to Matt to walk through the financial.
Matt Stumpf, CFO
Thanks, Adam, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. This quarter is a good example of the underlying strength of our business. As Adam mentioned, we didn't get the same level of model uplift we've seen in recent quarters, but we still delivered second quarter revenue of $1.92 billion, growing 53% year over year and 4% sequentially, driven by the core gaming business and continued scaling in the consumer vertical. Adjusted EBITDA was $1.61 billion, up 58% year over year, with margins expanding approximately 300 basis points from the same period last year.
Quarter over quarter flow-through to adjusted EBITDA was 70%. The primary driver of the sequential increase in costs was higher compute associated with training our existing models and with new model development, and that higher compute run rate is reflected in our outlook. We manage this business to EBITDA dollars and free cash flow rather than to a margin percentage, and we'll continue to deploy dollars when we see an opportunity to produce more revenue.
Free cash flow for the quarter was $863 million. As I previewed on last quarter's call, conversion was below our normal cadence in the second quarter due to the timing of international cash tax and interest payments. This is a timing dynamic, not a change in the earnings power of our business. We expect free cash flow conversion to improve in the third quarter and to normalize to roughly 75% of adjusted EBITDA for the full year. We ended the quarter with $3.05 billion of cash against $3.7 billion of total debt, which puts net leverage at approximately 0.1 times trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA, well within the approximately 1 times where we'd expect to operate over the long term. During the second quarter, we repurchased and withheld a total of approximately 1.14 million shares for $551 million and ended the quarter with 335 million shares outstanding and approximately $1.8 billion remaining under our share repurchase authorization. Our choice to moderate the pace of our buybacks this quarter relative to the roughly $1 billion we deployed in the first quarter reflects consideration of our lower free cash flow during the quarter and does not indicate a change in conviction or in how we intend to use the authorization going forward.
One other item before I turn to our outlook. We continue to get questions on the reported SEC inquiry, so let me close the loop. It was a voluntary request, which we never deemed material. The SEC has recently advised us that it concluded its inquiry with no recommended action. We're pleased to have it resolved. Turning to our outlook for the third quarter of 2026, we expect revenue between $2.055 billion and $2.085 billion, representing 46% to 48% year over year growth or 7% to 8% sequentially.
We expect adjusted EBITDA between $1.71 billion and $1.74 billion, representing 48% to 50% year over year growth with an adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 83%. That outlook reflects the model improvements that are already live and performing, continued scaling in our consumer vertical, normal seasonality, and the higher training and compute costs I mentioned. It does not assume additional model releases that have not yet been deployed. To close, this was not the quarter we hold ourselves to and we've been direct with you about why.
What hasn't changed is the shape or strength of this business: nearly $2 billion of quarterly revenue growing better than 50% year over year, margins above 80% and extremely strong cash generation. And with the next step up in model performance already live, our outlook reflects a business getting back to the trajectory we expect. With that, let's move to Q&A.
OPERATOR
We'll now begin the question and answer session. Please be sure to unmute and turn on your video before asking your question. We will take as many questions as time permits and since we have many questions today, please be patient as we move through the list. Okay, our first question will come from Jason Bazinet with Citi. Please unmute and ask your question.
Jason Bazinet, Analyst at Citi
Maybe I've missed it, but I think this is the first time I've heard you talk about partners to bring in more customers. Can you just expand on the partnership opportunity that you see?
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah, thanks Jason. We have done a couple deals so far with third-party companies. One of the larger analytics companies in the market in e-commerce, and we found that if we go to the source that works with these companies on the other side, the advertisers that we want, it's a more targeted way to get the right kinds of advertisers onto our platform. So rather than just start by buying ads and bringing in long tail, which is harder to make work with where the model evolution is today, we're going through these partnerships to try to get very targeted customers into the platform.
Jason Bazinet, Analyst at Citi
So this is like Triple Whale or
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
You sort of nailed it.
Jason Bazinet, Analyst at Citi
All right, got it. Thank you.
OPERATOR
Our next question will come from James Heaney with Jefferies.
James Heaney, Analyst at Jefferies
Great. Thank you, guys. I just wanted to get under the hood of the gaming advertising business and maybe it's difficult to explain it in a simple response, but just curious exactly what the sort of model breakthroughs that you were looking for that didn't happen. Just trying to understand the timing of it and kind of what happened in the quarter.
