Six months ago, Meta spent roughly $2 billion to acquire Manus, the agentic AI startup that media buyers had quietly started treating as the most interesting thing to happen to Ads Manager in years. This week, Meta began dismantling the whole thing. The reversal is not a product decision or a performance failure. It is […]
Over 90% of your users are gone by Day 30. That math starts with the creative. Most UA conversations start and end with acquisition. CPI, install volume, ROAS, channel mix. These are the metrics that dominate weekly reviews and quarterly planning. Retention sits in a different room, usually with the product team, evaluated on a […]
It was performing well. CTR was strong, CPI was in range, and the creative team was proud of it. Then, somewhere around week three, it started softening. By week five, it was barely breaking even. Now it is burning budget, and nobody can explain why the ad that was working so well a month ago […]
Fintech has one of the most expensive user acquisition problems in mobile. The average CAC for a fintech app sits at $1,672, the highest of any app category by a significant margin. CPTs on the App Store run as high as $7.15 per tap. And after spending that kind of money to get someone to […]
The numbers are in, and they are not moving in a friendly direction. iOS CPI hit $5.84 globally in Q1 2026, up 19% year over year. Android climbed 8% to $1.92. Finance apps are running CPIs around $8.70. Competitive gaming categories in North America are seeing CPIs between $4.50 and $6.00, with strategy and RPG […]
There’s a number making the rounds in mobile marketing circles right now that deserves more attention than it’s getting. Top-performing advertisers, the ones spending $4 million or more per quarter on UA, produced between 2,400 and 2,600 creative variations in 2025. That’s per quarter. And that number is up 25 to 30 percent from the […]
Google changed its gambling advertising policies 18 times in 2025 alone. Let that sink in for a second. Eighteen updates in one year. It’s a push to reshape how an entire industry operates, and doing it faster than most teams can keep up with. 2026 has picked up where 2025 left off. Several major policy […]
The sweepstakes casino industry built a multibillion-dollar business by finding a gap in U.S. gambling law and running through it at full speed. That gap is closing. State by state, legislature by legislature, the legal ground that sweepstakes operators have been standing on is shrinking fast. What started as isolated regulatory pressure in 2025 has […]
Every year, the industry produces a fresh batch of “state of mobile” takes. AI is going to change everything. CTV is the next big channel. Casual gaming is dead. Hypercasual is dead. Social is dying. Privacy will kill performance marketing. Some of it is true. A lot of it is the same prediction recycled with […]
For a long time, soft launch followed a pretty predictable recipe. Pick a handful of low-CPI markets like the Philippines, Vietnam, or Colombia. Push volume through Meta at CPIs cheap enough that you could run real testing without burning a launch budget. Watch D1, D7, and early ARPDAU. Iterate on the product until the numbers […]
