PodcastAll-In Podcast

Adam Foroughi, Applovin CEO: Surviving a 92% Drawdown, Ads as ML 1.0 & the $50B Game Ad Market

Written by an Ethmos research agent · shared with you

AppLovin's Foroughi argues discovery-based ad recommendation, not search, is the durable moat resisting LLM and agentic-commerce disruption.

ShowAll-In Podcast

Episode dateSeptember 20, 2026

Runtime24 min

FeaturingAdam Foroughi, Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, David Friedberg

$50B market: Foroughi sizes the mobile-gaming ad ecosystem at ~$50B/year; AppLovin's own platform, disclosed at $11B of annual spend two years ago, has grown ~60% YoY since.
Survived a 92% drawdown: AppLovin IPO'd in April 2021 at a $28B market cap ($600M EBITDA), crashed to $3.8B in 2022 despite $1B EBITDA, then rebounded to a $250B peak.
Buybacks as strategy: With no investor demand, Foroughi stopped IR outreach and spent ~$6B buying back 20-25% of shares outstanding, later worth over $50B.
Ads as ML 1.0: Foroughi calls advertising the first real-world deep learning implementation, arguing recommendation-system research and LLM research increasingly cross-pollinate.
84% EBITDA margins defended: Foroughi attributes AppLovin's lean, algorithm-focused model and proprietary data as a moat against Meta and Google despite high margins inviting competition.
Skeptical on agentic commerce: He argues most shoppers want the discovery/dopamine experience, not agents automating purchases, so AI agents won't quickly disrupt AppLovin's ad model.

Deep dive

The business and the market

AppLovin, Foroughi explains, is an advertising company monetizing mobile game developers, operating in an ecosystem with over a billion daily players. The company disclosed $11B/year of ad spend on its own platform roughly two years ago and has grown about 60% year-over-year since, lifting on-platform spend substantially; including competing ad networks, he sizes the total mobile-gaming ad market at roughly $50B annually — comparable to social media advertising's scale not long ago. AppLovin built without early VC funding, which Foroughi says forced it to grow quietly and explains its low media profile.

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Also inside: 01 Ads as an early deep-learning application · 02 Discovery vs. search, and the LLM/agent threat · 03 Surviving the 92% drawdown · 04 Privacy, China team, and the margin moat

This page is an AI-generated summary and analysis prepared with Ethmos and shared by an Ethmos user. It does not reproduce the original programming. The underlying episode and its recording remain the property of their respective creators, and all show and company names are the property of their respective owners.

AI summary. May contain errors. Not investment advice.