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah. Thanks, James. If you go back the last 12 quarters, every quarter we've had really good growth, except for Q2 and single digits. I think every other quarter since taxon 2 has been double digits. Now we're Q2 starts as the seasonally weakest quarter. But every quarter that we've had these outsized growth rates, we've had improvements to our model. So our team isn't just sitting there doing nothing for the last 12 quarters. It's constant improvement.
We just don't really break it out. So if you recall, our gaming growth model we'd given you all back in the day included one sizable improvement per year, but constant improvement to the models as well as on an ongoing basis. In this case in Q2, we didn't have the same amount of uplift that we normally have in any other prior quarter that came right after the quarter. So that's why Q3 has started really, really well and that's why we've guided strong going forward.
James Heaney, Analyst at Jefferies
Great. And then just one more question if I can. I think last quarter you called out reaching sort of record revenue and the consumer vertical in April. Curious if you can provide an update on the progress that you saw in the second quarter. How much of that growth was just built on existing customers versus maybe what you saw from new advertisers? Thanks.
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah, I mean, new advertisers are beneficial, but the base of the business is already pretty good. And so new customers aren't going to go live and really drive impact to that growth rate. So when we say 20 double, I think I said 26% growth in the talk track over Q4, that's a substantial uptick in this category. Usually e-commerce Q1 dips a lot from Q4, Q2 then has to trail back up and then Q3 and Q4 really build on the year with half the dollars spent in Q4.
And so having that kind of growth in Q2 implies that the customers that we have on the platform are seeing a lot of success. 28%. 28% to be correct.
James Heaney, Analyst at Jefferies
Great, thank you guys.
OPERATOR
Yeah, your next question will come from Steven Ju with UBS.
Steven Ju, Analyst at UBS
Yeah, thanks guys. So I think the feedback that we're getting from advertisers in the e-commerce segment seems to be that as they spend money on the platform they're nowhere near hitting that sort of efficient frontier of ROAS ceilings. So I'm just wondering if we're kind of hearing from a positive biased group of folks or if that's what you're hearing overall from a broader group of the advertisers that you're talking to. And secondarily I think Adam, you talked about starting with the mid sized merchants and going long tail, but I think in the past you had indicated some hesitation on working with some of the larger advertisers.
I'm just wondering if that perspective has changed the last three to six months or so as it seems like some of the mobile game advertisers are also pretty large.
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah, I mean I'll go with the second one first, Stephen. So in gaming our model is pretty mature and we've got a lot of data and so the architecture is just more developed. If you have a new game in the market today that hasn't even launched and you go onto our platform, the return goals are hit really, really quickly. So there's almost no learning budget. The model is really sophisticated at nailing it. For anything in e-commerce or consumer, we're still early in evolution.
We've got less data penetration in the market by a lot. We've got less sophisticated model at this point. And so if there's a small shop that goes live it's less likely that with very few dollars spent it's going to hit their goals and they're going to scale. Some of them do but in a lot of the smaller ones they're not able to achieve it. Now if there's a mid-market brand they know that there's learning cost to marketing campaigns so they'll invest more, get to their goals and scale.
So what we found is that mid-market is a sweet spot right now. As data builds we have no reason to believe that tail's not going to be covered too given in gaming, we're able to support any type of game at any level. On your first question, if I understood it correctly, you're basically saying advertisers haven't reached their maximum amount of spend for the return that they're getting. And we're new. Yeah, we're a new platform. Right. Like these companies, first of all, they manage their budgets really slowly.
We launched this product, I think it's now been probably 18 months or so. And so you've got these companies that usually manage their budgets over somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/4 to 4/4 ahead. Most of their budget goes to social and search. We're deemed a new bucket, so a testing category, and to graduate up takes time. So this stuff compounds over time, over quarters and years. An advertiser that is live today we would expect for sure given the results that they would be able to see, in 12 months they're bigger.
In 24 months they're bigger. But the rate of improvement there shouldn't be organically appearing just like some of the more mature marketing platforms. It should be accelerated because they're probably indexing lower on us as they build a history and get to know the platform, invest more in the platform, get comfort in long-term results, run their incrementality studies, et cetera. That ramp up should be faster.
Steven Ju, Analyst at UBS
Thank you.
OPERATOR
Next we'll go to Ralph Shockert with William Blair.
