The Growth Potential of Adtech: Applovin, Unity, and Zeta

Introduction:

In our previous article, Why is Applovin so awesome, but others haven't learned from it?, we summarized the core reasons behind Applovin's market position and increasing market share in the DSP domain:

• Near-monopoly in Mediation: This allows Applovin to act as both a player and a referee in ad bidding, helping DSPs obtain bidding information from other DSPs through Mediation and subsequently improve their machine learning algorithms.

• Exclusive data from Adjust: As the second-largest player in the MMP market with nearly 30% market share, Applovin can access Adjust's data regardless of whether game publishers agree or not, while other DSP vendors need the publishers' consent to obtain MMP data.

• Feature iterations of Axon2: More exclusive data drives more frequent updates to machine learning algorithms. Applovin also shortens the model training cycle for traffic apps by integrating training data from Meta and others, enabling customers to launch CPA campaigns faster.

As the market enters this stage, companies playing the DSP role in Adtech have different stories. In this article, we will briefly discuss the stories, growth potential, and core advantages of different companies.

1.Applovin

Applovin's past story mainly revolved around matching advertisers with game publishers. Since its traffic mainly came from the gaming industry, advertisers were also primarily from the gaming sector.
Although e-commerce advertisers have always wanted to try out Applovin, they could only be displayed in lower positions because their bids couldn't surpass those of gaming advertisers.
However, starting from the beginning of this year, Applovin began frequently engaging with large e-commerce advertisers and achieved significant success.