UA Monthly #1: Meta’s New Playbook, Reddit Ads, & the State of UA

Welcome everybody to Deconstructor of Funds much requested user acquisition monthly episode one. First episode, not hopefully the last episode. I got two amazing experts here today. Jihan Oak.
My name is Jihan. I work as an independent UI consultant and on the side I built a lightweight data intelligence platform called scaling.game.
Perfect. And before you worked at Pocket Jams, Ubisoft, Zingga, and Skills in various growth roles. So just making sure that we didn't just pick up an random consultant to come and talk about UA.
That is correct. Yeah, that's my past. Yep.
And then the always insightful Mr. Josh Chandley from Jamaica. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. From Jamaica. Something somewhere a little bit further away than that. Yeah. Presidency of another games.
Yeah. Different island.

And yours truly to be asking all the stupid questions today. Uh Mishkatkov, certified UA yellow belt. So in this episode, we will be talking first and foremost, is Meta back? Is it for real? Is it a scam? Of course, Mate from Two and a Half Gamers had a lot to say about this. We will covering Apps stateofame marketing report. We'll talk about Reddit launching AI campaign called Max and then uh [laughter] Liftoff is going public. So those are our topics today. Let's start with Metafoo Dust. So Two and a Half Gamers and Mate with an amazing clickbait title and a very insightful episode. So they went after Meta with interesting podcast. Long story short is this is according to Mate's LinkedIn. Meta wasn't back. We just got a two-day dopamine hit. His read is that the revenue spike many teams saw wasn't a Meta suddenly bidding on nonIDFA traffic. Again, it was Meta rolling out new extremely aggressive end cards and

interactive playables formats that effectively increased ad pressure, sometimes feeling like two ads in a row and maybe it harder to click out. Made it harder to click out. CVR jumped. ECPM followed. Dashboards lit up, but the underlying signal mix didn't change. Meta still leaned heavily on IDFA and nonIDFA performance stayed flat and he also pointed out that retention dipped at the same time the revenue spiked and his punchline isn't technical it's competitive meta showed it can move the market quickly with a format and economics and temporally squeeze unity and applo share even if the win is short-lived and paid for it with churn later Josh what happened here
yeah yeah I mean first of all I think podcast with mate and Felix was amazing. They absolutely crushed it. Really good analysis. I So I I agree with them that Meta, you at least appears to be laying the groundwork for an expansion into iOS in app inventory. You know, they've been

relatively dormant for a long time and so you're not going to launch changes to everything on the exact same time. You're going to layer things out and just start whittling away at it. So we we'll see if they can execute on that. And it's not just the new templates either. I'm noticing them speaking a lot more at conferences and doing a lot more outreach as well. My only real push back is that I I agree that it's like a temporary blip, but I I don't believe that Meta's return is, you know, guaranteed to be a net negative for Apploven. My thinking has a evolved here as we've seen the last year of performance. You know, last year we saw Unity and Apploven both grow at the same time. We've seen a whole new demand pool like ecom flow into an app without hearing as much pricing pressure on Axon for gaming, you know, so we're kind of modeling for a war here between Meta and other inapp ad networks, but perhaps it's more of a partnership. Maybe inapp

ads, you know, like ad monetized games and apps really are just, you know, heavily undermonetized. And so one outcome here might not be, you know, Meta goes up, therefore everyone else goes down. It might be that just ad monetization is going to start making a hell of a lot more money. And if that's true, you know, LTV for admonetized games could be skyrocketing. That means, you know, ad monetized games could gain share. You know, the last time we saw Admon do this well, you know, hyper casual caught on fire because just essentially just trading impressions really, really fast turnarounds. you know, when CPMs are that high, that starts to make sense. So, I'm curious to see what happens here. Uh, it might be that as we see meta return, it's competitive, but I it could be additive.
I second pretty much everything that you said. I mean, podcast was pretty self-explanatory and like very very very helpful for everyone to understand the