Ralph Shockert, Analyst at William Blair
Hey Adam. Hey Matt. Just Adam, maybe to start on the model improvements. I'm guessing you've kind of seen this before, but just any sense of why you didn't get the model uplift that you would have expected in the quarter? I don't know if there's a way to sort of diagnose that. And then maybe just two more, please. Any more you can share on maybe the rate of improvement that you're seeing post quarter? Then Matt, you know, as compute costs continue to increase in scale, how should we think about the margin profile of business?
So there's three in there. Thanks guys.
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
So I'll have Matt take two. I'll start with one. Look, it's R&D. Right. Like there's no guarantee that we're always going to have lifts in every single period of three months. The team is always working on lifts and usually in every single quarter it's not one lift that we get. We compound multiple small lifts. The impact was just smaller in Q2 followed by a pretty material uplift in Q3 in the early part of Q3. And so that's just the reality of when you're building models.
You're building models, you don't have a certainty on the impact of what you're testing. You're testing hypotheses, hoping for good result. And so the system is a whole bunch of A/B tests looking for lifts. And there are going to be periods where we don't get material lifts. There's any other periods where we have huge lifts that contribute to 12, 13, 15% Q-over-Q type quarters.
Matt Stumpf, CFO
Yeah. In terms of the rate of improvement and what's included within the guide, Ralph, so within this quarter, what we've assumed is similar to kind of our guidance philosophy in the past where we have a high level of confidence, but the difference being for this one quarter we've guided inclusive of the model improvements that we've launched that we're aware of, and then also the compute cost increase that we've seen. To the margin question over the longer term we may see some variability, which is consistent with what we've told analysts and investors in the past as well, that we may have some short-term fluctuation in the margin profile of the business. But it should be indicative and investors should look at that as a positive because when we're spending, we're very cautious about how we're spending and we're only spending if we see that there is incremental revenue behind that. So, you know, when you see these short-term fluctuations, you should then realize that over time we're going to continue to improve based on those cost increases. So over the longer term, we still have a very high level of confidence that we'll be within kind of that 80, the low 80% EBITDA margin.
Ralph Shockert, Analyst at William Blair
Okay, thanks, Adam. Thanks, Matt.
Matt Stumpf, CFO
You're welcome.
OPERATOR
Our next question will come from Omar Dasuki with Bank of America.
Omar Dasuki, Analyst at Bank of America
Hi team. Thanks for taking the question. So you opened your platform, I think, to everybody in late June. It's been about, I think, six weeks now since it was open. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, how you would evaluate the performance of your onboarding, you know, in terms of the number of advertisers onboarded, you know, whether it kind of met your expectations, exceeded or well or was below, and how you expect that trajectory to of the number of advertisers to go, you know, for the rest of the year and into calendar 27 specifically?
Should we be thinking about your consumer business as one where there are tens of thousands of advertisers over time that spend a little or a few advertisers that spend a lot because you said you're being targeted now, but I want to try to understand how long you expect to be targeted as compared to just advertisers flocking to your platform and what you need to do to get to that point where advertisers flock to your platform and it can become a very widely used platform like Meta and Google.
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah, it'd be the latter on your own words, Omar, but few advertisers contributing more today. So we look at the launches as expected. We said it's not going to be a big marketing push behind the launch. We're targeting the marketing relationships and the dollars that we spend to where we can go get those mid-market brands. We need to execute on the bigger ticket customers first. So not the very, very big because we'll get to the head of the market later.
And not the very, very small that would contribute count of advertisers but be considered SMB or long tail. That's harder for us to make work right now. So that mid-market is what we're focused on. If we're able to execute there, which we have a lot of confidence in, that's what most of the customers in the consumer category spending today are. Then you broaden it out. But that gets us more data coverage. It gets us a time to get to a place where the model is more sophisticated because with time we're going to build a better model and it gives us time for a reputation to seep into the bigger parts of the market.
Now remember, these systems take a long time to build out. You talked about Google and Facebook. They've been around two decades and a decade plus. Right. It took us 14 years to be fully penetrated into the gaming category, in terms of any customer in the world in mobile gaming today would be foolish not to spend dollars on our platform. So it will take time to build this thing up. But we're seeing very quick growth because the customers that are on the platform are seeing a lot of success and, as already touched on, they're not even at a ceiling of what they can spend given the result that they're seeing.
The ad templates are going to improve over time. The model is going to improve over time. With every incremental mid-market customer, the data in the system improves and then over time we're going to be able to broaden it out. We can't tell you when. That's just something that's not predictable.
