Earnings preview: what AppLovin and Unity's Q4 will tell us about 2026 CPMs
AppLovin and Unity report Q4 2025 ad network earnings tomorrow. The questions worth asking before the numbers land, and what neither has confirmed yet.
AppLovin and Unity both report fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results tomorrow, and the two companies are walking into the print from opposite directions. AppLovin arrives on a run of beats that has made "will it keep compounding" the only question anyone asks. Unity arrives still proving that Unity Vector, its AI-driven ad model, is a real second act rather than a slide-deck story layered onto a struggling Grow business.
What to watch in AppLovin's earnings
For AppLovin, the number to watch is not the quarter just gone. Growth has already been strong enough that a beat is close to priced in. The real signal is the guide for the first quarter of 2026: does management extend the growth rate it has been running, or does it start talking about deceleration as the comparisons get harder. A cautious guide would be the first real test of whether AppLovin's broader ad platform ambitions are adding a genuine second growth engine or simply smoothing the game-ad business's own plateau.
What to watch in Unity's report
For Unity, the open questions are more structural. How much of Grow Solutions revenue now runs through Unity Vector, and is that share still climbing quarter over quarter. Buyers who moved spend onto Vector last year want proof the model keeps improving rather than plateauing at good enough to justify the migration. There is also the ironSource-branded legacy business sitting underneath the Vector story: does management say anything about its trajectory, and does the language suggest a network being invested in or one being wound down in slow motion. Nothing in Unity's public statements has confirmed a shutdown of anything. But the way management talks about legacy versus Vector tomorrow will tell buyers more than the topline number will.
Both companies are also reporting into a market that has spent the last month absorbing Sensor Tower and AppsFlyer data showing mobile game revenue essentially flat and creative volume rising sharply. That backdrop raises the stakes on CPM commentary specifically. A flat-revenue market with rising ad supply and rising creative volume is a market where CPMs could move in either direction depending on which side of that equation each network's advertiser base sits on. Tomorrow's calls should say more about that than any press release will.
