AppLovin Corporation (APP) Q4 2021 Earnings Call Transcript

AppLovin Corporation (APP -2.99%)
Q4 2021 Earnings Call
Feb 16, 2022, 5:00 p.m. ET

Contents:

• Prepared Remarks
• Questions and Answers
• Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Greetings. Welcome to AppLovin Corp.'s fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings results conference call. [Operator instructions]. Please note, this conference is being recorded.

I will now turn the conference over to Ryan Gee, head of investor relations and strategic finance for AppLovin. Thank you. You may begin.

Ryan Gee -- Head of Investor Relations

Thank you, Sherry, and welcome, everyone, to AppLovin's earnings call for the quarter ended December 31, 2021. Joining me today to discuss our results are our co-founder, CEO, and chairperson, Adam Foroughi; and our president, chief financial officer, Herald Chen. Please note our SEC filings, earnings release and shareholder letter discussing our 4Q and 2021 performance are available at investors.applovin.com. During today's call, we may be making forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future financial performance of the company.

These statements are based on assumptions and beliefs, and we assume no obligation to update them. Actual results may differ materially from those results predicted here today. Please review the risk factors in our most recently filed Form 10-Q as well as elsewhere in our SEC filings for further clarification. We will also be discussing our non-GAAP financial measures.

Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures are included in our earnings press release, our shareholder letter, our 10-Q, and our 10-K to be filed shortly. Please be sure to review those reconciliations as non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for or superior to our GAAP results. This conference call is being recorded, and a replay will be available on our IR website shortly. With that, I'll now turn it over to Adam.

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

Thanks, Ryan, and thank you all for joining us today. I'm pleased to report record fourth quarter financial results. I'm even more excited by where our software business is heading and our potential in 2022 and beyond. I want to highlight two reasons why we confidently raised our software revenue outlook for 2022 and why we believe we can grow to approximately $2 billion in software revenue in 2023.

First, the compounding of our software platform business exiting 2021. It's hard to fathom, but we have nearly 3 times as many clients using our solution to grow their businesses today versus last year. And our software platform revenue was larger in the fourth quarter than for all of 2020 and grew 27% quarter over quarter. This marked our third consecutive quarter of double-digit sequential growth and significantly higher growth than all other industry peers.

AppDiscovery continues to perform very well and consistently delivers against our clients' ROI goals. That is why we had over 200% net dollar-based revenue retention for our existing clients, which provides a solid foundation for a robust organic growth rate to persist in '22 and beyond. Also consider our sales force is still ramping and that AXON just turned one year old last quarter. Second, the integration of MoPub.

We've seen amazing progress to date integrating MoPub features, publishers and demand partners. The number of apps monetizing with MAX is up over 60% since we announced the deal. And over 90% of the largest publishers for MoPub are actively integrating our unified offering. The AppLovin Exchange will enable many new DSPs and bidders to work with MAX.

These demand partners generated the vast majority of MoPub's revenue, but they didn't have direct access to MAX publishers before. As they come online through our unified platform, which will be over twice as big as MoPub, we expect these partnerships to deliver a compelling revenue opportunity in '22 and beyond. We believe to operate a fast-growing business successfully over the long term, we need to be executing against our current opportunities and also be building products that can be catalysts for growth years into the future. I'm very proud of our team because in addition to executing on all of our current initiatives, we're building products in big markets, such as blockchain and NFTs for mobile content, marketing solutions for mobile OEMs and carriers, and enabling performance marketing in the fast-growing CTV market.

These categories have similarities to the business and technologies we've already built and success in any one of these can meaningfully expand our business. We look forward to sharing our progress on these initiatives and others as they develop. With that, let me turn it over to Herald to provide color on our numbers and outlook.

Herald Chen -- President and Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Adam, and thanks to everyone for taking the time to join us. As Adam noted, we had a very solid Q4 and an outstanding 2021. In 2021, we not only had great financial results, where revenue grew more than 90% and adjusted EBITDA grew more than 100%, we were able to fully ramp our AXON machine learning platform, build critical mass in our first-party apps, complete strategic acquisitions in both tech and content, access to public equity markets and private debt markets, and importantly, build out our global team and board. This positions our company well for future growth.

Instead of reading our financial and operating metrics for Q4 and 2021, which are well laid out in our earnings release and shareholder letter, I do want to highlight our outlook for '22 and software target for 2023. First, we plan to grow our scaled software business at over 100% for 2022. We're projecting software platform revenue for 2022 at just over $1.4 billion, at the midpoint of our range, representing 111% year-over-year growth. This is a sizable upward revision from the $1 billion target we gave you earlier in 2021.