situation, but I agree with the part that this is just laying the ground for meta. It is finally coming up. They are finally catching up with the nonAT tracking solutions that they have been building for a long time. I remember that when they first launched AM on the UA side, similar thing happened for a few days. It actually worked perfect and everyone got super excited that it got broken for a little while, took some time and then finally they released it and now it's functional. This has been a very similar case. they've been obviously like working on not just the technology itself but the changes on the ad formats and this one tactic just spiked for a little while which is also not new other platforms like they have similar ad formats like Google so they're just like following the rule book for that but in terms of the yeah industry impact yeah I fully agree on with you so I don't see as like a net

negative as well it's just that it'll probably take some time
I just wanted to ask you guys a little additional question with looking at Sensor Tower's latest data from their report and when they break down the ad network impression share by genre we can kind of clearly see that Meta even as this report was coming this was before Meta was officially back they definitely control social that's over 50% of all the ad impressions but they have been absent pretty much from inapp advertising and if I understand correctly meta is back refers to them being back in inapp advertising columns. Right.
Exactly. Instead of just selling us impressions, they now want to buy some impressions from us, too. And that's why that's so exciting for ad monetized games. If we get all of the this new demand, and it really is as incremental as it kind of looks. Let's say inapp ad LTVs jump let's say 20%. That's maybe that's optimistic, maybe it's pessimistic. Well, if admonetized games

have LTVs 20% higher now, well, there are auctions that we were losing on Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube that now we're winning. And we start to grow that whole pie. That's good for everybody. But I think I've been telling Meta and saying publicly like, "We miss you. Come back to iOS. We want this inventory." But, you know, we said that because we love the quality. And so, it would be a damn shame if the way they came back was by degrading that quality. Part of what grows LTV is also boosting your retention rates. If we're juicing our ARP Dow by decreasing our retention, you know, that's going to make this a lot less exciting. And so I really hope that as we continue to see these developments, you know, quality isn't something that we give up on. What do you refer to by the quality? So, do you refer to the fact that the ads were so intrusive that where they pretty much forced you to click on them or do you just refer to the basically the rollass of those

users?
It's a damn good question, Mishka, because no one in the entire world agrees on the metric.
Oh,
so you you you've pointed specifically on the painful bit. Maybe you're on your way to a brown belt. Don't know what's after you.
No, no, no. I think green is my next one.
Green. Is that what is that how it goes? Okay. Yeah. So the way I think about it is churn rate per impression. Like if I show a th000 impressions, how many users do I lose? If I show a th000 impressions and I lose one user, that's not so bad. If I show a,000 impressions and I lose 100 users, that's really bad. And so I don't have moralistic attitudes. Like if you want to make the user force quit my app, I don't care if it doesn't make my churn rate per impression shown go up. That's the actual metric that I think about day-to-day on the admon side. And so if that metric is going in a negative

direction faster than the ARP Dow is going in a positive direction, it's actually a risk to LTV, not a tailwind. Pixel Flow is a fun and great game by Loom. shout out to another Turkish, you know, superstars. But it's not that good compared to how bad the ads are. So, so the ads make me quit the game because the ads are so intrusive that they don't even mind you showing the X on how to close. They're like, you're going to play a playable ad of last time it was Coin Master. You will pay play Coin Master right now. I know you wanted to play Pixel Flow, but you're going to play it and then I'm going to show you the App Store three times as you aim to continue playing Pixel Flow until you just close down Pixel Flow. Is that what you're talking about?
Yeah, it sucks, right? I posted about this a week or two ago. I I call it the initification of mobile advertising where the the challenge that we're seeing is a lot of these ad networks,

they're making these decisions about ad templates and what impressions they what creative they show based on what helps them win the auction. And what that means is they're not even optimizing for ARPDO. They're optimizing for CPM. And so, you know, thinking back to an AP world, if you're only optimizing for a really short-term metric, you spam the player with offers, you go really hardcore and aggressive, and you move that metric, but you might hurt retention and long-term LTV. If an ad network does something like this, and that that hurts the user experience and hurts retention, but they can charge a little bit more for the ads. they don't really get hurt by them leaving your game because they're just going to go watch ads in a different game. And so they don't pay that retention tax. The publisher does. And so the incentives are aligned in a way where all the ad networks really care about is winning the impression, getting the click, getting the attribution. So they're not

