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…
Category: Mobile Marketing and Advertising
What does DIRECT mean for App-Ads.txt?
Recently I started working on a project on appgoblin to estimate the number of client apps for all mobile advertising and data collection companies. In doing this there are currently two sources of data: decompiled SDKs of which I have only done ~20k apps and app-ads.txt which I have scraped closer to ~200k apps’ app-ads.txt…
How to figure out which 3rd Parties might be integrated with an iOS App?
In the past couple months I built out scraping for Android apps which downloads, decompiles, scrapes the `AndroidManifest.xml` then analyzes the Android app for known 3rd party ad networks or trackers. I enjoyed this a lot, but the other half of the equation, iOS remained elusive. I was surprised how much more difficult this turned…
See which MMPs and Networks Apps and Games are Using
Edit 2025: I’ve significantly overhauled AppGoblin to track hundreds of mobile app ad networks, trackers and other mobile app services which track your mobile app data. I recently added a free feature to AppGoblin to see which advertising/monetization ad networks and MMP partners apps are using. You can break down the results by category and…
AppGoblin: Free App Stats & Info
Update: 2025 AppGoblin just keeps growing! Now covering >4m apps, thousands of advertising companies, 50k apps scanned for SDKs, and free ASO marketing tools for app marketers. The past few weeks I spent building a front-end for an app store crawler that I made. The end goal is just to provide an open front-end for…
Keeping Mobile Gamers Engaged with App Widgets
I love using widgets. I probably have too many of them on my phone’s home screen. News apps, weather apps, stocks, stats. I love being able to glance through them without opening the corresponding apps. This led me to realize though that I have seen very few widgets for mobile games. As I started working…
Is Someone Else Using Your Game’s Monetization IDs?
Looking around app-ads.txt files one of the first things I was excited to check was whether DIRECT publisher IDs show up on other unrelated apps. To do this I ignored any apps that shared the same developer contact URL or Developer IDs. This doesn’t catch 100% of the legitimate publishers I checked, as the examples…
What A Mobile Ad Monopoly Looks Like
Google’s market share in in-app advertising is unmistakably dominant. The data above was scraped from 100k+ Google Play Store & Apple App Store apps (with a slight emphasis on games) who use advertising for monetization. This public data is made possible by adoption of IAB’s app-ads.txt standard which allows buyers and sellers to cross verify…
Can You Use AI to Generate Marketing Creatives?
Disclaimer: All images and ads in this post are for spec commercial examples only. The originator of thecommercial is not affiliated with, connected to, nor sponsored or endorsedby Clash of Clans (or Starbucks). TLDR: Fully formed art, but difficult to control details AI Text to image models have seen explosive growth the past year matched…
To Love & Hate in the World of Advertising
“I hate ads, who likes to see ads?” Recently my mother came to visit me in Taipei. On the drive from the airport we talked about my startup, Bubbleye, and how we predict a user’s interests in mobile ads. Her response: “I hate ads, who wants to see ads?” She’s right, no one wants to see…