AppLovin Unity Q2 2025 Earnings: Two Diverging Paths

AppLovin's second-quarter revenue came in at $1.259 billion, up 77% year on year, with net income of $820 million. The company guided third-quarter revenue to a range of $1.32 billion to $1.34 billion at an adjusted EBITDA margin of 81%, extending rather than moderating a growth rate that has now compounded for several consecutive quarters since the company completed its exit from the Apps business into a pure ad-tech model. Unity's quarter told a more complicated story: revenue of $441 million, down 2% year on year but ahead of estimates, with the Unity Ad Network up 15% sequentially and now representing 49% of the Grow segment. CEO Matt Bromberg described the quarter as an inflection point.

Two networks selling into the same mobile game advertiser base posted results that, on the headline growth number, look nothing alike this week. Reading past the headline is more useful than picking a side, particularly for a buyer weighing how much incremental Q3 budget to route toward each platform's automated bidding stack over the next quarter.

AppLovin's growth is now the industry's reference point

Yesterday's Ledger #15 framed the open question for AppLovin as whether its growth rate was holding or beginning to decelerate as its AXON engine's automated bidding matures against a larger base. The 77% figure answers that question for this quarter: not only is the growth rate holding, the raised guide for Q3 suggests the company does not see deceleration on its own near-term horizon either. For a buyer, that is a signal about where advertiser demand and, by extension, CPM pressure is likely to concentrate over the next quarter. A network converting scale into growth at this rate is winning advertiser budget from somewhere, and the most likely place it is coming from is exactly the platforms still migrating toward an equivalent automated model.

Unity's revenue decline is a smaller story than the Ad Network number

A headline revenue contraction, even a modest 2%, would ordinarily be the story. It is not the story here, because the number that actually matters for a buyer's near-term plan is the Unity Ad Network's 15% sequential growth and its climb to 49% of Grow. A product that has gone from a smaller share to essentially half its division's revenue in successive quarters is a genuine migration in progress, not a stalled initiative propping up a declining top line. Whether that migration is happening fast enough to reverse the overall revenue trend by the following quarter is a fair question. Whether it is real is not; the sequential number settles that.

What "diverging paths" actually means for a media plan

The instinct after a quarter like this is to read it as one network winning and one losing, and reallocate accordingly. That is too blunt a read for a buyer with live spend on both platforms. AppLovin's AXON engine has had longer in the market to concentrate advertiser demand into a mature automated bidding stack, and its growth rate reflects that head start more than it reflects any near-term weakness specific to Unity's product. Unity is earlier on the same underlying curve, with a model demonstrably taking share within its own segment quarter over quarter. Treating the two as being at different points on the same trajectory, rather than as a winner and a loser, is the more accurate way to read a single earnings week.

A practical framework for the quarter ahead

For a UA team running spend across both networks, three things are worth doing off the back of this week's numbers rather than waiting for the next earnings cycle: track Unity Ad Network's share of Grow each quarter as a leading indicator of when its bidding model might close the growth gap with AppLovin's, rather than only checking the headline revenue line; treat AppLovin's raised Q3 guide as a signal that CPM pressure on its inventory is more likely to rise than ease over the next quarter, and budget accordingly rather than assuming current rates hold; and keep the comparison honest by benchmarking cost per install and return on ad spend directly rather than by growth rate alone, since a network's corporate revenue growth and a specific advertiser's unit economics on that network do not always move together.

A third data point, smaller but consistent

Digital Turbine's fiscal first-quarter 2026 results, reported earlier this month, pointed to a stabilising rather than growing on-device business, a smaller story than either AppLovin's or Unity's this week but a useful third data point on where advertiser budget is and is not concentrating. On-device distribution has not been where the growth in mobile UA spend has shown up this year, and this week's contrast between AppLovin and Unity reinforces the same read: budget is following the platforms with the most advanced automated bidding, not the ones with the broadest distribution footprint. A buyer still running meaningful spend through on-device channels should read Digital Turbine's stabilisation as a reasonable outcome to expect, not as a sign that the category is about to reaccelerate.

The pattern worth watching past this one earnings week

This is the second time this year that a network's headline growth rate has tracked closely with how far along its bidding automation is, rather than with the breadth of its publisher network. Sensor Tower's State of Mobile 2025 report in January pointed to the same dynamic in broader terms, automated, machine-learned bidding replacing manual optimisation across the buying stack. AppLovin's and Unity's results this week are the clearest earnings-level confirmation of that shift so far this year, and the operating question for the next quarter is not which network has more reach. It is which one's bidding model is improving fastest, because that is the variable now moving CPMs and conversion quality on a quarter-to-quarter basis.

Related archive reading

These articles provide related context and remain subject to their stated review status.

• AppLovin +66%, Unity −25%: two ad networks, one buyer's market
• Q3 earnings ad networks: AppLovin and Unity diverge again