Dom Davies

@Liquidn8w @Jasonsmys @Nietschecapital @lajit6384 @accrued_int you listened to a podcast - you are clearly more equipped to discuss this than I am

@_DomDav @Jasonsmys @Nietschecapital @lajit6384 @accrued_int Fwiw I’m not making the assumption you’re claiming. We are literally taking about two different things.

$app. @_DomDav @accrued_int @Nietschecapital I see $U reporting Wednesday morning. Any thoughts on how much we should read into their reporting?

You are making the assumption that every game advertised on Unity uses their analytics product. Let's assume for a second that were the case. How come they haven't been using that data for the 10+ years the Unity ad platform existed? I'll take my 12+ years of hands-on experience with billions transacted vs listening to a podcast any day. I need to put a new rule of not responding to anonymous accounts.

Just google: Podcast: Understanding Unity’s Vector (with Felix The) Your last sentence shows you need to listen to the podcast and understand the data differentiation. When you control the game creation and have player usage data vs 3rd party SDKs you have differentiated insights. Only one company has that.

@varunagg A bit confused - how is option A "hacking MAX?"

@_DomDav Lots of large pubs are already hacking the MAX auction to imitate setup A and have seen better results.

Crosspost from LinkedIn re: why the CloudX proposition is nonsense for game publishers. Lots of layers to this onion, but it's good news for $APP and $U.

@Liquidn8w @Jasonsmys @Nietschecapital @lajit6384 @accrued_int I’m not a big podcast guy, but if you post a link and a timestamp I can check it out. Regarding “sequential data”, ad platform has some form of user journey. Almost every user is tagged and bucketed to some degree by the networks.

@_DomDav @Jasonsmys @Nietschecapital @lajit6384 @accrued_int $U has actual sequential data Listen to the podcast by Felix and what he said.

The latter - a rising tide lifts all ships. Better job at monetizing impressions translates into better results for advs + more rev to pubs. Networks need non-attributed data to help with modeling. More signal on what works helps everyone. $APP existing helps $U’s network, and (to a smaller degree) vice versa.

@_DomDav @Liquidn8w @Nietschecapital @lajit6384 @accrued_int Could you expand on this? Does it show more about $U and Vector or the mobile ad market in general, like rising tides lift all boats

@Jasonsmys It’s been solid all of Q1. I am happy to see $U find their footing.

@_DomDav Revenue attributable to Vector up 48% YoY. Holy shit that acceleration… And I’m assuming it really ramped up in the past month or so as they had poor guidance during the earnings call

$U acquisition incoming? Good for them. Company is actually quite good when you look at the uphill battle they have from that string of bad decisions made by former leadership.

@twoodhouse14 I can see a PE firm taking them private then relaunching in a few years when the market isn’t on its head.

@_DomDav Who are they buying ?

@Liquidn8w @Nietschecapital @lajit6384 @accrued_int Good news for $U is great news for $APP.

@Nietschecapital @lajit6384 @_DomDav @accrued_int Look at $U amazing results. What does it mean for $APP?

I don’t have the data to comment on what’s happening across the platform. However, based on the publisher data I do have access to, I don’t believe Ecom is slowing down. Times are weird, maybe some seasonality coupled with macro concerns. Whatever is happening at the moment seems transitory. I doubt the Ecom team is letting advs go live with bad creative - the new creative are likely looking for incrementality (which do compound).

@nndeepdive @_DomDav do you have any thoughts on the first point? Are the ecomm issues user error and caused by bad creative, that point two should help directly solve?

$APP under pressure pre-market on Cleveland 3P checks 1. eCom spending momentum sounds subdued in 1Q – continued instances of churn. Customer feedback from eCom brands suggests scale has been a common issue, with ROI diminishing as budget move up from low initial levels. We have not seen much new customers momentum to offset the instances of churn we’ve seen in 1Q. 2. Gen-AI creative viewed as removing hurdles for new customers & could improve ROI/scale. Creative challenges have remained a bottleneck for existing & new customers, keeping a lid on media spending or preventing new customers from joining. Feedback was positive on both APP’s new internal tools as providing quality output and solving some of these issues & we’ve also heard partners investing in outside/3P tools to help as well.