Our outlook for continued robust growth stems from: one, our strong finish to 2021 and record Q4 '21 results, setting us up well for organic growth in 2022; and two, as Adam mentioned already, our outlook benefits from the solid progress integrating MoPub into MAX. While going forward, we won't be reporting on MoPub stand-alone since it is being fully integrated into the MAX platform, we continue to believe the MoPub acquisition should be a highly accretive and strategically impactful investment for our company in the near term and over the long term, as evidenced by our software guidance for '22 and '23, which I'll come to in a second. I do want to call out that we expect to pay approximately $200 million in migration fees to publishers coming on to the MAX platform, mostly in the first quarter. Given these costs are related to the MoPub transaction, we plan to add back a substantial portion of that amount to our adjusted EBITDA.

Post the MoPub acquisition, we would not be adding back those fees in the ordinary course. With regard to our '23 outlook for software, given all the progress we've made to date and the many opportunities we see ahead, we are working hard to reach the $2 billion of software revenue in 2023, as Adam mentioned. On the app side, our outlook is for $2.2 billion in 2022, at the midpoint of our range. It is amazing to say we had negligible apps revenue just four years ago and now have a multibillion-dollar business with an awesome set of studios and developers around the globe.

While we've reached critical mass to drive first-party data -- the first-party data we need for our machine learning engine, we are continuing to make substantial investments in new content and are planning to release new first-party apps with evergreen potential over the next several quarters. The midpoint of our outlook at $2.2 billion assumes modest revenue from new content, given the inherent difficulty in projecting new content performance. We project our new apps to have a more meaningful impact in the second half of '22. Note that if we do have a new hit title, we would ramp our user acquisition to drive revenue as we did with Project Makeover over the last year.

As it relates to our EBITDA for '22, we're targeting an adjusted EBITDA margin in the high 20s percent range, up from 21 at 26%. While Adam and I are focused on compounding free cash flow over the long term, we are and will invest for the long-term value creation rather than near-term profitability. Lastly, and importantly, Adam, Ryan, and I would like to thank you for your support in 2021, and please know that we and our AppLovin team are working hard to deliver for all of you in '22 and beyond. With that, we'd be happy to take your questions.

Thank you.

Questions & Answers:

Operator

Thank you. [Operator instructions]. Our first question is from Stephen Ju with Credit Suisse. Please proceed.

Stephen Ju -- Credit Suisse -- Analyst

OK. Thank you so much. So Herald, just to kind of follow up on the migration costs of $200 million for 2022, and it looks like there was about $3 million or thereabouts for the fourth quarter. So can you discuss what this expense actually entails? And to your point, I guess, change in mediation platforms are pretty rare.

So can you talk about what's actually going on underneath the hood in terms of the nuts and bolts of the migration? And Adam, undoubtedly, you've seen sort of the latest privacy-driven changes that Google was talking about for Android. So can you talk about how things might be the same or how things might be different versus what Apple did on iOS? Thanks.

Herald Chen -- President and Chief Financial Officer

Stephen, thanks for the question. Historically, as we said, in the mediation space, there's been little volatility. And people, once they're on a platform, stay there because it is inherently integrated to all your applications. So very, very sticky.

And historically, we've not paid these fees in the past. But with the acquisition of MoPub, and MoPub being shut down as a service at the end of this quarter, a lot of publishers needed to move quickly, and there's quite a bit of cost to them actually from a revenue standpoint where they potentially can lose revenue given the speed with which they need to migrate. And there's just cost to get the migration done. And so we negotiated these onetime fees to cover those costs.

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

Stephen, it's Adam. On your second question around Google's announced privacy changes. A couple of things there. One is, we don't know exactly the direction these changes will take because it's a multiyear plan.

And Google works with all the major companies in the sector to ensure that there's not a disruption of performance on advertising targeting and attribution, and then pair that with a better privacy environment for the consumer. So it's just going to take a while to develop. That said, we obviously dealt with IDFA changes coming really quickly to the market in 2021. And you saw our business grow quite considerably on the software side in '21.

Going into the changes, we talked about the privacy change on Apple being muted for our business. You saw us growing 30% quarter over quarter in Q2. You saw the same trend in Q3 and Q4. So our business is growing quite quickly.

And these changes actually, in a way, do benefit us because the core of our data that drives our machine learning is all first-party data achieved and access from our own games. So we believe we're set up very well to perform regardless of any sort of privacy changes or regulatory changes in the ecosystem.

Stephen Ju -- Credit Suisse -- Analyst

OK. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from David Karnovsky with JPMorgan. Please proceed.

David Karnovsky -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst

Adam or Herald, can you maybe walk through what's embedded in your guide for expense growth in 2022? Your outlook, I think, has $750 million of software growth at the midpoint. And I know some of that is MoPub, which has a higher expense structure initially. But just trying to understand if your expectation for incremental margins on the underlying software business has changed at all.

Herald Chen -- President and Chief Financial Officer

Thanks for the question, David. It's Herald. So yes, overall, we think the acquisition of MoPub with the $1 billion we paid in this incremental couple hundred million dollars to get publishers migrated is a highly accretive, as mentioned, and strategic deal for us. So we do feel very good about that.

And we do think the flow-through on the software side margin structure is high. There is, as you note, more infrastructure to be built. And as we're scaling and doubling the size of our software business, we're having to keep up with that for sure. And we're bringing on a lot of new DSPs and a lot of new publishers simultaneously.

