Mobile Ad Network Spend Share: Q3 2025, Network by Network
Mobile ad network spend share data for Q3 2025 shows app networks still dominate US budgets, with Dream Games leading top advertiser spend.
Mobile Gamer.biz put out another data digest this week, and it lands on the same quarter this desk already worked over in Q3 Earnings Ad Networks: AppLovin and Unity Diverge Again. The difference is the vantage point. That earlier piece read what the two companies told their own shareholders; this one reads the buyer side, meaning mobile ad network spend share by channel alongside the advertisers and the individual games actually pushing money through those channels. Both pictures point the same way, which is why the second one deserves a separate look.
Where the money actually goes by market
Start with the United States. App networks, which in this tracker's methodology means AppLovin and Google's AdMob counted as one bucket, took roughly 66.5% of digital ad spend, leaving YouTube a distant second at around 21.5% while Instagram and Facebook sat in the single digits, as did TikTok. Sit with that for a moment. Two-thirds of US digital ad spend in this dataset runs through app-network inventory rather than through the major social platforms most UA conversations still picture when somebody says "the auction." Japan is close but not the same: app networks lead at roughly 52.6%, well under the US figure, with YouTube again second at around 22% and TikTok far stronger at close to 14.5% against its low single-digit share in the States.
Network share is not one global number a buyer can paste across regions, and a media plan calibrated to the US channel mix will misallocate budget the moment it gets copied into Japan.
Who is actually spending, and on what
The top-advertiser list for the year running through Q3 says more about who sets the pace than either company's earnings call did. Dream Games led US mobile game advertiser spend at a reported $373 million across the trailing four quarters. Tencent followed at roughly $278 million, Playtika at around $239 million. Microsoft and Take-Two closed out the top five in the low $200 millions each. Game-level spend rearranges things: Dream Games' Royal Kingdom topped individual title spend at about $212 million, ahead of Candy Crush Saga and Royal Match, with Brawl Stars then Evony: The King's Return completing the five. The two rankings do not line up, and the mismatch is the useful part, because Dream Games leads both while Tencent's overall spend outpaces any single Tencent-owned title on the list. Some of the largest advertisers spread their money across a portfolio instead of concentrating it behind one flagship, which is the Dream Games approach with Royal Kingdom and, evidently, its newer title.
Why this ordering should be read with some caution
Every figure here comes from a third-party ad-intelligence tracker's model of spend rather than from advertiser disclosure, and this desk's standing caution about tracker-reported numbers applies with extra force when the output is a specific-dollar ranking. Trackers infer spend from observed ad delivery plus public rate-card assumptions. They cannot see an advertiser's actual media contracts, the discounts negotiated against them, or spend that never touched a tracked channel. Read the ordering as the reliable part: Dream Games ahead of Tencent ahead of Playtika. Comparisons drawn inside one tracker's methodology hold up reasonably well, month to month or company to company; comparisons between this tracker's numbers and a rival vendor's estimates for the same period do not.
What the game-level list says about creative strategy
The titles at the top of the game-level ranking repay a second look beyond the raw figures. Candy Crush Saga and Royal Match are both mature match-three games, years into live operation, still pulling spend in the $160 million to $180 million range; that is what a well-optimised, continuously refreshed creative pipeline buys a publisher, and it sits far above the spend ceiling most studios assume a title of that age has hit. Royal Kingdom is the other model. Dream Games took the studio discipline that built Royal Match and put it into a second title, running what amounts to an internal portfolio strategy instead of resting on one flagship, a pattern that rhymes with the multi-title structures this desk has examined in other top publishers this year. Then there is Evony: The King's Return, which carries a much longer and far less publicly discussed history than anything else in the top five. Its presence is the reminder that rankings like this one regularly surface titles the trade press mostly ignores, so a UA team benchmarking its own category should read the ranking directly rather than the conversation around it.
What this changes for a media-buying plan
Take a UA lead putting together a Q4 or 2026 channel plan. App networks holding roughly two-thirds of the US auction means a buyer under-indexed on AppLovin and AdMob relative to social channels is leaving reach on the table rather than diversifying prudently, which is a different problem from the one that buyer thinks it has. Japan argues for market-specific channel mix assumptions rather than a single global split, and TikTok's meaningfully larger share there is the clearest case for building them. The last signal is subtler. A portfolio publisher spreading spend evenly over several titles runs a different competitive strategy from a studio putting everything behind one flagship, so the gap between the company-level and the game-level ranking is competitive intelligence in its own right, and a buyer sitting in the same auction ought to know which pattern its direct rivals are running before it decides that its own concentration or diversification is the right call for its portfolio and its budget.
