AppLovin is a performance advertising platform focused on mobile app audiences. Its core product, Axon Ads Manager, is an AI-powered user acquisition tool that places ads in front of mobile users — predominantly mobile game players — and optimizes campaigns toward advertisers' return on ad spend goals. Advertisers set a revenue target and budget, upload creative, and AppLovin's AI engine handles targeting and conversion automatically. AppLovin also operates MAX, a free in-app bidding mediation platform that publishers use to run real-time auctions across ad networks, maximizing their ad revenue. MAX is AppLovin's key supply-side asset, giving Axon AI access to over 1B daily active users playing mobile games globally. AppLovin earns revenue on the spread between what advertisers pay and what publishers receive for underlying impressions. The business runs at very high incremental margins, with management citing roughly 95% incremental EBITDA flow-through as revenue grows on a largely fixed cost base of data center and engineering expenses. Historically, AppLovin served almost exclusively mobile game developers, but it has recently expanded to e-commerce and web advertisers — a significant strategic shift. AppLovin recently launched a self-service ads manager to scale advertiser onboarding without building a large sales force. The company completed the sale of its Apps business (a portfolio of mobile game studios) in 2025, making it a pure-play advertising technology company. AppLovin returns capital to shareholders primarily through share repurchases, funded by free cash flow.