I think for our guide for the year, maybe just taking a bigger-picture look at it in the high 20s EBITDA margin. As mentioned, we want to be investing for growth in the business, and we think our ability to continue to grow the business over the long term at scale requires that investment. So we're trying to include what we think are some new projects in that EBITDA number. We are investing quite a bit into our studios as well.

I think you know that we acquired a numbers again at the end of last year. We're scaling the investment into those studios to ensure that they've got the right resources to deliver content on the back end. So we can certainly drive the business in a different direction in terms of overall margin given the flow-through, but there's so many opportunities for us to invest, both on software and apps where we'd like to invest in both of them.

David Karnovsky -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst

OK. And then Adam, in your prepared remarks, you mentioned some areas for investment like marketing solutions for OEM or blockchain. Just wondering if you could expand on this other investment costs against that in 2022. And if you can provide any specific details why are these the right opportunities to invest in?

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

Yes. So when we look at anything that's new, we do that incremental to what our current opportunities are. But we do want them to be related to the expertise that we have, both in terms of technology platform, audience, and data so that we have a higher likelihood of success if we do invest in something. And so the three areas I mentioned, the carrier and OEM space, marketing solutions, to really enable manufacturers to generate more from their device sales than they currently generate from the solutions they have available, is something that's a natural extension of our machine learning demand and software platform.

The NFT and blockchain marketplace and solutions there are just incremental ways to help monetize mobile gamers. And we've got 200 million of them playing our games. And then across our audience network, we access 2 billion of them every single month. And so because of our penetration in the mobile ecosystem, we think helping enable developers to expand their monetization opportunity with solutions there is beneficial to all parts of our business.

So it makes sense to invest there. And then finally, the connected TV space. Very similar to what we do today. We're serving full-screen, immersive video advertisements on mobile devices, and extending that and the performance models to TV as a new and fast-growing digital access point for content feels like a natural extension of our platform.

All of these are covered in the guidance that we've given you in terms of costs. If any of them hit -- and frankly, hitting on a new business is always hard, but these are so related to what we do, but if any of them hit it dramatically widens and it expands our market opportunity and growth opportunities for years to come, and that's why we're investing there.

David Karnovsky -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from Tim Nollen with Macquarie. Please proceed.

Tim Nollen -- Macquarie Group -- Analyst

Hi, everyone. Thanks very much. I'd like to ask about the kind of the components of the software platform growth, if I could. So you had very, very, very strong growth, especially in Q2 and Q3, and really kind of building up from AXON rolling on to the -- to be a contributor to that service starting a year ago, which, as you mentioned, you've now lapped against.

So not surprising that, that rate of growth has slowed from those super high rates in Q2 and Q3. I'm just wondering in Q4, if you can give us an idea of like what was an organic versus an AXON-related figure, if that's possible to do? And then looking ahead to the '22 guidance, a nice big number there. Is it possible to give us an update on what the MoPub contribution would be to that versus any AXON versus any other elements? Thanks.

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

OK. On the first part -- do you want to -- I'll handle the first part. Herald, do you want to jump in on the second? So on the first part, our software business is pretty much all organic. Really, Adjust was the only material acquisition we had before we announced closing MoPub in January.

And in Q4, we saw a 27% quarter-over-quarter growth. Obviously, the numbers are getting bigger each quarter, and yet, the quarter-over-quarter growth is much higher than anything anyone sees in the industry on the software side and it has kept up. And what we're seeing, even though AXON is maturing and we lapped the prior year's numbers with AXON, is that advertisers who are using our solution are investing more dollars every single quarter into the platform because as data builds and they can validate that the performance results are very strong, they want more of it. And that's why you saw a huge step-up in dollars per SPEC in the quarter.

And we expect to continue to see AXON improve over time because the machine learning systems, as they get more data and they get more scale, benefit from that and become more and more accurate on behalf of the customers that are using it. Going forward, MoPub presents an opportunity for continued expansion, more access to demand and then obviously, a large expansion of access to audience on our marketing platform, MAX. And MoPub, as of last year, had a very strong year. And then coming into January, it was doing very well, but it is going to be completely rolled into our solution.

We're going to take those demand partners, the DSPs, and advertisers that were buying through MoPub, to gain access to the MoPub audience and we're integrating them into our MAX solution to give them direct access to the unified offering, which is now going to be over twice as big as MoPub was. So we think that's going to present an opportunity to create revenue growth from that access point for possibly years to come. And we're very optimistic about the acquisition because we've seen so little churn. As mentioned, 90% plus of all top publishers are migrating over to our platform.

I'll hand it off to Herald for the second part.

Herald Chen -- President and Chief Financial Officer

Yes, Tim, I think a lot of the foundational growth drivers Adam mentioned there for '22, look, we have a great organic business. And quarter over quarter, from Q3 to Q4, right, that was 28% increase, which is all organic, right? So that's a pretty big move rolling into '22. Then we have the AppDiscovery continuing to improve with underlying AXON. We also have Adjust doing well and a good SaaS business growing at the rates that we'd hoped.