Omar Dasuki, Analyst at Bank of America
Got it. So which specific parts of your technology would you say are maybe ahead of schedule and behind schedule? I know generative AI creatives was one that was talked a lot about the last six months. But what other pieces of the technological development should we try to keep an eye on to gauge your progress?
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah, look, we're early in a business that is pretty substantial at this point and growing very quickly. The reality with it is, is that we can't say what's behind or ahead of schedule. The requirement is get more customers, get more data, continue to write more sophisticated models, improve the ad template and you get lifts for the current customers and every single new customer. Over time that compounds as we get more success stories on the platform, more narratives out there, more agencies that are media buying agencies is knowing that our platform works really well as the third sort of anchor in the marketplace. More customers are just naturally going to come. So that's sort of the formula to, to the future.
OPERATOR
Our next question will come from Rob Sanderson with Loop Capital.
Rob Sanderson, Analyst at Loop Capital
Yeah, thank you. Good afternoon, guys. I've got two questions both related to e-commerce. The, the funnel. Can we talk about the funnel like you, you know, for folks coming through self-service? You said earlier in the year, you know, you were getting some like 57% of qualified leads were coming through and I think lack of creative was kind of a primary reason for leakage. But that was before you had tools for ad creation. So anything you could sort of share on how that dynamic might be changing now that you're maybe better equipped with some of that tool set.
That's question one. And then a little bit on feedback from commerce advertisers. What's been working well with the self-service platform now that you're GA, you know, what are some things you still need to improve upon or that you'd like to get better and then are there sort of common requests for features like, you know, are folks looking for better targeting or better measurement or more campaign automation? Are there any sort of categoric things that you know, are kind of next steps for you to go to work on the, on the product side?
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah. Thanks for all the questions. So both answers are sort of related. The creative is the biggest hurdle in our system. So nothing has really changed. There's lengthy video plus interactive end card which isn't a common ad unit. We can auto-generate the interactive end card with pretty high efficiency at this point. We're not at the point where we can yet get a high quality video for 30 to 60 seconds in the hand of an advertiser out of the box.
So that's still work in progress and we have examples where it works, other examples where it doesn't work. The reality is once we can get that to happen or we create alternative forms of templates that don't require video, we'll be able to hand advertisers a one-click campaign creation and that should resolve any sort of conversion rate issues on the flow. So it's just not something that we've gotten to yet is that's the same same concern that people have on number two when they buy on social and search.
A lot of the advertisements in the when you buy an open web social and search a lot of the advertisements are just dynamic catalogs or they're more static like come get a sale, click here to buy this product much less so a 30 to 60 second video. It's just not that common that someone has that unless they're a pretty material advertiser that is buying on television. And so if you think about that like mid market and up probably has templates that match the creative needs on our platform.
When you get into the SMBs that are signing up directly, they probably don't. And so we've got to resolve that as we go into wanting to get in more into long tail over time.
Rob Sanderson, Analyst at Loop Capital
Thank you, Adam.
OPERATOR
Our next question will come from Alec Brondolo with Wells Fargo.
Alec Brondolo, Analyst at Wells Fargo
Yeah, thanks so much. Appreciate the question, guys. I'd love to ask about the health of the mobile game ecosystem. I think a lot of us are having conversations with mobile game publishers and developers. They're speaking to CPI inflation maybe waning. ROAS, there's some market data that suggests that mobile game app downloads are down something like 10 to 15% year over year over the last several months. And just so just how do you guys feel about the category?
How are your conversations as customers progressing? And I have a follow-up.
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah, so it's a good question. The category has to be good for us to perform in gaming. Right? That's why we gave you the stat that the MAX marketplace grew double digits Q over Q which is not immaterial growth. In fact that's incredibly outsized growth. The ad-supported market is growing really quickly. The in-app purchasing market has some misleading data out there because companies that are analytics providers can't actually track the purchases that are going off platform.
And as more and more in-app purchasing games go off platform, the revenue didn't just disappear or shrink, it actually became incremental to them on a net revenue basis. It's just not measurable. So as you look at what what companies are reporting as services revenue in the category or what these analytics providers are reporting, you're not going to catch all that incremental revenue that's missed. Now when it comes to installs, the trend over the last few years has been a movement away from very high install, low quality, hyper casual, much more to casual and deeper games.
