I have always had a lot of admiration for MoPub. The MoPub team built a strong platform with outstanding features for developers and over the last decade it continued to find success and grow.
For the past few months we’ve worked hard to move all those great MoPub features and integrate them directly into MAX. We also turned the MPX into the AppLovin Exchange (ALX). Why? Because we know how good this platform was and we want to ensure we carry those things forward.
Last week, on March 31st, MoPub was shut down. I want to thank their team for all they have done for the product, for developers and for the industry.
Driving Innovation
Monetization technologies, like MoPub and MAX, are a huge responsibility – other businesses all over the world depend on them and their continued improvements. Given our commitment to the ecosystem, and our leading in-app bidding solution MAX, I knew that when approached by Twitter that we could do a lot with an opportunity to integrate the MoPub product and business.
Together, we constructed a deal for AppLovin to acquire MoPub. This required us to integrate MoPub features into MAX so MoPub and MAX would operate as a unified platform under the MAX platform going forward. I want to thank the Twitter team for trusting us with MoPub.
The Race to Integration
The moment we signed and announced the deal, our engineering and business development teams began the race to get the product integrated with all the core features we knew MoPub developers needed. To support the robust set of publishers on MoPub, we had to build all the traditional ad serving features that all types of publishers depend on, expand our DSP marketplace, and support significantly more load on our pre-existing platform, all while publishers started quickly migrating over to MAX. Said another way, we had to build 10 years of development effort, features and infrastructure into our platform in 6 months.
Through the hard work of the AppLovin and MoPub teams, when MoPub sunset last week, we can confidently say we have a unified platform that not only brings those features to market, but is also built in a way that we will continue to innovate on top of this robust technology stack for years to come. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this effort. We couldn’t have done it without each and every one of you!
We know the news sent shockwaves through the industry for both publishers and DSPs. For publishers, not only did it require them to shift their ad stack to a new mediation technology (which is hard to do), but they also had to move quickly to ensure most of their users had time to update their apps to the newest version so that when MoPub shut down, their ad monetization wouldn’t be significantly impacted. For DSPs, they had to integrate with our platform, and relearn their models on our unified exchange.
In the last 90 days, I had the pleasure of spending time with many of the executives of the new publishers and partners that we are now supporting. This has been an opportunity to create new personal relationships that’ll continue to help us shape our offering and innovate for years to come. Thank you to all of the MoPub customers for understanding the circumstances and working with us to make this transition as seamless as possible. We know there were other choices in the market, but it means a lot to us that nearly all of the MoPub customers trusted us and decided to make AppLovin their partner.
The Road Ahead
Now that we’ve completed the transition period, we understand the responsibility we have to our customers and the ecosystem as a whole. Traditionally, it has been very challenging for the biggest demand partners to access a high volume of in-app inventory because of the fragmentation and the lack of bidding and price transparency. But now, we can solve for this and the incremental demand that we have on our platform will benefit publisher growth opportunities for years to come.
Additionally, the direct access to our growth product, AppDiscovery, gives all of our partners a much stronger 360 solution for all of their core mobile growth needs. The most important thing is that we work together as an industry to create additional efficiencies that can help all our businesses grow together.
We are committed to being your partner and driving innovation, which will help you grow, and push growth and innovation for the entire mobile app ecosystem.
Thanks to all,
Adam and the AppLovin team