As mentioned, it's difficult then to parse out the impact of MoPub and MAX and exactly how that lays out. I know previously, we gave a number that the run rate of MoPub would be in the mid-200s by the end of the year. We still remain very confident in that, and frankly, probably believe there's upside to that. One important note was we did give guidance on that revenue the way we did because it takes time to ramp, as mentioned before, migrate from one mediation platform to another one.

One, to get the publishers to migrate; and then to get the demand side to migrate. And so we're going through that process now, as you know. But the impact of that in terms of the actual revenue booked in the year, therefore, will be less than the 250 million. It's more of a 250 million run rate was the target when we announced the deal.

Now that we're well into it, we feel very good about that number as well. So that led us to, what is, I guess, not a small range in terms of software target, at the high end of 15 at 1.5 billion midpoint, just over 1.4 billion. And then where you can really see the impact overall is the guide to our target of trying to hit the $2 billion number in '23, just goes to the fact that we've got a lot of confidence in putting these things together. And then the ecosystem building around that should allow us to drive pretty significant growth for this year and next.

Tim Nollen -- Macquarie Group -- Analyst

And if I could just follow up quickly. I think last quarter, you gave us some indication of the adjust contribution to revenues. Is there a similar type of number you can give us now?

Herald Chen -- President and Chief Financial Officer

Yes. Adjust, when we acquired it, it was around $100 million, and it's growing at a solid double-digit rate. We'll continue to do that, we think, for '22 and '23 as well.

Operator

Our next question is from Jason Bazinet with Citigroup. Please proceed.

Jason Bazinet -- Citi -- Analyst

Just one quick question. You guys had done so much M&A and have been very successful doing it. I just wonder, as you sort of look at the landscape, do you feel like most of the sort of acquisitions are behind you and it's now more about investing organically in the assets that you have? Or do you think there are other sort of interesting assets that you could plug into your existing portfolio?

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

Jason, it's Adam, and thanks for the question. So three years ago, when we got into gaming, we made it strategic and focused. And obviously, gaming is super fragmented, but it became strategic to us because we wanted to accumulate content across every single category of gaming so that we can have that data to feed into the software platform and execute on, obviously, what you're seeing flow out of our numbers today. We've checked the box on gaming.

So we've got enough of the gaming business and enough audience and data that the software business can do its thing. And obviously, as you've seen this year, the exceptional growth of the software business proves that. And then in the last year, we announced two material software acquisitions, which we think strengthens our current offering. And obviously, we're in the middle of integrating those.

So that will take us forward on an organic basis for quite some time on current initiatives. Then when we look at new initiatives, what we really think about is, is there a possible acquisition to go do to accelerate our ability to extend our platform, our audience and our data to something new in those categories that I talked about in my script. And then separately, when we look at those new categories, we wonder should we build it. And so that build-versus-buy decision is always going to be one that's top of mind.

But I would say what's strategic for us now is a lot different than what's been strategic for us the last few years as we went through a whole bunch of acquisitions to get that data intact to power the software business to become what it has as a market-leading platform.

Jason Bazinet -- Citi -- Analyst

OK. So enough 1P data, but maybe something on the NFT or blockchain side from an M&A standpoint. That's helpful. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from Clark Lampen with BTIG. Please proceed.

Clark Lampen -- BTIG -- Analyst

Hi, guys. Good evening. I've got one on the software business. As we were thinking about, I guess, software segment performance, not only in '22 but years past that, in '23 and beyond, can you remind us -- you may have just answered this, Adam, but how does the gaming portfolio sort of affect software growth in concert with one another? Does the incremental swing, whether it's positive or negative with the gaming business, meaningfully impact your ability to continue growing or achieving those out-year targets? And then separately on the margin outlook for '22, excuse me for asking you a dense question, but I just want to confirm that the $200 million of migration costs that's associated with MoPub is embedded within that high-20s margin outlook? Is that correct or incorrect?

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

I'll let Herald answer part two maybe first because I think it's quick, and then I'll answer part one.

Herald Chen -- President and Chief Financial Officer

We assume we're going to add back a substantial part of that 200 million to adjusted EBITDA, and therefore, that is excluded in the guidance at the high-20s margin.

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

Yes. On the first part, really, what you're asking about is like how important is gaming and gaming growth to the software growth. And what -- really, what we knew going in, as we built out this machine learning system is, these types of software solutions are built on having really good data and then being able to extend that data into predictive lookalikes across the whole audience. And we've got 200 million monthly active users and 2 billion that we see across the platform, and that ratio is working really well for us today.

Longer term, and we've said this repeatedly over the last year, we're not a games company. We're a software company really helping our partners grow. And as you look at our software revenue, it's expanded dramatically. On the game side, the vast majority of our user acquisition spend, which is the core driver of gaming growth, is on our own platform.