incentivized to optimize for LTV. And that's just one of the big challenges we face with ad quality today.
And is there a way to track this this churn that the ads cause?
Very very few tools. The only tool that Wildcard uses is called Unity ad quality and that does attach to Max, but it's a separate SDK now than Iron Source. So, it's quite hard to track. Yeah. Like like what I'm really describing is the foundation of the broken relationship between marketing teams and product teams or admonization teams and because product teams always see them as hurting the product and admonization only looks at the number. look, we're bringing you free money. And then they go to these conferences that, by the way, I like, please continue inviting me, all the ad tech companies. [laughter] And they would show you like, hey, we did a study and 78% of the users like [ __ ] rewarded videos. I'm like, everybody hates them. They're so bad that Dream

Games advertises with like hundreds of millions of dollars that they do not have ads in their game. Like that's their USP. Kingshot is advertising. Our USP is you can play the game that you are playing and we will not force you to open up App Store and play I don't know whatever. Actually, Kingshot also uses playables a ton, but you get my point. So, it's it's it's confusing. It's interesting.
It's a symptom of a bigger issue. Yeah. And that's not to say that the networks aren't providing value. like clearly like they're still providing almost all of the liquidity in our app economy. It's just that there's not enough incentive for them to optimize purely for us. And that's just to some degree it's kind of okay. But I think there's an opportunity here where if we can start to improve the user experience in a more long-term basis that can start to improve inapp ad ltvs for these games and that will only just increase the whole pie. Jan, do you believe that if

this inapp ad revenue is increasing, we'll again see hyper casuals back in the business?
Unlikely probably because of the other side of the coin. The reason why they were they were hyper casuals and it was working so well was because on the UA side of things, the costs were lower as well. Now because of the competition that Josh described on the admon side, there's a similar competition on the UA side as well and the costs have been pretty much increasing like every quarter for the last few years. That's why like companies are pushing their payback periods longer. That's why hybrid casual is now in place. Even like the simplest hyper casual type game has to have a slightly longer payback window after they hit the golden audience which is fairly small the people that absolutely love the game. So that's why see it unlikely hopefully it would be nice to have but very unlikely. It would be nice to have hyper casual back.

Like I I like the motion in the industry like so many new games coming up.
Even though like we turned them out a lot. It's nice to see like so many content cuz a lot of content is coming around the trends as well back then if you remember almost like a social media scrolling type of experience where like you get so many interesting content based on the trends obviously like you turn them out but
yeah certain people like it a lot like myself.
Yeah. I mean I guess my my counterpoint is like that reals and shorts have only gotten more popular in the last 5 years. It's very true that costs are inflating and that we're paying higher CPMs and CPIs like the whole every whatever whatever your metric is that you want to track those are going up. But if you're an admonetized game provider means you're getting paid more too. The last time I saw us hitting like true new all-time highs on the admon side for CPMs, it was like 2021ish. You know, I think it's been a it's been

a hard while for us post ATT. If CPMs are rallying, the high frequency turnover of hyper casual like could be exactly what benefits. Now, I don't I don't make hyper casual games, so I've got no dog in this fight. But the reason that I saw them dying off is cuz hyper casual games are IRR plays. They're not going to give you 200% rorowass over two years. They're going to give you 110% rorowass over 30 days. And if you can make a 10% return every month, that's an amazing business. The challenge is if you're spending a dollar, make a$110 and your CPMs drop 30%. Now you're spending a dollar to get 80. Whereas if they go from doing 150 to 120, that's still a business. But with hyper casual, there's this volatility here where when the market's in a bad state, when prices are low, they don't start to they don't function as well. It's like, you know, like any other commodity, you know, if oil prices collapse, there are some producers that need to stop producing for a while and they start to turn on

their business model because CPMs are at or oil prices are at a sufficient level. I see um these pure highfrequency, high turnover ad monetized games is super valuable when prices are high. And I can see that that's kind of the direction we're going in. I don't think we're setting crazy highs right now, but especially, you know, like we we were just talking about if Meta comes back, if we see more and more demand, especially incremental demand that doesn't hurt other ad networks flowing in, that's a bullish signal for CPMs.
There's like two sides of the business, right? [clears throat]
There's apps that are spending UA dollars and there's games who are making Admon dollars. And even though a game doesn't have ads in it and not monetizing through ads, they still spend UA. So that's why UA is more pushing the prices higher, which benefits Admon. What it might lead is actually like a lot of AP driven games might integrate

