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The $12B+ Mobile Ad Market: Sensor Tower's First-Ever Deep Dive
The mobile advertising market is projected to reach a valuation of at least $12 billion by 2025 across 19 key global territories.
- The global mobile advertising market is projected to reach at least $12 billion by 2025 across 19 key territories.
- Market consolidation is high, with AppLovin and Google collectively controlling approximately 65% of the total market share.
- Gaming accounts for 72% of ad demand, while non-gaming sectors—led by e-commerce giants like Temu and Shein—now capture 28% of total revenue.
🎯 The Mobile Games Ecosystem Explained by Felix Braberg
The mobile games ecosystem is a massive, high-stakes industry that facilitated over $1.4 trillion in spending in 2025, with mobile gaming alone accounting for $52.5 billion in in-app purchase revenue.
- Mobile gaming generated $52.5 billion in in-app purchase revenue in 2025, contributing to a broader mobile ecosystem that facilitated over $1.4 trillion in total spending.
- Creative strategy is now the primary driver of user acquisition, with top-performing companies scaling from 100 to over 10,000 creative assets per month to maintain visibility.
- Developers are increasingly adopting direct-to-consumer payment solutions like FastSpring to bypass the traditional 30% platform fees charged by Apple and Google, significantly reducing transaction costs.
S07, E: Demystifying open source MMM (with Michael Kaminsky)
The modern marketing measurement landscape is undergoing a critical shift away from the over-reliance on opaque, proprietary models toward transparent, open-source Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and rigorous experimental validation.
- Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) is not a universal replacement for attribution; for many smaller, performance-driven brands, last-touch attribution remains more effective and less misleading than complex econometric modeling.
- Open-source MMM libraries like Meta’s Robyn and Google’s Meridian are not inherently biased toward their creators, as their transparency allows users to verify results by swapping channel labels or auditing the underlying code.
- Brands should validate the reliability of an MMM before adoption by using parameter recovery to test if the model accurately identifies known relationships and predictive forecasting to see if it correctly anticipates future outcomes based on past budget changes.
🎮 Which Playable Performs Best? Why There's No Single Answer (Playable Trends June 2026)
The mobile gaming industry has reached a consensus that no single playable ad format guarantees success, necessitating a diversified strategy that targets various user segments through constant experimentation.
- There is no single high-performing playable ad format, necessitating a diversified strategy that relies on constant experimentation across multiple creative variations.
- Developers are increasingly prioritizing non-authentic, exaggerated mechanics over accurate gameplay to maximize immediate user engagement and click-through rates.
- The six-second auto-advance rule is a critical design standard, where the ad automatically initiates moves for inactive users to maintain momentum and minimize friction.
EA wants console game makers to consider in-game ads during development
Electronic Arts is actively pursuing the integration of in-game advertising within console and PC titles to establish a sustainable revenue stream capable of offsetting the escalating costs of modern game development.
- Electronic Arts is integrating in-game advertising into console and PC titles to offset the rising costs of modern game development.
- The company is deploying a proprietary ad platform directly into the Frostbite engine to enable dynamic, standardized, and targetable ad placements.
- EA aims to shift away from intrusive ads in favor of organic, design-led placements, such as stadium signage in sports games or branded cosmetic items.
The Mobile vs Web User Acquisition: What Nobody's Talking About
The gaming industry is undergoing a fundamental shift toward a unified marketing infrastructure that bridges the historical divide between mobile, web, and console platforms.
- The gaming industry is shifting toward a unified marketing infrastructure that standardizes attribution metrics across mobile, web, and console platforms to eliminate fragmented, platform-specific tools.
- Developers are increasingly applying mobile-centric performance optimization strategies to web-based direct-to-consumer shops to diversify acquisition channels beyond mobile-only environments.
- AI-driven automation is transitioning from simple rule-based campaign management to handling complex, large-scale data synthesis and repetitive tasks like reporting and creative production.