But as we continue to expand our relationships on the software side and really get more dollars from third parties, we're going to take the third-party reported revenue number and converge it with that TSTV number because we expect our software platform to be able to grow much faster than our desire to spend on user acquisition on the games portfolio because we already have the data that we need to power the software platform. So you'll see our focus is going to be to continue to expand the dollars that third parties are paying us on the software side, whether it's through MAX, whether it's through the demand side relationships that we're going to inherit through MoPub, or the vast majority of the revenue, the direct relationships with advertisers buying on a performance basis on our platform.

Clark Lampen -- BTIG -- Analyst

Got it. And Adam, is there a vertical sort of adjacent to gaming that you guys would sort of like to attack next? I guess, do you feel comfortable that you have a solid business and a solid assortment of first-party data there? Is there something that, I guess, just sort of is at the top of your focus?

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

We've talked about this before. The nice thing about gaming data is that it expands to other markets. And we're seeing nongaming as a fast growth vector in our business, and we've seen it over the last year. And if you think about the data -- what data do we collect today, what is the first-party data? Well, if someone pays $50 in the last week in a game like Project Makeover, that tells you a lot about that person, but they're not only playing Project Makeover and they're not only playing games, they're doing a lot more than that.

They might be in the shopping apps. They might be in the fashion design app. They might be in the home design app, food delivery, etc. And our systems can figure that out with the data sets that we have.

So expansion across vertical to other app categories is something that we've been excited about, we're seeing traction with and we continue to be excited about going forward.

Clark Lampen -- BTIG -- Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from Vasily Karasyov with Cannonball Research. Please proceed.

Vasily Karasyov -- Cannonball Research -- Analyst

Good afternoon. I had a question about MAX and all the new publishers that's coming on board. So would it be fair to say that there are some publishers that only use mediation and there are some that use mediation and real-time bidding to monetize their inventory? So my question is, number one, do you try to steer publishes toward one or the other option? And if yes or no, why? And then my second question is about the take rate. I understand that your take -- you only have the take rate for the real-time bidding auctions, but how do you see that going forward? Do you expect it to be stable? Do you think it can go up? Are you prepared to seek a contraction in there? So I would appreciate your thoughts on this.

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

Yes. So a couple of things embedded in there. When we launched MAX, we did it because we wanted to facilitate real-time bidding to the marketplace quicker. And we -- fundamentally, we believe that the ad ecosystem should be traded in real time.

It's no different than a stock trading floor that's gone programmatic over the last 20 years. And when it becomes real time, it enables companies with a data advantage and a technology advantage to win their share of inventory and make whatever margins they deserve to make, but it maximizes truly the dollars that the publisher earns. So today, MAX is the furthest ahead in the marketplace, delivering that real-time bidding to the publisher and to the end consumer to get that best ad out there on the device. It is a hybrid solution.

It's bidding plus mediation. We get paid when companies bid on MAX. They pay for a seat on our marketplace. We don't with mediation.

So over time, MAX' economics continue to improve. Now we wanted to facilitate bidding. We are a bidder on MAX. We've been a bidder in the marketplace for a couple of years.

We're very good at it. Obviously, you've seen the growth of our software business expand dramatically, but we don't target a specific take rate from any of the ads we serve. If we can make $0.01 on the dollar, we're making an extra dollar -- an extra $0.01 of revenue, and we're reporting to you on a net revenue basis. This is one thing that's important to understand.

When we talk about our revenue this past quarter or even when we're talking about $2 billion of software revenue in '23, that's net revenue reported software revenue. So it's exceptionally high margin. The costs to the publisher have already been taken out of the dollars that the advertiser pay us. So really, any sort of constriction on take rate doesn't impact at all what we're going to report to you because we're not operating afraid of that today.

And we're seeing continued growth in that software business, and we're very confident about the continued growth of it going into '22 and '23.

Operator

Our next question is from Ralph Schackart with William Blair. Please proceed.

Ralph Schackart -- William Blair -- Analyst

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. On the app side of the business, as it relates to the 2022 guide of, I think, 2.2, 2.35 billion in revs you talked about modest revenue contribution from new content, and I think more so contribution in second half of the year. But any color you could add or help us think about how the relative growth rate of the consumer apps might compare different versus the business apps? Was the conservatism more on the consumer side or is it more broad-based?

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

Yes. So we -- go ahead, Herald. Do you want to jump in?

Herald Chen -- President and Chief Financial Officer

Go ahead, Adam. Go ahead.

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

I was going to say, like, we don't operate the games as business apps or consumer apps. They're just games and apps, and they monetize with IP plus ads. So a lot of these products are hybrid. They're making money from advertisement to users and then some users will pay within the games for content as well.

Fundamentally, though, like -- again, we've said this a lot of times, we're not a games company. The games serve a purpose for us in our business. We've gotten them to scale $2 billion-plus business, which is great. More importantly, we're getting data first party on 200 million monthly active users.