ad revenue to their games a little bit more so that they can actually benefit from these CPM increases instead of like we might expect an increase in ads revenue based games as well. But I feel like the bigger wave would be all games start integrating like either rewarded ads or some sort of like ads placement so they would increase the IAA portion of their revenue. Web stores you see what good looks like but have you experienced great app charge is the direct to consumer platform that powers over half a billion dollars in transactions each year for top studios. They're not just another vendor. They're backed by Supercell and built by monetization veterans from Moonactive, Plague Tikica, and other industry giants who understand the difference between merely functional and the truly exceptional. What sets them apart? Deeply personalized web stores with custom design offers, industry-leading monetization features,

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All right, we've kind of steered into talking about the market. So, that's a good segue to talk really about the market and especially the the state of game marketing. So, AppSlier together with Unity and Nuzu. That's a I was kind of confused like what is Nuzu doing part of this because Nuzu is kind of like focused on HD gaming maybe. Shout out to Nuzu amazing company. So

Appflier together with Nuzu and Unity launched state of game marketing report and this one is a long one an interactive report. You can click on it link in the description below. But I'm curious of like what are your takeaways from it?
I love the subtitle. Gaming's golden age of marketing. It definitely feels like we're heading there which is kind of cool. I think I had two big takeaways. First, the biggest UA market in the world is contracting. You know, mobile gaming UA was about 25 billion last year according to this report, which is up 4%. So, slow consistent growth, but they reported that USA spend was actually down 5%. Jian has been dead on like CPIs are high and they're not getting lower. Competition is strong and it's sophisticated. I think incremental scale is more challenging to achieve profitably than it was a year or two ago. On the other hand, you know, Turkey and India grew 29 and 19% respectively.

And so the first big takeaway is that, you know, geographic diversification isn't a hedge. It's increasingly a source of efficiency. That's been, you know, a trend for a long time now, but I think it's getting really big and loud at this point. The second is that the the creative arms race is real and the data kind of proves that the middle class is having a hard time. The headline numbers were the top spenders were producing two 2,400 to 2,600 you know creatives per quarter which is up by you know 2530%. Like that's just an insane number of ads per game. Well, it's a little bit slop, but it's also the idea that now with AI, one idea can be 30 variations almost instantly, and it allows for incredible personalization. You can have 30 themes of one idea and serve the best theme to the best person.

The challenge here is that publishers spending under a million dollars a quarter, you know, they're not really able to produce more creatives. They're in this dead zone. And the report kind of called that out. This phenomenon, it creates a lot of pressure if your budgets are like below 5 10 million a quarter. You know, there's a risk that gaming revenue increasingly concentrates to the big players because first they have the production capacity to create it and second they have the scale to actually use all of that personalized contents. If you have 30 different flavors of the same ad, but you're spending 100k a month, it's going to be really really hard to give networks enough data to actually be able to target those. And so that this capacity, you know, it it creates some risk of concentration. But second, it makes me wonder what's the next shoe to drop. We're seeing networks start to generate creatives at scale for free. If you upload creatives to meta

now, they will start suggesting and offering you like free AI creative. If volume is the game, does advertiser side production become a losing bet in the long term?
Yeah, some of mine are similar to yours, but the biggest thing for me was I've seen the reports saying paid installs are up around 10%, but impressions are actually up 20%. She made me feel like there's just more more noise on the user level per conversion especially. The other thing was kind of like tying back to the previous conversation how hybrid monetization is getting real slowly. Only 30% of the games run hybrid hybrid monetization which by hybrid monetization we mean AP plus ad revenue and only 7% more games adopted in the 2025 and if we keep seeing eCPMs increase more and more game would enable ad revenue more to the mix. Creative