And in-app purchasing, as you get into deeper funnels, you get a much higher CPI and a much higher LTV. So as the cost goes up, it does not mean that the value goes down. Everything is on a return on ad spend basis. Now the last bullet is we drive a lot of the market too, especially for discovery. We're the biggest in the world as far as I know when it comes to mobile gaming user acquisition. And so when we have a quarter where we don't push lifts, that's not great for the category as well.
We're driving growth in the category given the scale that we operate at. Then when we go follow it up and we push a model release early in Q3, if you talk to a lot of those same advertisers, they'll say install rates went up, CPIs went down, performance has improved. So we are the catalyst in large part in this category at this point. If you're talking about user acquisition and you know that that is something that we take very seriously, we've got to be on top of our game so that these game developers can continue to see the type of success that our tools and platform have enabled for years.
Alec Brondolo, Analyst at Wells Fargo
Yep. And then maybe one on the web advertising business and advertiser acquisition, you know you were branded AppLovin then you changed the brand to Axon when you entered web advertising, you changed it back to AppLovin when you went to general availability. I think the question I have is do you feel like the AppLovin or Axon brand, the lack of kind of knowledgeability of the brand among consumers is hurting your ability to acquire advertisers. Because it seems to me that in the long tail the advertisers are choosing their ads platforms based on the platforms they know as consumers.
Obviously they don't know AppLovin as a platform. And so I wonder, I wonder if you have the right branding to go out and acquire the next hundred thousand longer tail e-commerce and web advertisers.
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah, I mean look, we can't get rid of the name AppLovin unfortunately. But we switched to Axon. Everyone kept calling us AppLovin. We switched back. The reality is if you talk to 100 customers that don't use us in e-commerce today there is going to be an awareness problem, but we're early in this category. A lot of people may actually know of us, but think of us as a mobile gaming platform. Now if you asked us 10 years ago in mobile gaming, do the customers know about us?
The answer would have been no. A lot of customers don't know about us. We have some customers but they're going to Facebook and Google. Much more so than they're coming to AppLovin. If you ask us today. Well, every customer is on our platform. So in some part brand does matter, but you earn brand loyalty with performance. If we continue to compound improvements in the technology, improvements in the templates, more success stories out there over time the customers are going to find out about our platform.
And I mean again I said this a couple minutes ago, but it took Google a couple decades to become the de facto standard for customers in anything search related. It took Facebook well over a decade. So these are not things that just build overnight. We're not going to have out of those hundred brands a high percentage in the next quarter knowing of us. But if we do our job right over the coming quarters, it's going to compound and get to a point where the brand is going to be recognized as a standard.
And these analytics providers do help as well as they talk to the customers on their platform. If they see us performing as the second or third best channel for customers that we have lived, it behooves them to push us to their clients and in some way it'll also benefit them economically because we'll strike a lot of partnership deals.
Alec Brondolo, Analyst at Wells Fargo
Thank you.
OPERATOR
Our next question will come from Robert Kulbreth with Evercore.
Robert Kulbreth, Analyst at Evercore
Great. Thanks for the opportunity to ask a question. Wanted to ask a couple on mobile gaming. Some of the feedback we received from advertisers this quarter is that they're spending a bit more on Android than they expected entering the year for a variety of reasons, some publisher specific, some influenced by things going on in the Play ecosystem and that may be impacting their share of voice or share of wallet with AppLovin. And just given the mixed dynamics, just wondering if you could maybe talk about the opportunity within Android to maybe drive further competitive distance versus your peers and higher share of wallet over time.
And then second one is just on the World Cup. We got some feedback that that may have been a headwind for some of the IAP-focused advertisers. Anything you may call out around those particular dynamics or the cyclical dynamics in Q2. Thank you.
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah. So the World Cup first. World Cup has spikes in spend from World Cup specific advertisers during games and it's not that material when in the grand scheme of a whole quarter. So I wouldn't say the World Cup has much of any impact on if an in-app purchasing or ad support game customer can actually spend on platform. And we don't index high to any sort of customer in any category nor do we run any branding. So for us we still cater to the game advertiser.
On the first question, we are very competitive on both platforms. Now there is a very large company out there that owns the Google Play platform that provides a lot of installs and spend for customers on Google Play. So I wouldn't say that there. I would say for sure, like we look at the opportunity to grow equally on both platforms, our models get better, our ability to scale spend goes up on both platforms. It's just that the Android platform is more competitive because there's a very big competitor out there doing well there.
