Smart Bidding Mobile Ads Now Drive 80% of Mintegral

Mobvista's interim results for the first half of 2025, published this week, put a number on a trend the market had already assumed was true: Smart Bidding, Mintegral's automated bidding product, now drives more than 80% of Mintegral's revenue, with gaming accounting for roughly 75% of that total. Those are not marginal figures for a mid-tier network trying to prove a migration is working. They describe a business that has substantially finished the transition from manual and semi-manual campaign management to algorithmic bidding as its default mode, with mobile games as the advertiser base underwriting the shift.

What the Smart Bidding mobile ads numbers actually say

An 80% revenue share for a single bidding product means Smart Bidding is not a premium tier sitting alongside a larger legacy offering. It is the product, and whatever remains of Mintegral's non-Smart-Bidding revenue is now the minority case. The 75% gaming share alongside that figure confirms something buyers in this category have suspected without a clean number attached: gaming advertisers were the natural first movers onto automated bidding at Mintegral, likely because game UA teams already had the volume of creative and campaign data that a machine-learned bidding model needs to outperform manual rules. A network migration story only becomes credible with a number this concentrated behind it, and Mobvista's disclosure supplies exactly that.

Why this matters beyond one company's earnings

This result lands inside a pattern UA Ledger has tracked across the year's earnings season, not as an isolated data point. AppLovin's Axon engine has driven its advertising growth throughout 2025, and Unity's rebuilt Vector model has been climbing as a share of its own Grow division since its GDC unveiling in March. Mintegral's disclosure this week adds a third data point to the same underlying pattern: across meaningfully different networks, the businesses converting fastest to automated, machine-learned bidding are the ones showing the clearest growth and revenue-mix improvement. That is a stronger signal than any single company's result, because it suggests the shift is structural to how ad networks compete now, not a feature of one vendor's product roadmap.

What it means for a buyer's network review

A buyer running spend through Mintegral, or evaluating it against AppLovin, Unity, Google or Meta's automated products, should treat this disclosure as confirmation that the network has genuinely moved rather than simply rebranded a manual product. Practical implications for a review this quarter:

• Ask any Mintegral account contact for a breakdown of how a given campaign's spend splits between Smart Bidding and legacy inventory, since the 80% company-wide figure will not be evenly distributed across every advertiser or vertical.
• Treat gaming-specific benchmarks and case studies from Mintegral with more confidence than benchmarks from advertiser categories where Smart Bidding's share is unknown, given gaming's outsized share of the product's current volume.
• Compare creative and data feed requirements against those already in place for AppLovin's Axon or Unity's Vector, since a mature automated bidding product generally rewards volume and clean signal in similar ways regardless of vendor.
• Watch for Mintegral's full-year and Q3 disclosures to see whether the 80% figure keeps climbing or has plateaued, since a plateau would suggest the easy migration gains are largely captured.

Sizing the shift in practical terms

To make the 80% figure concrete, consider a hypothetical mid-sized puzzle publisher running $300,000 a month through Mintegral. If that spend mirrors the network-wide split Mobvista disclosed, roughly $240,000 of it is already flowing through Smart Bidding rather than legacy manual placements, with gaming advertisers like this one forming the bulk of the demand feeding that algorithm. A buyer who has not explicitly checked which bucket their spend falls into may be underestimating how much of their own campaign performance already depends on Mintegral's automated model rather than on their own manual bid adjustments. That has a direct implication for where a team spends its optimisation time: manual bid tweaks on a Smart Bidding-dominated account are increasingly marginal compared with feeding the algorithm better creative and cleaner conversion signal, which is the lever that actually moves an automated bidding product's output.

The consolidation angle

Mobvista's results arrive during a year when consolidation has repeatedly reshaped who a buyer's ad-network relationships actually sit with, from Tripledot's absorption of AppLovin's former Apps portfolio in July to the broader publisher M&A wave earlier in the year. A mid-tier network posting a genuine, numbers-backed automation story is one more reason those relationships are worth reviewing rather than assuming static. As UA Ledger argued when Evaluating a Mid-Tier Ad Network Vendor at the Show, the right diligence question for a network like Mintegral is no longer whether it has an automated bidding pitch, since every network does by now. It is whether the disclosed numbers back that pitch up, and this week Mobvista supplied a rare, specific answer.

What to watch next

The open question after this disclosure is whether Mintegral's non-gaming advertiser base follows gaming's lead onto Smart Bidding at a similar pace, or whether gaming remains a disproportionate share of the automated product indefinitely. A widening gap between the two would suggest gaming UA teams are simply better prepared than other advertiser categories to feed a bidding algorithm the volume and signal it needs, a pattern worth watching across every network posting similar automation numbers through the rest of the year.

It is also worth watching whether Mobvista breaks out Smart Bidding's gaming share separately from its blended figures in future disclosures. A single combined number is useful for a first read, but a buyer trying to benchmark their own account against the network average will eventually want the gaming-specific slice isolated, since a puzzle or hybrid-casual advertiser's experience of an 80%-automated network may look meaningfully different from a hyper-casual or non-gaming advertiser's experience of the same product. Until that breakdown exists, the safest approach is to ask the account team directly rather than assume the company-wide figure applies evenly to any one campaign.

Related archive reading

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

• The Ledger #17: Mobvista's Numbers, Gamescom's Wrap
• The Ledger #14: Epic v Google Ninth Circuit Appeal News