volume is another one Josh already like summarized it well. It was interesting to me that in addition to the top bottom users are have increased their creative volume a lot as well which is likely due to AI capabilities now and middle is getting crashed somehow which was kind of like interesting but in hindsight I guess the top ones they have the resources so they catch up with every industry updates fast and smaller developers they always had little resources but now they can do a lot more with little resources and in the middle there's studios that are probably taking a little bit more time on integrating AI to their workflows. Um, creative volume gap between top and bottom of the publishers have been widening. As Josh already like touched on, the top advertisers are running so many creatives now. Obviously, they have so many resources so they catch up with

industry updates way faster. What was interesting to me is the middle one is actually like stagnant and flat slightly even declining if I remember correctly and the bottom part of the publishers are actually like increase their crib volume even more than the top on a percentage basis and that's probably because the AI capabilities they small teams catch up with it so fast and they do so much with a little resources and the middle publishers are probably just taking a little more time integrating AI to their workflows. because they already have decent sized team and probably working workflows for them so far. So it might be taking a little more time to integrate more resources. Other thing that we haven't talked about was how Chinese publisher are winning the UA game. They are taking 35% of the global UA share and growing very aggressively in like western markets and Asian markets as well. I think part is also like their volume of game coming up has

been increasing as well especially on the casual sides which stood out to me. And lastly on the UA side I was surprised to see how iOS advertisers run 15% more resources than Android. It seems like the incremental scale has been coming from adding new channels on iOS. I'm assuming that this is also like post stabilization like more especially on the incentivized networks more and more of them coming to iOS and start having iOS offerings. I believe this ties back to that uh for last year
and and Josh like you were talking a lot about like the amount of variations and the amount of creatives that are being produced. So I calculated like about 28 per day is the number then
including weekends. Yeah.
Yeah. Including the weekends like seven days a week about 30 a day. And of course that's variations. You upload one and gives you 30 different variations.

But is this like a essentially a new tax of participation in the mobile gaming business?
Yeah, the competition is incredible. I'd say like a year ago it was about copying fastest, but now we're even seeing just like some direct ripoffs where like the actual content is being taken from other advertisers and if it wins for your app then you make your own and start doing variations. The level of cutthroatess especially from some of the new entrance in countries where gaming is growing very fast. They're incredibly aggressive competitors and they're pretty bloodthirsty. Does that mean that if you're a typical ethical western developer that you're really looking at your ads and making sure that they're not sexist or copies of others and that they respect the IPs? Are you at a disadvantage by be by essentially doing the right things?
If doing the right things is not rorowass optimal. Yeah. But like going even further, you know, I've seen

content from our UA videos, our UA creative running in other apps, UA creative, the actual pixel for pixel thing. You're at a disadvantage. It's incredibly hard to police. The volume is just breathtaking of this. And so it it is very difficult. And so there's definitely some gamesmanship where when you can start to hit something with enough volume and let's say something is unethical to the point where it is not allowed. Right? Meta does app. They're not individually checking every single ad. They're doing it with algorithms. And so if you can soak a content filter with 30 or 40 variations of an idea that should be banned, you can figure out exactly where the line is, but also where the holes are. And so yes, these some of these companies are able to be pretty aggressive and really push those filters. And so it's a challenging

environment. Is there such a concept as sort of a like I remember we used to have a was it called the hero creative or is that like a long long gone?
No, I mean depends on the game genre. Sometimes some game types have a creative that's has the top that is the top spender for like months really. So that still exists. Yeah. Is is the halflife of this sort of a wellperforming creative just decreasing?
You have so many options to improve it little by little now. And it's kind of like Josh pointed out that the speed that it gets copied if it's working well is like it's unbelievable at this point. It's just so fast. So it pushes you to come up with actually creative variations. Obviously like there's only so much you can do with variations but still you have to get more creative with

what kind of variations you have. For example, like we were talking about earlier, right? So he's pointing out for example the speed between like each scenes and the video which is actually relatively new. I I think it's a great strategy. Yeah. So you need to come up with strategies like this even with variations like you need to be a little bit more than color of the caption or like size of the caption. It just pushes you to be more creative. Obviously whoever copies it actually gets pretty close of a success when they copy you. But once you come up with some original concept or variation, anything of that sort, you are still the biggest fan. Like you were talking about like how you like pixel flow. There's so many v variations of pixel flow now. Yes.
And they're probably making decent honestly. They're making a good living probably,
but there's only one pixel flow now. So