Very. It’s the first step towards hyper personalization in the context of programmatic advertising. A lot of what you see these days has an AI aspect to it - probably a big chunk is already full AI. Personalization set aside, it’s a good way to explore new to explore new themes, copy, and concepts.

@eric_seufert @_DomDav how significant is this? Is AI creative advanced enough to perform well

AppLovin launches AI-enabled video creative generation AppLovin is launching AI-enabled video generation to optimize eCommerce ads for in-game environments. By repurposing assets through generative models, the platform addresses the performance gap between social media creatives and full-screen mobile placements. This rollout highlights how proprietary performance data and flexible advertiser bases enable rapid platform-level innovation. mobiledevmemo.com/applovin-launc…

@eniac If I see a sponsored post by them anywhere (and can remember), you’ll be the first to get tagged so you can roast them

I don’t think it’s worth spending time responding to Andrew Chen’s take on paid ads. It’s not even controversial, it’s just inaccurate and misleading.

@dogballcapital @Ad_Quant @Nietschecapital Whole market took a beating these last few months. I don’t believe it’s directly correlated.

@Ad_Quant @_DomDav @cloudx @Nietschecapital remind me again how much $APP stock went down as a result of the launch of cloudx?? The amount of shit we have to go through and most of it is because of shit

Most monetization platforms are designed to facilitate a single auction per impression opportunity. This simplicity comes at a cost. For one, a race to the bottom in ad quality and a subsequent hit to publisher retention. With CloudX, publishers are able to set up multiple auction rounds per impression opportunity, controlling who competes in each round and under what terms, while still preserving a highest bid wins dynamic within each round. For publishers, this enables increased pricing power and the ability to work more flexibly with demand partners. Read our latest blog post at the link below, and get in touch if you'd like to learn more: hello@cloudx.io cloudx.ai/posts/auction-…

I wrote a more detailed breakdown of the other “value prop” on LinkedIn - it’s a big wall of text, but if you understand the ad space you’ll quickly get why it’s bad for pubs. I talked to a lot of publishers who sat through the pitch last week at GDC / have heard from them directly - yikes.

@_DomDav @cloudx Good read @Nietschecapital @dogballcapital doesn’t seem like cloudX value prop is providing much value to publishers. Smoke and mirrors for a founding crew that’s done this same bit 3 times now. Nothing new or innovative just another mediation play 😂

Nah, few reasons: 1) latency = imp loss, bad signal, lower return on buy side, in turn impact on sell side. Bad for everyone. 2) less dense auctions w/ fewer bidders is bad for publishers. 3) manually prioritizing who can buy inventory is old tech and methodology. Not a single publisher ever made more money running a waterfall vs a bidder setup. Long term or short term. Publishers do try to game the auctions by running a multi ad unit setup with ad units with bid floors, but the bidders have caught on and it’s not really a substantial or sustainable way to catch an edge anymore. Publishers can do this on any mediation tho. I do agree that ads are getting long, but every network has 60+ second ads. This doesn’t solve systemically. You could make the case that “if I show my users less relevant or engaging ads, they will stick around longer,” but that’s a severely oversimplified and broken way of thinking. Lastly, the post accuses mediations of favoring their demand if they run a network. A little known fact is that bidders reserve the right to audit the auctions, which they do. If $META, $GOOG, $U, $APPS, $PUBM, or $MOBVF ever caught a slight possibility of an unfair or biased auction, the market would know.

@cloudx @_DomDav true?