And the games and growth in the games are driven strictly by what we're spending on user acquisition. That's what drives mobile gaming businesses outside of acquisitions and M&A, which we haven't done recently in the games business, and are less inclined to do so now that we have the data that we needed. So as you think about what matters to us in our business, we're talking about software, software growth. We're one of the fastest-growing software businesses on the face of the planet today, scaling this business to a couple of billion dollars next year.

And that's important because, today, we report to you that TSTV number, which is a lot bigger than the software reported revenue we give you. That delta is the spend for own games on our own platform. Well, as our software business goes from where it is -- and we talked coming into this year $1 billion projected for this year, we just raised that up 40% and are now talking about 2 billion next year, as that continues to grow, that's all going to be dollars from third parties. We're not going to be able to double the amount that we're spending on our current games because they just don't justify that kind of expansion.

And so you'll see the third-party number can merge with that TSTV number. And that gives us a lot of room to grow, the dollars we're collecting and the margins that we're able to make from the business, while focusing on what we care about, which is software, not necessarily the games part of our business.

Ralph Schackart -- William Blair -- Analyst

Great. That's helpful. Thanks, Adam.

Operator

Our next question is from David Pang with Stifel. Please proceed.

David Pang -- Stifel Financial Corp. -- Analyst

Great. Thanks everyone. Just wanted to follow up on the in-app bidding question. Could you talk about what portion of the ad transactions on MAX was in-app bidding? And how should we think about that mix changing over the next few years with the addition of MoPub? Thanks.

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

Yes. So in the past, obviously, a couple of years ago, when we launched MAX, the market had no bidding. We've gotten MAX to probably half bidding at this point, and we expect by the end of the year the vast majority will be bid realtime. MoPub allows us to access MoPub demand, which is more of exchange-based demand.

Real-time bidding is -- takes two forms. One is from header bidding networks. These are companies such as ourselves. Facebook was one of the first adopters of bidding.

So think, the platforms with SDKs. And then there's another aspect of the market, which is demand-side platforms, or DSPs. They plug into exchanges to use someone else's SDK to access the audience and bid in real time as well. With MoPub, we're unifying the demand-side bidders that are -- ad networks traditionally thought of as well as the DSPs into one unified marketplace, one unified real-time auction.

And so bringing those DSPs live through our access point to this massive audience on MAX plus MoPub is what we're excited about. That drove MoPub's revenue. The platform itself unified is over twice as big as MoPub ever was. And so that gives us a lot of access to growth in these demand-side partnerships as they come online.

Operator

Our next question is from Martin Yang with Oppenheimer & Company. Please proceed.

Martin Yang -- Oppenheimer and Company -- Analyst

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. First question is on your natural extension on the new initiatives. Can you clarify, are you providing software solutions to the nongaming apps? Or are you thinking about publishing nongaming apps yourself? Or both?

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

I don't think we spoke about nongaming apps. We're focused on building software platform technologies for these bigger markets. Connected TV is obviously one. We think performance marketing and an extension of our current demand and data into the connected TV world can be very impactful.

When it comes to blockchain and NFTs, both for gaming and nongaming, if we can help facilitate the ability for users to engage with content and really take ownership over that content through our software platform and our relationships, we think we can expand the modernization opportunity in mobile apps, which is very impactful for all of our partners and ourselves. And then lastly, we talked about taking our marketing solutions, machine learning and demand and enabling carriers and device manufacturers to generate more from the handsets that they sell to the consumer by doing partnerships with our platform. And so those are the three big areas that we're really focused on, all software-centric.

Martin Yang -- Oppenheimer and Company -- Analyst

So my question is really referring back to your comment on checking the box on gaming, but there are still pretty substantial in-app marketing and advertising opportunities in nongaming apps. So would you do something similar for -- to obtain the first-party data from nongaming apps if you orient your software solution to other publishers that are not game publishers?

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

I got you. I think the answer is no for the reason I gave you before, which is, we've got so much first-party data now. When you know someone paid the $50 in Project Makeover, you know a lot of things about them. And one of those things you know for certain, just conceptually, we know this human being, that person doesn't only play Project Makeover 24 hours a day.

They do a lot of other things. If they've got $200 a month to spend in a fashion design game, they're probably spending a lot of money on fashion, e-commerce apps, food delivery apps, rideshare apps, a whole bunch of other things that heads of households tend to invest in. And the machine learning can figure that out and enable nongaming companies to market through our platform, too. And we've talked about the category as being a fast-growing category.

It's still not a big part of our business, so we don't talk about it broken out. But it's an area that we're excited about because we've already seen success in. The other part of that, that's important is a lot of the nongaming spend that happens in mobile and then just on digital, in general, comes from demand side platforms. The big demand side platforms, omnichannel, where agencies will spend dollars through, are not an area that we had any exposure to in our business prior to MoPub.

As we integrate these MoPub partnerships into our unified offering and give them access to over twice as much of the eyeballs, we expect to see a lot of dollars flow through our platform direct to the consumer from those types of advertisers as well, which would qualify as nongaming.