it's similar with ads. A lot of people are copying you and get pretty decent results. But if you're creative enough, you are still making a difference and the competition just pushes you to be the most creative that you can ever be. Now,
just to add on to there, maybe I'm being a little bit too judgmental before as well, where to some degree, like when we talk about a new winning concept and it's being copied, maybe the word copied is too judgmental. Maybe, you know, these are just creative trends. if things are trending on on Twitter or Tik Tok or or reals, you know, if you make content in that area too, it's not necessarily that you're copying and it's bad. And so I want to maybe soften on like the judgmental language. There are some things where yeah, like the content is literally being stolen, but that's like bad being mixed in with some of the stuff which is good, which is engaging with users. We do it on the same on on gamedev, too. like if we see a new winning mechanic, a new winning feature or like a battle pass or whatever the the life events is,

you know, we we want to follow those trends too because it means that the user isn't constantly trying to relearn every little thing. Can you say it's copying and it's bad? I suppose, but to some it's just like it is just a trending thing as well. And so I guess I just want to soften a little bit and not be too judgmental about it.
Yeah, but you said pixel for pixel copy. Yeah, pixel for pixel. Sometimes it's really bad. Sometimes it's that's that's an outlier I would say. Like I have that I have that experience at my business every couple of months.
Yeah. It's not that fast. It's not like every single competitor ad is cloning my ad. You know, my competitors are doing a great job for the most part.
Yeah. And the second point that I got from what you guys were talking about one was that the spend has gone down in the key market which is the US. And there was this sort of a hypothesis that we are not seeing the real value of mobile gaming business because of the inapp ad business side which is not shown in these stats but also because of

the web shops like that's the secret thing where all the money gets funneled. But if you look at this analysis if the spend goes down doesn't that mean that that we are actually seeing a pretty accurate image of the market like there's no secret loot that we're not seeing?
Yeah. Yeah, the only other thing it could be is margin taking where higher returns are being required, but I can't I can't speak to that being the case
maybe to some extent like if you consider because there's less VC money so there's less probably focus on just absolute growth and more on profitable growth and that decreases the amount of money you're putting because you need a faster cycles and faster payback. So there might be multiple things at play, but um the sort of a main message has been that that you guys are just not seeing the whole picture. Like it's an iceberg. It's like we see the bottom of it and not not the top. Let's be honest, you're tired of chasing installs across the same crowded networks. We all are. That's why Wibes

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at Meta here. Max is supposed to surface next new creative and audience insight, especially a feature called top audience personas that reports which personas are showing up and how creators perform against them. Jan, what's going on here? First off, by CPA, they probably meant cost per action, and by action, they probably meant purchase. I'm assuming that's how we usually use it. This new offering is essentially like very similar to Meta's Vantage Plus or like Tik Tok Smart Plus. Really, they have a way of yeah, put all the content you have and Reddit makes a lot of variations of it. This matters because just like just we talked previously like how important it is to have a lot of variations of or like just new content uh on the creative side of things. So Reddit just helps advertisers to come up with those more which was interesting and new to me was the claim of opening the black box. So what is different than

other platforms? Reddit is saying that they actually give a lot of visibility on what is working for these campaigns which is very different than other offerings. Other offerings are more like blackbox even though like a specific creative piece is working or like specific audience is working. Maybe you don't know anything about it and the platform optimizes it for you. In this case, Reddit claims that they're going to give more visibility to these data points to educate the advertiser and potentially like give them opportunity to lean more on maybe like on other campaigns which is interesting to me.
Yeah, I think every platform needs a product like this. You know, we talk about creative being the last lever and it's because like manualized targeting via the advertiser, it just isn't as effective as ML on the network side. So like you know advantage plus you know Apple of Axon, Unity Vector, Liftoff

Cortex and now like Red Max that the pattern is is universal. the platforms are reducing those manual levers to where you're feeding it creative and budget and then the algorithm is able to handle all all the hyperpersonalized stuff with their audience. Regarding the opening the black box, the top personas, tools like this sound great, but they don't always actually deliver enough value to change the behavior or change the decision an advertiser would make. And so when I start seeing that happen, I'll believe it.
So Reddit is really like explicitly positioning this around top audience personas as the key differentiator. What would real transparency even mean? Is it persona level lift, creative to persona mapping, different subreddit signals, incrementality? Like what would be the perfect case scenario?

