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AkhenOsiris $APP Part 2 However, accurately valuing consumers playing games for offers that aren’t games requires predicting an even more complex chain of behaviors. We have to predict ad engagement, click-through rates, app or site engagement, conversion…

. We grew our businesses together over many years. But as we expanded beyond gaming into e-commerce and other categories, I began working with a broader set of founders, operators, and marketers.

One consistent theme in these conversations is that despite our scale, many potential customers do not fully understand how our business model actually works. There are very few examples of scaled advertising businesses like ours that do not rely on owning a consumer traffic property, so the confusion is understandable.

As a result, I still hear the same questions surprisingly often. Are we focused only on gaming? Are we large enough to matter? And does advertising on Axon expand purchaser behavior beyond what advertisers already achieve through social platforms?

I am proud of what we have built and the impact our advertising solutions deliver, so this post is meant to provide a clear and direct explanation of how the Axon engine works and why it is critical for advertisers. Going forward, we’ll post more regularly on business, product, engineering, and culture topics.

The scale of the opportunity
Here is the reality. Advertisers on our platform are currently spending well over $11 billion dollars annually on media, and that number has grown meaningfully since we disclosed it in Q1 2025. To put that into perspective, advertisers spend more on AppLovin than they do on Pinterest, Snapchat, and Reddit combined. More importantly, the vast majority of dollars on our platform are spent on a performance basis. Advertisers are acquiring customers and generating revenue that exceeds their advertising costs. If they do not, spend stops immediately. This distinction matters. Axon is not optimized for budgets or reach. It is optimized for advertiser profit.

Most Axon ads are delivered through our own mediation platform. MAX reaches over one billion daily active users. This audience consists primarily of adults who play casual mobile games such as Candy Crush, Solitaire, Mahjong, and Crossword games. The social power user is not the same user as the user playing a puzzle or a crossword. This creates space to reach this different consumer and create more shopping intent than would be possible if only focused on social.

Understanding our inventory
Given the strength of Axon, we are a major player in the MAX auction. The ad impressions we win are exclusive to us, and benefit solely the advertisers on our platform. If an advertiser is not buying through Axon, they are missing access to a significant portion of premium mobile supply.

This leads to a fundamental misunderstanding regarding DSPs (demand side platforms). Occasionally, an advertiser will tell me they are already accessing our inventory via a third-party DSP. Our business is likely larger than most of the DSPs combined. Access to inventory on MAX reflects competitive auction outcomes; said differently, when our advanced models predict high purchaser intent, it’s very unlikely that any other bidder can bid as competitively as us for that user. This closed loop between supply, demand, and optimization is one of the primary reasons our advertising opportunity for our partners has grown so much in the past couple of years.

The power of Axon 2
For most of our history, Axon focused primarily on games. That was not a strategic limitation; it was a choice to stay focused while we built our technical capabilities. We became experts in helping game developers grow their businesses, and that focus, paired with technology, helped us become the largest user acquisition channel for mobile gaming in the world. - AkhenOsiris tweet

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