🚨 AppLovin just opened its platform to ecommerce brands. Buying the same in-app gaming inventory your UA team depends on

Self-serve launches H1 2026. It's not coming. It's here.

AXON already controls 60% of global mobile gaming ad impressions. That data advantage is exactly what makes it attractive to ecommerce brands.

One early case study from the earnings call: a cookware brand scaled from $4M to $16M in revenue with AppLovin providing 65% of their user acquisition. Projected path to $80M.

Here's the mechanism mobile gaming advertisers need to understand.

Every ecommerce brand that comes onto the platform feeds AXON with new conversion signals.

The more ecommerce spend flows in, the more the model optimises for ecommerce conversion.

Gaming inventory becomes more valuable to a beauty brand than it is to a gaming UA team. The auction moves against you.

CPI in mobile gaming has more than doubled since 2018. That was before a well-funded new category of buyers entered the same inventory.

AppLovin posted $1.66 billion in revenue last quarter. 66% year-on-year growth. They are not pivoting away from gaming. They are adding ecommerce on top of it.

Most mobile gaming publishers are thinking about AppLovin as a distribution partner.

Maybe they should also be thinking about what happens to their UA costs when ecommerce decides gaming inventory is worth more than they are paying for it.