We'll wait and see. From what I'm getting, they're planning to utilize the level of information that they have about the users, which is usually like subreddits that they are in the questions that they're posting. They have some sort of like they're creating persona for each each users that they have based on their interests on these topics. And these interests are all not just like one. It's like more like a mix of interests at like different magnitudes for each users. And there's like no end to it on Reddit as well, right? You can just post anything instead of like on Facebook. You obviously have some sort of like well you used to have a lot of like interest targeting. This is more like there's no end to it. They can get as specific as they can, but as as Josh said, yeah, we we'll see.
Yeah. The the challenge is like when you look at some of the screenshots that they're showing like Mishka, if I if I tell you one of your top segments is that you're tech and finance savvy players.

How does that change your product decision? How does that change your creative decision? And so I'm skeptical until proven otherwise. Like dashboards showing broad segments aren't that actionable. If it's just like age, gender, subreddit clusters being repackaged. It's just kind of a a fancy report. You know, there are corner cases where it could make sense, but I I think it's unlikely to be a major differentiator that every single advertiser needs to lean on until proven otherwise. And how would you start testing like how any UA team should start testing with with Reddit? Because they also announced naturally a new AI tool that automatically essentially converts your creative assets to Reddit friendly assets. So making the accessibility higher, but how do you move on from here?
The accessibility thing certainly reduces friction for onboarding with like Redditizing your post because like

it's a very unique inventory source. Yes,
Reddit is a very special part of the internet. If it's sufficiently dynamic, it could also reduce creative fatigue, but I'm not really sure cuz I haven't seen it. And then in terms of like how to how to onboard and test it, you know, until until we see what's actually happening in the real world, it it's hard to say. They haven't given us guidance, but at some point it's just you're going to have to feed it money. Hold your nose through the LP. Yeah, I for the learning periods
and see what comes out through the other sides. What we don't know is how long does this take to learn? How prone is it to resetting its learnings? And how scalable is it?
All right.
And maybe yeah, how how consistent it is over long term also.
That's true.
So, two skeptical hippos when it comes to Reddit, [laughter] which actually fits the platform perfectly. All right, let's let's talk

let's talk about Liftoff and them filing. This is the last last piece of news. Liftoff filing to go public. So, Liftoff is a Blackstone backed mobile performance marketing and monetization platform. Actually, they even own Game Refinery and app refinery. So the data tools they built from the 2021 liftoff bungle combo acquisition that filed for US IPO and quickly became a litless test for adtech sentiment in 2026. Long story short, Liftoff is going public at a $5.2 billion valuation at the top end while operating a meaning at a meaningful scale. They have hundreds of millions in revenue alongside real questions about margins, leverage, and what a moat looks like when every platform and network is racing towards the same AI optimized blackbox performance model unlike Reddit that has opened up their box for everybody to look into. So Gian, what's your take on

Liftoff going public?
Well, it's exciting about the tech industry for sure. Definitely gets more eyeballs. I mean after apploven's success got a lot of eyeballs from especially non- gaming side of the industry. I'd say that mini apploving narrative would be tempting but a little dangerous to assume cuz I mean Axon has been very consistent revenue growth and it really helped applo like became what they are really whereas Liftoff's cortex is a little bit it needs to be proven at a larger scale let's put it that way even though they are also increasing non-gaming inventory of their business for a for a decent amount of time. It's still not as proven as Apploven Axon and they have good revenue growth. They have good gross margins. The the Aita margins look good. Actually slightly even better than where Apploin was at its IPO in