imagine you’re Travis Kalanick you built Uber from nothing into a $70 billion company and changed how every city on earth moves then in the worst three weeks of your life, family tragedies hit, and five of your investors hand you a letter demanding you resign so you step down the board replaces you, your successor and board sell off the self driving division you created, the thing you believed was Uber’s entire future gone $4 billion to Aurora the mainstream media tries to write your obituary: toxic culture, bad leadership, and a cautionary tale silicon valley moves on as they always do but you don’t you don’t really forget you go quiet, completely quiet you take $150 million and buy a ghost kitchen company called CloudKitchens you raise over a billion dollars, hit a $15 billion valuation, build a company with thousands of employees and nobody even knows the name eight years in stealth, employees aren’t even allowed to put your company on their LinkedIn then today you rename the company Atoms, and it’s not a kitchen company anymore it’s a robotics company 1. food 2. mining 3. transport your first move? acquiring Pronto the autonomous vehicle startup built by Anthony Levandowski, the same engineer you originally swooped away from Google to build Uber’s self driving program oh and he went on to deploy 100+ autonomous trucks for one of the largest materials companies on earth now he’s coming back to work with you and the reports say Uber itself the same company that pushed you out, is now backing you to go after self driving harder than Waymo the guy they removed is the guy they end up needing poetic justice your framework aka everything in civilization is mined or grown, manufactured and moved you call it the golden age your manifesto ends with three words: “I never left” eight years of silence then this but here’s what people keep getting wrong about your situation everyone wants to call it a comeback or a revenge story it’s neither you just went quiet and built for eight years while everyone who wrote you off had stopped paying attention that’s not revenge, that’s just what true builder obsession looks like most founders would’ve stayed bitter most would’ve written a book and done a podcast tour, most would’ve taken the $2.5 billion in shares and disappeared off to a beach or Epstein’s island you didn’t do any of that you just kept building and now the same people who pushed you out need you again so whether you love him or hate him the most dangerous person in any room is the one who goes quiet yet never stops building karma is real welcome back Travis

@Jasonsmys @BryantGarvin @triplewhale @Jasonsmys I should also highlight that I believe this is for illustrative purposes of incrementality and not an aggregate representation. Results on every metric here will vary by the advertiser.

Ok thanks for the tag, with the full context this makes sense - solid write up. It’s highlighting incrementally. Even if a channel is not the highest in ROAS, any incremental profitable spend helps. The author covers the scenario in which lower ROAS helps vs hurts. One way to think of it (and I am grossly oversimplifying) is I’d rather have 150% ROAS on $100K ($150K) vs 200% ROAS on $50K ($100K). 50% delta sounds bad, but it’s a lower return on a larger pie. Obviously this math assumes a lot, such as “why can’t I just scale the channel with 200% ROAS,” but that misses the point of incrementally. Other aspects for consideration, such as diversification, etc. but this should answer your question on my other post.

Applovin brands run LOWER ROAS than almost everyone else in our data @triplewhale On Meta... On Google... Across the board And they grew spend 26% month over month That's not a mistake... it's a different business model First the numbers Applovin advertisers (483 brands) vs. the broader Meta cohort (20k+ brands): Meta ROAS: 1.73x vs. 1.96x Meta CPA: $51.46 vs. $37.34 Meta AOV: $87.94 vs. $73.49 They're paying more per customer across the board... on products that are worth more This is what an acquisition-oriented business looks like They're not optimizing for ROAS efficiency They're optimizing for customer volume at a price they can afford As long as that customer is profitable over time... lower ROAS is a FEATURE, not a bug They're also THE MOST DIVERSIFIED COHORT in the data Applovin brands have 8% points MORE wallet outside Meta+Google than the average brand. That's not a coincidence. These brands are actively trying to be everywhere their customer is Omnipresent acquisition... Not channel overdependence But here's the hard part... Running at lower efficiency across multiple channels ONLY makes sense if you actually know it's working. Platform-reported ROAS won't tell you that. This is exactly where MMM and incrementality testing earn their keep. If you're running a multi-channel acquisition stack at lower marginal ROAS... You need to know: Is each channel adding incremental customers? Or are they just fighting for credit on the same ones? Without that answer, diversification is expensive overlap... not omnipresence. The brands doing this right aren't looking at platform dashboards. They're looking at blended MER. New customer acquisition rate. Incremental ROAS from proper measurement. Applovin at 9.3% of wallet makes sense in that model. It makes no sense without it. The brands growing fastest aren't the most efficient. They're the most intentional about where inefficiency is actually buying them something. Applovin is a bet on reach, on brand, on being present where your competitors aren't. Just make sure you can prove it's working Data via @TripleWhale Internal · 483 brands · Feb 2026 · What does your incrementality testing show on Applovin?

@Jasonsmys Just responded to you. Hope it’s helpful.

@_DomDav It was a tweet. Just responded to you on it

@Jasonsmys I'd rather not speculate without context - could you please post the link?

@_DomDav Thanks for the post! Unrelated, but I saw a post talking about APP having lower ROAS than other channels, but it being a feature It seems like advertisers on APP will keep bidding until ROAS is like 1.1x? Could you explain that dynamic? Is it because it’s performance driven?