Martin Yang -- Oppenheimer and Company -- Analyst

Got it. I have another logistics question, if I may. Is there any migration fees you expect after 1Q '22?

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

No, really, like -- look, our business long term may have some sort of nominal migration fees. We've had them in a nominal way in the past. The big amount in the quarter is specifically for MoPub publishers switching off of a platform that's just going to go off-line. One of the big issues of the platform that goes off-line, which really doesn't happen, this is a decade-old software platform, is that in the mobile app ecosystem, you can either update an app or not update an app.

And a lot of old devices are set not to update. And so a lot of these publishers stand to lose an annuity value of revenue on users that choose not to update, and then MoPub is going to go off-line. So they're no longer going to be able to advertise to those customers and you just cross off a stream of revenue. And so we're taking this fund to make that not a problem for these publishers because ultimately, we looked at the MoPub deal as access to publishers and the demand side.

It was a very cost-effective deal for us, but we didn't want the publishers to lose in the middle of that transaction. So we're covering the cost of that lost annuity due to the quick shutdown of this platform. And that ends up being a very unique case related to this acquisition, which is something you just don't tend to see in technology where a huge platform goes off-line.

Martin Yang -- Oppenheimer and Company -- Analyst

Got it. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from Matthew Cost with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.

Matthew Cost -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Thanks for taking the question. Maybe the first one is for you, Adam. You've mentioned a couple of times, basically, if I'm interpreting it correctly, this idea of once you have the data in place and you feed it into AXON, there's a lot that you can do with it. And so I guess I just want to understand, does that mean that when you reach a certain audience side in terms of your portfolio -- audience size in terms of your portfolio of apps that, that yields enough data on an ongoing basis that you can do what you need to do with it? You don't need to keep scaling the app portfolio beyond a certain point because you maintain 200 million MAUs and have all the data that you need? I guess, what do you mean by that? And then I have a follow-up.

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

Yes, that's 100% right. That's why we've been talking about for the last year. Like the games business may grow, it may not grow. It doesn't matter because it's scaled enough where it's fueling the massive growth in the software business.

And so you sort of have today, 10% actual data, what we have perfect data on our own apps, and then 90% is predicted lookalikes. Being at a scale that we're at today with the technologies and data platform and machine learning and algorithms that we've built, you're obviously seeing a software platform that's growing much, much faster than any other platform in our industry. And so you can tell that 10 times ratio of lookalikes to actual data works. Now if we can get data on 2 billion mobile devices, we would take it.

Actual data is always better than lookalikes, but we know that it's exceptionally hard to go scale a platform to get that much direct first-party data. There's maybe only one company in the history of the world that's gotten that much scale to consumers, right? But we've proven that at 200 million, we're very, very good on the software side, so we're excited with where we're at on the data side of this business.

Matthew Cost -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Great. Thank you. And then maybe just one for Herald. Just thinking about like the growth in SPECs over the course of this year, I think excluding Adjust, you guys added around 40-plus -- a little over 40 million -- or sorry, not 40 million.

40 SPECs in 2Q and 3Q. And I think that, that number, if I have it right, was about seven in 4Q. So I guess, again, excluding Adjust, what are kind of the dynamics behind SPEC adds over the course of this year?

Herald Chen -- President and Chief Financial Officer

Yes. Thanks, Matt, for the questions. Yes, again, the software business, as you know, has grown tremendously over the course of the year, and we're projecting it to continue to do that. And we gave a SPEC number to try to give a little more granularity into the build price volume-wise.

One aspect -- and of course, it's grown considerably, price volume more in the fourth quarter in terms of people scaling quite rapidly, particularly ex Adjust, to $757,000 in the quarter, so a pretty significant amount of money of increase. What was slower in that period was the actual SPEC count. And that's really due to the fact that in the third quarter, we added a lot of SPECs that we're testing and whatnot and didn't add as many of those in the fourth quarter. So we still feel very good about the customer growth, obviously, with all the migrating customers from MoPub.

Again, it will be hard to distinguish who's a MAX customer, who's a MoPub customer because it's all going to be MAX customers. We're highly confident in the software line growing and, therefore, price quantity has to follow that. One footnote to that, and it is in our letter, but didn't want to highlight it. Just I wanted to keep things clear for this.

In our letter, on the upfront side, we kept the SPEC numbers the same. One very detailed point is our SPEC definition was based on a run rate per quarter. They had to get to $125,000 of run rate in the quarter. Going forward, we'll continue to report that metric for a little bit, but we're really going to go focus more on an LTM basis to have $125,000 of revenue.

The reason I point that out is that we'll get rid of some of the volatility that is inherent if you use just a quarterly run rate number of SPECs coming and going. And given the scale of the customers we're talking about, we think that will be a much better metric going forward.

Matthew Cost -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from Omar Dessouky with Bank of America. Please proceed.

Omar Dessouky -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst

Right. Thank you. How would the Open App Markets Act, as currently written, affect your business strategically? And are you playing any role, direct or indirect, in how the law is being written?