terms of EITA margins and definitely better than Unity on an operating basis now. But they have a pretty high depth preo, very high depth rate revenue ratio. So we'll see. We'll see how it goes. First disclaimer, I I am not an equity analyst and nor do I deserve the credentials as one. But yeah, I I don't see the resemblance to App Leven either. I think Appleven has an incredibly durable business in a very unique way and it's leveraged its assets to to create a very unique moes. I think Liftoff has stuff going for it, but it's also it's not a criticism of Liftoff to say it's not as not as special as Apploven. App is the most special ad tech mobile inapp ad company out there right now. So the Cortex appears to be a credible ML engine on the demand side. It's newer which mean than Axon and that means it has more room for growth. So it

could improve more. 140,000 apps integrated is a is a a real advantage. 1.4 billion DAO. It is like getting that initial insertion point is is quite challenging and so it creates some defensibility but ultimately you know liftoff is still bidding inside other networks auction environments. It doesn't have its you that's an architectural gap. It has to bid inside of you know max level play ADM mob pro. So it it doesn't have any kind of special data as far as I'm aware of at least. But that said, I think they're a very important market constituents and healthy ecosystems. You know, we need liftoffs and companies like Liftoff for us to stay healthy.
All right, let me ask this. So Apploven has absolutely collapsed in the stock market to just $130 billion valuation. So the stock is almost half right now and Liftoff is targeting 5 billion at the top end. Again, we're not financial

analysts, but if Liftoff IPO doesn't go too well, does that kind of reflect well or poorly at Appven or has no effect?
I will keep repeating this in case I misqued. I am not an equity analyst.
Yeah,
the changes in Apploven stock is is very surprising to me. I think that the fundamentals of that business are are continuing to improve and they're they're executing really well right now. This is just a great example of why I should never buy or sell individual stocks because what's happening out there defies my understanding. I think they're at an all-time high in terms of strength, but clearly maybe I'm missing something.
As Chris says, hedge fund hotels. So, somebody checked out [laughter]
maybe maybe.
What's the moat for Liftoff? Like what makes it unique? The way I think about ad networks is I think about it like an engine being fed fuel. The engine is the product of the technology, the supply

side integrations, how good that is, the machine learning, the bidding algorithm, and then the fuel is essentially all the data that you're piping through it. You know, if you've got a really great engine, but you're trying to run it on vodka versus, you know, race car fuel, whatever the name of race car fuel is.
Kale juice.
Kale juice. Yeah. Kale, [laughter] you know. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Um the, you know, what you're feeding into it is al is almost as important as the engine itself. And so when you when you look at liftoff, it's engine has some really cool pieces to it. It has supply side integration. It's one of the most integrated ad networks in the world and that means it's going to get efficient access like efficient costwise access and decent data pipes. the DSP side, the actual bitter cortex to my knowledge, you know, isn't quite as sophisticated as Axon yet, as Jan said. And I I think

that they're also, while Apploven is more focused or was more focused on on gaming, Liftoff has a pretty incredible non-gaming business. And so I could be wrong there. The engine seems okay with particular strength on like just the breadth and it can touch 1.4 billion people every day. That's pretty good. And it's hard to lose that once you're integrated. I don't understand why their fuel is is special. You know, MMP postbacks, that's just like gas station basic fuel. There are larger ad networks. Meta gets to see everything from Instagram and and Facebook. That's really special data. You know, Google gets Google search and YouTube. That's special. Apploving, you know, Axon gets Max. That's special. Unity, you know, is is promising to integrate, you know, engine data. That's special. I would love to learn from Liftoff what's special about their data sets.

Yeah. And with almost $2 billion in depth and losing at the moment $50 million a year net, it's not quite Apploven's 80% EB business.
That's true. Yeah. I mean, these businesses, I think one of the keys to them is the people inside of them. And Apploven has some incredible everyone I've seen at Applov1ven is like a is smarter than I am basically is just like the short and long of it. And so if you're spending your money on repaying debt as opposed to hiring the best and the brightest, that probably compounds over time.
Well, gentlemen, this was it. UA Monthly episode one. Dear listeners, give us feedback. We'll continue improving from there. What should we cover? What should we do more? What should we do less? On that note, Chihan Josh, thank you so much for educating the audience and most importantly myself.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you for having us. Y