Robert Kulbreth, Analyst at Evercore
Thank you.
OPERATOR
Next we'll go to Jim Callahan with Piper Sandler.
Jim Callahan, Analyst at Piper Sandler
Great, thanks for taking the question. One for me on the revenues. By geography it looks like US accelerated Q over Q, but International was closer to flat with 1Q. Anything to sort of call out there on the delta?
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
No, nothing material. I mean International has been strengthening for a period of time over the past few quarters and then it's slowed down a little bit. But yeah, nothing specific and that's based on user location, so it's really the demographics based on region now also remember the web consumer business is more concentrated to the west than it is internationally at least today.
Jim Callahan, Analyst at Piper Sandler
Okay, that all makes sense. And if we think about non-gaming, but maybe excluding e-comm, I think there have been some discussions of verticals like either short dramas or prediction markets that may be leaning into spend kind of on the mobile gaming category. Any commentary you can provide there?
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah, I mean we just touched on the World Cup. Prediction markets was a big category there, but those other categories aren't yet a focus of ours. If you split the world up into consumer business, e-commerce on the web, and then non-gaming apps, the former is a much bigger category and that's what we're going after first. So we will go after the second later, and it just hasn't been a focus of ours yet in what we model.
OPERATOR
Our next question will come from Matt Swanson with RBC.
Matt Swanson, Analyst at RBC
Great. Yeah, thank you for taking my questions. You've been able to build this company incredibly lean. And when you were talking about the model improvements of doing A/B tests, what could the advantages be of maybe going from dozens of iterations to hundreds of iterations? Like is there a thought process around the right level of R&D spend, or is there a diminishing return from a ramp like that?
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
No, I mean, like you want to do—you have to do—smart A/B tests, right? Like just a whole bunch of nominal different A/B tests or low-IQ A/B tests aren't going to yield uplifts. So in a way we want very high talent density, which we have. We still need to hire more research scientists, do more A/B tests, but we need to become even more sophisticated using AI technologies to accelerate the rate of those tests too. So we do a lot of that, where AI is helping A/B testing.
And the rate of testing has for sure gone up in our company over the last couple of years, as LLMs have gotten a lot more sophisticated at writing code. So our focus won't change in terms of hire very, very smart people and then enable them to drive to more A/B tests powered by large language models helping with a lot of the coding.
Matt Swanson, Analyst at RBC
Thank you.
OPERATOR
Our next question will come from Clark Lampen with BTIG.
Clark Lampen, Analyst at BTIG
Thanks, guys. We've asked a bunch of questions on sort of funnel dynamics so far, and I think when you were answering Omar's question, you sort of broke it down in a very simplistic way where you can think about customer growth, data growth, and then that having a downstream impact on sort of performance and model uplift. It sounds like you're addressing the first portion at least near term with partnerships. Is there anything that you can do, I guess, on that sort of second layer in terms of data collection, whether it would be something like extending ad credits or maybe building out more of a managed service presence for an advertiser to help them sort of scale volume—maybe that doesn't make sense, but it sounds like they're sort of interrelated. And I'm just curious if sort of pushing on that second lever might help the first. And a second question, if I may. The lead-gen business isn't something that's sort of come up thus far on the call, unless I missed it. And I'm curious if you could provide just a very brief update on where things stand right now, whether it's ramping or just sort of directional trends.
Thank you.
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah, second one first. And thanks, Clark. Lead-gen business is still a work in progress, so we're still in testing with customers. There's nothing new to report there. On the first one, every new customer we get, their spend doesn't determine the type of data that we are able to access. They have to share their data with us to tap into the deep learning model that we have to get output—good advertising results—out of our system. So the goal is getting more mid-market customers.
They can give our model visibility into more of the user's transactional behavior. If we're able to do that over time, which is inevitable—it's just getting more customers on the platform that are substantial—we will have more data that then we can model against, write a more complex model, and get a better output. So that's sort of the function over time, and it compounds because the more customers we get, the better our performance will be. And then you'll get to a place where hopefully we reach tipping point, and the rate of customer acquisition goes up, and then it's sort of just automatically off to the races.
Clark Lampen, Analyst at BTIG
Thanks a lot.
OPERATOR
Next we'll go to Aaron Lee with Macquarie.
