AppLovin grows 60% Y/Y rounding to $20bn in annual platform ad spend

• AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi spoke at the All-In Summit 2026, discussing LLMs, personalised ads and more.
• His mindset includes expecting "to get screwed" every day.

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi has suggested ads have greater potential for economic expansion compared to the rise of chatbots, even if large language models (LLMs) have greater economic value.

"What people don’t realise 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," he said.

In January 2025, AppLovin declared that on its own platform ad spend had reached $11 billion per year. Last week, at the All-In Summit 2026, Foroughi shared that the company has grown 60% year-over-year, rounding to approximately $20bn.

He added that as AppLovin isn’t the only player in the marketplace, across ad companies that number is "probably more than double", leading him to estimate that around $50bn in advertising is being spent every year in the mobile games ecosystem.

"People love the ads that we show"

Foroughi stated the economic value of an LLM and what it’s doing in society may be greater, but that advertising is "a very profitable implementation of a deep learning model". 

He argued a shift from using Google to find a product to using a chatbot won’t have a major impact on economic expansion because that same product is being sought by different means.

Conversely, presenting a relevant ad on Facebook, in an app or in-game can present users with something they weren’t aware of before. He called this a "fun moment for consumers" and a form of creating discovery.

"You would think people wouldn’t like them, but we see tonnes of engagement on little mini-games that are appearing in other games and people are playing these previews because the technologies have gotten so good at recommending something relevant."

He noted that a lot of players watch ads because they want rewards, which creates a dynamic with the possibility of "intent". By presenting personalised ads, Foroughi suggested that experience can be further enhanced.

"If you're sitting there in a game and you're watching an ad for 30 seconds to get a free life, you're getting something that has monetary value. Now, if you're doing that, do you want to sit and watch garbage for 30 seconds or do you want to watch something relevant?" he posed.

On this basis, Foroughi argued that Apple’s increased privacy measures in recent years run counter to consumers’ actual preferences.

"If you could precisely target a user five years ago on iOS, and today someone says ‘I don't want you to precisely target me’, you group them in a bunch and you serve them a worse advertisement," he explained.

"Now, the funny outcome of that is we'll get a lot of complaints after that change that Apple made from users that say 'serve me more relevant ads - you're showing me a bunch of spam'. So, there is this notion that you need privacy regulation so that technology companies can do exactly what's expected of them. On the other side, consumers do want relevant ads."

The value of ads and games

Also at the summit, Foroughi revealed his mindset to making AppLovin successful, not resting on his laurels but always preparing to move quickly.

"We never think we won. We think, every day we wake up and we're probably going to get screwed right now and we better work hard. And so you've got a company that's lean with a lot of subject matter experts who are really, really focused on this thing, this mobile gaming experience, and translated into transactional behaviour on the other side," he shared.

"And so I think there's this ability to take on giants. If you're very focused, you remain lean and you can just move faster than them."

He reflected on AppLovin’s successes and challenges, on taking the company public and surviving through difficult times. In 2022, he said the company had no demand and a lot of supply. In fact, "stock went down literally every day", so AppLovin began buying back its own stock.

When shares dropped, he described an "us against the world" mentality.

In more recent years, AppLovin has seen its ad revenue rise significantly, along with its stock price - though shares are currently below their December 2025 peak. The company has also battled short-seller reports questioning the company's business practices.

Foroughi noted that, previously, AppLovin had bought studios and used its games business to collect data for training its first deep learning model.

As studios don’t tend to share their data with third-parties, they were bought "as a data play". Once a model that was successful in the market had been built, third-parties started coming in and AppLovin divested from its games business, selling its studios to Tripledot.