AppLovin +66%, Unity −25%: two ad networks, one buyer's market

AppLovin's fourth-quarter revenue came in at $1.66 billion, up 66% year on year, with earnings per share of $3.24. Full-year 2025 revenue reached $5.48 billion, up 70%. The company guided first-quarter 2026 revenue to a range of $1.745 billion to $1.775 billion, extending rather than moderating its growth rate. Unity's fourth quarter told a different story: revenue of $503 million, up 10%, with Grow Solutions contributing $338 million. Unity Vector, the company's newer AI-driven ad model, now accounts for 56% of Grow revenue and has posted a third straight quarter of mid-teens sequential growth. Unity's shares fell more than 25% in pre-market trading on a first-quarter guide of $480 million to $490 million, a range the market read as disappointing against AppLovin's trajectory.

Two networks, one earnings week

Two networks, both selling into the same mobile game advertiser base, produced results dozens of points apart on growth rate this week. That gap is the story, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not mean for a buyer's plan this quarter.

What it does not mean is that Unity Vector is a failing product. A model going from a standing start to 56% of a division's revenue in roughly a year, with three consecutive quarters of mid-teens sequential growth, is a genuine migration under way, not a stalled one. The share price reaction was about the guide relative to expectations, not about Vector's trajectory in isolation. Buyers running spend on Vector today are on a product still gaining share of Unity's own book, which is a different situation from a legacy platform in decline.

What AppLovin's advantage means for channel mix

What the gap does mean is that AppLovin's Axon engine currently converts scale into growth more efficiently than Unity's does, at least on the numbers available this week. AppLovin's advertiser base has had longer to concentrate on its automated bidding stack, and the results show it. That difference matters for a UA team's channel mix decisions this quarter for a simple reason: CPM trends on a network tend to follow advertiser demand into whichever platform is delivering the best measured return, and AppLovin's growth rate suggests advertiser demand is still moving in its direction.

For a buyer with budget split across both networks, the practical read is not to abandon Unity Vector on one earnings call. It is to treat the two platforms as being at different stages of the same underlying trade: automated, AI-driven bidding replacing manual and semi-manual optimisation across the industry. AppLovin is further along that curve and its results show it. Unity is earlier, with a model that is demonstrably improving quarter over quarter but has not yet closed the growth gap.

One other detail from Unity's report is worth flagging, unrelated to Vector's own numbers: management gave no indication this week of what happens to the ironSource-branded legacy ad network as Vector's share of Grow keeps climbing. Buyers still running meaningful spend through that legacy line item should treat Unity's continued silence on its future as a reason to keep a contingency plan current, not as reassurance that nothing will change.

There is a broader pattern worth naming here too. This is the second consecutive earnings season in which a network's headline growth rate has tracked closely with how far along it is on automated, machine-learned bidding, rather than with the size of its publisher network or the breadth of its inventory. That was true of the comparisons drawn in January's State of Gaming reporting, and it held again this week. For a buyer building next quarter's channel mix, the operating question is no longer which network has the biggest reach. It is which network's bidding model is improving fastest, because that is now the variable moving CPMs and conversion quality on a quarter-to-quarter basis. Reach still matters at the margins, but it stopped being the deciding factor for where incremental budget should go.

Related archive reading

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

• AppLovin Unity Q2 2025 Earnings: Two Diverging Paths
• Incrementality results do not transfer between channels