Edit 2025: See the full list of the top monetization and ad networks on appgoblin.info/companies/ad-networks
For a week or two I’ve been working on updating the appgoblin.info top ad networks and MMPs. Currently both are still up, which should change but I’ll give an overview of the process of changing and what might be next up.
Goal: Display the top clients
I’ve long wanted to have a way to view the top advertising channels, monetization networks and MMPs by number of apps, install or even estimated impressions. My last version of this from last year was based on scraping of SDK data from unzipped Android and iOS apps to see which ad networks, MMPs and analytic providers were most common:
Currently this version has a few cool features that I’ll want to preserve:
- Percentage totals. This seems pretty basic but it’s definitely a good way to compare the entities without using abstract numbers like 14.4K which is really dependent on how many apps have been scraped.
- Group by parent vs brand. Many of these companies have been bought or owned by others. For example, Google owns AdMob for it’s ad network as well as Firebase for mobile app analytics.
- Last 30 days installs: This is important I think for capturing upcoming vs current top networks.
- Breakdown by Store (ie iOS vs Android).
But this version also had some issues:
- Limited to my SDK dataset. I’ve also been scraping a much larger dataset of app-ads.txt files which is easily 10x larger than the small number of apps I’ve downloaded and unzipped. I’d like to include this as well
- Limited by Categories: I wanted to expand the types of companies I track to not just be adtech companies. For example, I want to include information about tools like Lottie or open source libraries in the future.
New version
This is the new version of the top companies for app monetization, ad networks and MMPs which I’m working on. It’s still a WIP and has a few more to dos:
- Combine SDK & App-ads.txt. While I think it’s useful to keep them separated, it leads to a lot of duplicated data on the main page. For example, the Google link appears 4 times for each comob of SDK + App Store.
- Missing Percentages. This new version needs some percentage to make it easier to read.
- Better handling of “RESELLER” app-ads.txt. Currently I’m ignoring RESELLER data… hard to tell whether this is worth adding or not.
- Currently no Company categories (ie MMP, Advertising, Tools etc). This is probably the biggest missing piece, that will take the most work, so should be implemented earliest. This also has the annoyance of having an odd mixture of concepts for app categories (like Casual Games) and company categories like ad networks. A distinct count also needs to be kept in account here since a single app often appears in multiple versions of the same company, so shouldn’t be double counted.
So, next up more work
This was just a way to outline some of the upcoming work to make a more usable breakdown of the top ad networks and MMPs. Next update will hopefully have these updates and be ready to use the new AppGoblin company listings to draw insights for the the top companies for monetization, ad networks and tools.