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

I will be honest, I'm reading up on what the law is right now. Can you give us a little insight into specifically what you're talking about, and then I'll answer it.

Omar Dessouky -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst

Yes. So I think it's pretty well known that major players that own platforms are able to advantage themselves in certain ways, or at least that's the view of some market participants. And it appears that legal interests are potentially going to try to make it a more competitive industry. And I'm just wondering what you guys think about it and how it might reshuffle the -- potentially the attribution ecosystem or the actual targeting ecosystem itself in your favor or not?

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

Got it. And this is -- you're talking about like the actual operating systems, the app store tax and any other rule changes they make that could be seen as benefiting themselves? Is that what you're talking about?

Omar Dessouky -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst

Yes. Yes.

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

So the app store fees, obviously, they're not going up. And I think a lot of people are hopeful that alternatives can be introduced or the actual tax from the outsource goes down. Overall, we're in a good position because, one, our apps business is paying a hefty amount in the 30% every single year. But more importantly, these types of added competition to a marketplace make the pricing that goes to the end developer stronger.

And so if that happens, you sort of take -- if $1 becomes $0.70 today and say -- and tomorrow it becomes $0.85, that's 20% more LTV that advertisers can go spend on a platform like ours. So that would just immediately mean, in a competitive marketplace like ours, that you see a step function up in terms of the dollars that companies are willing to spend to go acquire new users because they have those kinds of economics that they get in their favor. When it comes to other rule changes, the platforms do provide an immense amount of value. So we operate within the rules of the platforms.

And we can't predict where they go. The competition is always good for these ecosystems. And I think when we look at this, we know that we're one of the leaders in the market on the app side. And we're undoubtedly the largest advertising platform outside of the Facebooks and the Googles on mobile today that exists independent.

And so we're set up really well to benefit from some of this disintermediation that might happen, added competition and better economics for the content creators.

Operator

Our final question is from Franco Granda with D.A. Davidson. Please proceed.

Franco Granda -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst

Thanks for taking my questions here. Just following up on an earlier question, I was hoping you could speak about your progress in nongaming revenues on your software platform. What was the growth rate of nongaming revenues in '21? And then now that MoPub has closed and you're integrating it, what does that mix look like?

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

Yes. That's not something that we break out yet. But I'll say really the area that's a big opportunity is both the direct app market on our platform, getting access to more of them through the Adjust sales force, bringing more nongaming customers into our ecosystem, as we've touched on. But more importantly, something we haven't talked on that I referenced earlier is, you end up with these omnichannel DSPs.

Trade Desk, obviously, being a famous one, but there's very big companies here, that route nongaming demand, specifically agency and brand dollars, into mobile applications. With the MAXs plus MoPub unified platform, we've got the biggest supply side platform that the mobile app ecosystem has ever seen in one place. We're the direct access to the consumer. And these agencies and those omnichannel DSPs are really going through this shift in mindset to try to optimize the supply path so they get direct to the consumer.

Well, they're going to be able to do it through our platform at massive amounts of scale now as they go and integrate into the MAX marketplace directly through us. And we think that's going to facilitate a lot of dollars in nongaming to move into our ecosystem, which will be to the benefit of our publishing partners, but also to the benefit of us as the trading floor.

Franco Granda -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst

All right. And then as it relates to some of the new opportunities in the software side that you talked about, such as NFTs and CTV, I was curious about your approach there. Are you approaching talent from their respective industries? Or are you moving resources from within the company to help you build out those strategies?

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

Yes. I mean, look, when we look at a new business, we're actually -- all of our core team has been here for -- since we started the business a decade ago. And so we're very entrepreneurial. And the best new businesses always start with a few people that put together an idea.

And if it sticks and it hits, it can really expand. Now that's a traditional start-up. We have advantages with our scale data platform, our algorithms and the demand access and data access that we have. And so we picked categories where our relationships and our technologies will give us an advantaged head start.

We're entrepreneurial, so we're building a lot of the core technologies ourselves, but we will look to buy potentially if it makes sense. We'll also look to staff from the outside-in. And in particular, with a couple of these businesses, we brought people from the outside to come in and run these businesses for us to give us even more confidence in executing them over the coming years.

Operator

[Operator signoff]

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

Thanks, everyone.

Duration: 54 minutes

Call participants:

Ryan Gee -- Head of Investor Relations

Adam Foroughi -- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson

Herald Chen -- President and Chief Financial Officer

Stephen Ju -- Credit Suisse -- Analyst

David Karnovsky -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst

Tim Nollen -- Macquarie Group -- Analyst

Jason Bazinet -- Citi -- Analyst

Clark Lampen -- BTIG -- Analyst

Vasily Karasyov -- Cannonball Research -- Analyst

Ralph Schackart -- William Blair -- Analyst

David Pang -- Stifel Financial Corp. -- Analyst

Martin Yang -- Oppenheimer and Company -- Analyst

Matthew Cost -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Omar Dessouky -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst

Franco Granda -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst

More APP analysis

All earnings call transcripts