Aaron Lee, Analyst at Macquarie
Hey guys, thanks for taking the question. I wanted to take another crack at the margin question from earlier. How should we be thinking about the incremental investment in tech and compute going forward? Obviously we have the 3Q guide, so we can kind of back into that. But just thinking beyond 3Q, should we expect an elevated runway for investment, and just how much visibility into those training and compute costs going forward do you have?
Matt Stumpf, CFO
Yeah, I mean we don't expect any departure from the higher-level guidance that we've given to analysts and investors in the past—that of the incremental dollar in revenue, we're spending about 10 cents on compute. We're at that level within the guide, and we're at that level if you look at the data center disclosure you'll get in the 10-Q as well. We're still tracking at that level. So we don't expect any difference from here, but we may see variability over the longer term, you know, and we'll communicate that and the reasons behind why we've increased compute if there is such an increase.
But today we don't expect any change from that kind of guide.
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Now we will say, look, engineers are doing R&D, right? So if someone figures out a way to write a more complex model—way more parameters—train a bigger model and run it, and there's a material revenue uplift, we're not going to hold it back. So if we go into a quarterly earnings call and four weeks later we get that, we're pushing forward. And you saw as we talked about the guide and re-accelerating, we have a model uplift that releases—more complex model creates revenue re-acceleration.
That's always a good thing in our business.
Aaron Lee, Analyst at Macquarie
That's helpful. Then on the figure you've given out previously for $70,000 of gross spend in the first year for new customers, is that still the right bogey we should be thinking about? And are model breakthroughs the key driver to getting that number higher? Or are there any other drivers you would highlight?
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
It'll likely go up as we do partnership deals and target mid-market. So that's just an indicator of are the customers coming into the platform just signing up on the website—push by marketing—where you're going to get a lot more SMBs and low-GMV shops, or are the customers that are signing up less in quantity and higher GMV that we're getting through strategic partnerships? The latter being the focus, we'd expect that number to go up.
Aaron Lee, Analyst at Macquarie
Got it. Thank you.
OPERATOR
Our next question will come from Martin Yang with Oppenheimer.
Martin Yang, Analyst at Oppenheimer
Hi, thanks for taking the question. Can you maybe talk a bit more about the nature of a partnership? Is it going through those partner attribution partners, giving the customers additional credit, better data integration? What are the customers of these partners benefiting from having AppLovin?
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah, I mean it's a good question. We're still working through how to do it the optimal way. But if you're an attribution company and we're willing to pay for leads, and they benefit from their customers having more complex attribution—another big vendor in the mix—there's a big win. If the customer on the other side gets another big vendor in the mix, it's a big win for them too. So you've got a construct that's just win-win-win across the board.
But we've got to get past the awareness problem and the implementation problem. So Triple Whale was mentioned earlier on the call. That is a good example of one that we're iterating on actively to find the right way to let a large, large set of customers working with them understand that our platform is beneficial as a partner. They're a highly motivated one because there's obviously revenue potential, but two because it is very beneficial for their business model to add us into the mix for all their clients.
Martin Yang, Analyst at Oppenheimer
Got it. And a longer-term question, as you move beyond mid-markets, when you think about working with Fortune 500 brands, for example, sometimes you talk about mobile ads in general as having more quality control issues. So when you go to those tier-one brands, are you—or would you—think about expanding supplies to non-gaming?
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah, look, supply will expand over time, but I would say actually that it's a little bit crazy to think that there's quality controls in mobile gaming because there's no UGC. The apps are in the app store, approved; these are only adult apps, and there's no UGC. So it's a very, very controlled framework. An ad inside Candy Crush is materially safer than an ad almost anywhere else because that inventory is so controlled, and then obviously the attention given to that ad in mobile gaming is much more than anywhere, including television, given our ads run longer than 30 seconds to the user.
So it sets us up to be a really good framework. Now for us to get to the head of the market, we need sales—that requires actual people selling—and we need a reputation that suggests we've made the middle of the market work. We're more focused on the middle of the market because there you've got hungrier companies, leaner marketing teams, probably not agencies—at least big holding companies—in the middle, so things can go quicker. But if we're able to build a really solid reputation here, we're definitely going to go to the head of the market.
And I don't think inventory quality will be the concern inside gaming. Now, that does not mean that supply expansion is for sure not one of the levers that we'll pull on over time as a growth lever.
Martin Yang, Analyst at Oppenheimer
Thank you.
OPERATOR
Next we'll go to Vasily Karasyev with Cannonball.
