AppLovin is now a social media company?
The mobile adtech company has launched Gist, a lifestyle-focused social media app with a UGC feed built around tips, personal stories, discussions, articles, videos, and mini-games. Users can browse without signing up, create an account to personalize their feed, share their own content, save and like posts, message others, and build profile pages around their contributions.
The launch has been quiet. We found out about it from people posting on X, though quiet launches are fairly typical for AppLovin.
Why This Matters:
What is AppLovin doing here? Didn’t the company recently sell off its app studio? Why launch an app now?
If we’re speculating, it’s likely a data play. AppLovin has historically relied on traffic and behavioral data from other companies’ mobile games and apps. By building an app like Gist, which they can likely drive users for via paid acquisition, AppLovin could gain direct access to valuable first-party social signals, including likes, shares, creator follows, and search intent. That behavioral data could become nice fuel for AXON, its AI-powered adtech and targeting platform.
This also isn’t a total surprise. In February, Giovanni Ge, AppLovin’s chief product and engineering officer and the founding engineer behind AXON, said in an interview in China that the company was already working on a social media platform.
His framing was basically that Meta started with captive organic traffic and built an ad platform on top. AppLovin appears to be doing the reverse — starting with the ad platform and building toward the owned/organic traffic piece.
Experts React:
Here are some interesting posts from X about the launch:
Our Take:
There’s also a perception that AppLovin is still heavily tied to gaming. Launching a Pinterest-like social app may be a partly symbolic gesture, as well. (“We’re not just games, damnit!”)
Notably, AppLovin launched a longshot bid for TikTok roughly one year ago, so the timing here is also serendipitous.
