Why AppLovin Was Acquired for $1.4B and Who’s Next?

Earlier in the week, a quiet company (to most people at least) called AppLovin was acquired by a Chinese company for roughly $1.4B.

It’s a company that has raised barely $4M and has revenues of $300M last year. Because they were built outside “the studio system” aka VCs, you’d only hear of them if you were in the mobile app install world.

Naturally, we wanted to take a look at how they stack up against other top mobile advertising SDKs. We took the top 50,000 iOS apps in the US and and the major/popular mobile advertising SDKs, and figured out what market share each of the advertising SDKs has in the 50K app population. We defined market share as “what percent of the top 50,000 iOS apps has this particular SDK”.

The results for the top 10 mobile advertising SDKs by install footprint:

It becomes clear just from the install footprint why the transaction value is so large. AppLovin has 11% install market share. Outside of Google, they and Charboost are the only ones in a class of their own. Interestingly, this chart shows that Google’s acquisition of Admob not only seem prescient but ended up being a really good deal.

The only independents left in the top 10 are Chartboost, Vungle, Tapjoy, and PlayHaven. So the obvious question now is — of the big remaining ones, when will Chartboost and Vungle be acquired and at what price?

The other take-away is it’s a little surprising that MoPub’s market share is much lower than I had expected. Perhaps this is due to the dynamics from the continuous talent exodus from Twitter.

I should note that we didn’t include Facebook because it doesn’t have a dedicated ad-serving SDK, so it is hard to tease out their market share.

If you like insight like this, we’ll be launching a resource soon that shows what mobile apps use what SDKs . Sign up here if you want to be notified and included when we release the private Beta soon. We won’t spam or sell your email to relatives of dead Nigerian princes. Promise.