Vasily Karasyev, Analyst at Cannonball Research
Hi, I have a long-term question, Adam, and it's about runtime data integration with Unity Vector. It's not a competitive impact question. Obviously AppLovin has a very strong position because you capture pretty much all the advertising signal there is to be captured and you utilize it very well. But that said, if I understand correctly, that runtime data gives a very specific, a very unique engine-level set of signals that, as I understand it, you don't have native access to.
And if that's true, then it seems like there's an argument that both channels can become complementary because they're using different sets of signals. So I was wondering if you could tell me if I'm thinking about it the wrong way and what are the implications of this new—if I understand correctly—new set of signals coming to the market? What does it mean for the industry? Does the overall spend grow as a result?
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah, I mean, look, this ties to what we tell customers that come to us and where their largest channel is spend. Sometimes we get asked should they only spend with us, or are they competing with themselves if they spend on other platforms? Everyone's data and model is different, and in this space—I mean, this has been, I think when we first went public, this was part of the narrative that was negative on us—that we're in a zero-sum sector. I think we've proven over the last five years this is not a zero-sum sector.
As marketing companies improve across the board, scale of user acquisition goes up, growth goes up, the P&L of the end client, the gaming customer, improves, then they can reinvest more dollars into marketing platforms. We're obviously the biggest; we want the market to improve. And that quote I gave you, with the MAX marketplace improving double digits quarter over quarter, that's a huge amount of growth for a very, very large market at this point in terms of our penetration into the ad-supported market in the ecosystem.
So we've proven the space is not zero sum. And that's because these models, when trained with differentiated data, create a higher ceiling for the gaming customer, which is beneficial.
Vasily Karasyev, Analyst at Cannonball Research
Thank you.
OPERATOR
Our final question will come from Tim Nolan with SSR.
Tim Nolan, Analyst at Macquarie
Hey guys, thanks for—thanks for fitting me in here. Adam, I think I caught a comment from you regarding Wurl recently. This is something which has not been addressed on this call, I don't think, yet. So my question is, now that the consumer business is launched, are you turning your attention a bit more to Wurl? You had said that you would kind of wait on that until you got this consumer business out there. Now that it's out there, I'm curious if Wurl becomes more of a topic of interest for you, and maybe how—how does your consumer experience lend itself to Wurl?
So, going from in-game ads to CTV ads, presumably now with lots of new relationships on the advertiser side as well. Any comment on Wurl would be great.
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah, thanks, Tim. Still getting used to your new firm. But on the Wurl and CTV question, like in consumer we're still budgetarily constrained; we're still early in the category, and if we were to go expand supply, the most natural is going to non-gaming apps and other open web–type placements. But the consumer vertical allows us to actually go out and expand supply. Gaming is much more niche, and really if you look at the world of the open web, social, you almost never see gaming ads.
Of course you see e-commerce ads. Right. So we think the first path to supply expansion will be on-device, and the second path will be connected TV. It's definitely an area of interest for us because that same lipstick-selling ad on the mobile device that's full screen should port really, really well to television. And we know that television drives shopper behavior. Everyone knows that at the scale that TV operates at. So it's an opportunity that's sitting there.
We're just not at the point yet where we can go execute on it.
Tim Nolan, Analyst at Macquarie
Yeah. Now, like you said, it just seems like a big market opportunity that itself is shifting to more performance-based advertising, and you've done such a great job on that. I guess the issue is it's less shifting to CTV apps and more shifting to the interface and the audience and the advertiser base, to understand those better.
Adam Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah, it's more—think of our consumer advertisers as, if they're spending, the earlier question of they're seeing really good ROAS, but they're not even spending at their ceiling yet. We're not at a point where we have excess budgets to take out. So if we just launched CTV and actually made it work and shifted dollars, we're weakening our position in mobile to go launch into CTV, and we wouldn't actually expand our revenue. To go into new supply, we need to believe there's going to be more dollars flowing.
So step one would be the obvious: just non-gaming apps, and gaming apps that don't currently run games, which would run non-gaming ads inside those apps. And then step two would be the open web. Step three would be connected TV. All of that's going to come for us because those are just obvious levers of growth to pull when we have the budget to go out yet.
OPERATOR
And that concludes the question and answer session for this quarter. We thank you all for joining us today. Have a good afternoon.
David Hsiao, Head of Investor Relations
Thank you.
Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.
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