S07, E23: Building ad tech for the chatbot era (with Tal Shoham)
The emergence of AI-native applications has created an urgent need for sustainable monetization models to offset the substantial operational costs associated with high-frequency inference.
- AI-native applications face high operational costs due to inference and token usage, necessitating a shift toward ad-supported monetization models to maintain sustainable profit margins.
- The granular intent signals captured in LLM conversations provide superior targeting capabilities compared to traditional search-based advertising, leading to higher click-through rates and conversion performance.
- Velocity, which recently emerged from stealth with $27 million in seed financing, is building an ad-tech mediation platform that allows developers to manage multiple ad networks through a single tool.
Can Performance Marketing Finally Work On Steam?
PC and console gaming are undergoing a fundamental shift as they transition from traditional, brand-heavy marketing toward the performance-driven acquisition models that have long dominated the mobile sector.
- Performance-based marketing is projected to account for up to 50% of publisher marketing budgets within the next five years.
- Empirical data from over 100 titles indicates that paid traffic on Steam is comparable in quality to organic traffic.
- Studios are overcoming Steam's lack of native ad infrastructure by using mobile-first funnels, conversion APIs, and cross-device fingerprinting to track user acquisition.
Brands in Gaming 101: Virtual Worlds
Virtual worlds have emerged as a critical marketing frontier, fundamentally reshaping how brands engage with younger demographics.
- Virtual worlds command higher user attention than other channels, with 73% of players in a focused state compared to 57% for video streaming and 40% for social media.
- Gaming is a primary social space for Gen Z, as 92% of women and 93% of men aged 16 to 24 play video games, and 17.7% have engaged with a branded game in the past month.
- The virtual world market is dominated by four platforms: Roblox (380 million monthly active users), Minecraft (200 million), Fortnite (130 million), and ZEPETO (33 million).
Podcast: Quantifying the advertising value of cookies (with Garrett Johnson and Shunto Kobayashi)
The transition away from third-party cookies in digital advertising presents a substantial economic challenge for publishers, resulting in revenue declines ranging from 29% to 35%.
- Google’s Privacy Sandbox increases ad latency by 100%, with median ad rendering times rising from 1 second under status quo conditions to 2 seconds, leading to a 3% loss of total ad impressions due to users navigating away before ads load.
- Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) like the Privacy Sandbox currently fail to fully bridge the revenue gap caused by the removal of third-party cookies, with the effectiveness of these tools heavily dependent on widespread adoption by adtech firms.
- The revenue impact of privacy restrictions is more severe in markets with fewer alternative identifiers, such as the European Union, where the Privacy Sandbox performs better because it faces less competition from traditional header bidding channels.
What Makes Award-Winning Gaming Campaigns?
The evaluation of award-winning gaming campaigns centers on the intersection of creative strategy, authentic community engagement, and measurable behavioral impact.
- Award-winning campaigns prioritize solving specific brand challenges through deep insights into player motivations rather than relying on vanity metrics like view counts or influencer reach.
- Successful initiatives eschew transactional incentives, such as coupon codes, in favor of organic integrations that respect community sentiment and player time.
- High-impact results, including significant sales increases, are best achieved by aligning brand messaging with the specific cultural contexts and behaviors of target fandoms.
S07, E21: AppsFlyer and the new dynamics of mobile attribution (with Olivia Kory)
The mobile advertising landscape is undergoing a significant structural shift, underscored by a recent one-billion-dollar investment in AppsFlyer by a consortium of major platforms including Meta, Google, Unity, and Moloco.
- A consortium including Meta, Google, Unity, and Moloco has invested $1 billion into AppsFlyer to maintain the neutrality of mobile measurement infrastructure and prevent data monopolization.
- Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) remain essential for daily campaign management because they provide the granular, ad-level data that platform-provided frameworks cannot replicate.
- AppLovin has emerged as a dominant force in the mobile ecosystem over the past 15 months, consistently outperforming competitors in efficiency and capturing a larger share of advertiser budgets.