Every week in Zero Clicks, we explore the interplay of AI, media, and commerce.

This week we’ll dive into…

• Big picture: AppLovin’s success might be a whole lot more bleak than you thought

• Job posts: Is 2025 the year of Pinterest? Stranger things have happened…

• The meme is the message: Please just let Meta work

Scrolling Alone

What a time to be alive in media, marketing, and commerce. Amidst the prospect of LLMs upending the very form factor of online shopping and the threat of tariffs wrapped like a Leviathan around the face of our industry, the biggest story in the business is brands running 15-second video spots on Words with Friends.

I’m basically out of superlatives to describe AppLovin’s insane run. At $113B in market cap, AppLovin is bigger than Pinterest, Reddit, and Snap combined. It’s worth nearly twice as much as The Trade Desk and well more than 3X the combined Interpublic and Omnicom agency mega-conglomerate. My obsession with Applovin is somewhat personal; the company is basically an affront to my grand thesis that the era of performance marketing arbitrage is over as a new platform for commerce arb essentially spawned out of thin air. The growth hackers always find a way.

For the uninitiated, AppLovin has been a successful public company for years, generating more than $3B in revenue in 2023 as both the growth and monetization engine behind some of the most popular apps and games on the planet. This year, the stock has nearly 10X’d in value, largely on the back of the company’s entrance into eCommerce. The ad unit is incredibly simple– hyper-disruptive video spots that essentially hijack a user’s screen and must be viewed before a gamer can, say, advance to the next level of Candy Crush.

Amidst the DTC Twitterati, AppLovin has basically become a meme with several vocal marketing leaders (some of them possibly paid shills) essentially declaring it an S-tier tool that can cover the gap in Meta’s sudden shortcomings around helping brands reach new, incremental customers.

Predictably, there’s now an AppLovin backlash with a new chorus of voices saying AKSHUALLY it’s not really incremental. Jones Road CMO Cody Plofker lays out the bear case well here– essentially saying that it will only prove incremental and sustainable for brands with low repeat revenue bases. AppLovin is currently only accepting brands that spend >$20K/day on Meta, which to some degree self-selects for some of the most successful, hyper-scaling brands on the planet. Lots and lots of hot air is gonna be spewed in the current quarters arguing about what can and can’t be credited to AppLovin, with lots of attribution pseudoscience sprinkled in.

So far, I’m mostly bullish, if for no other reason than the fact that you simply can’t easily ignore advertising in this format. It’s prominent, in your face, and reaches millions of American consumers who may have opted out of Meta and other channels where brands generally try to reach customers. From a sheerly commercial perspective, I expect AppLovin to have staying power. The real test will come when they scale the platform to smaller Meta spenders in 2025. If that crowd is half as enthusiastic as the big brands, this will be a $200B company.

There’s one other incredibly important, unique wrinkle in AppLovin’s success, wholly told in this chart from DTC Index.

All the usual disclaimers apply here: the data set is somewhat limited, the methodology might be imperfect, and older shoppers are way more likely to respond to surveys than their younger brethren. But man, to quote a certain silent generation rock legend, “Every picture tells a story, don’t it?”

Above all, this is one of the most viscerally sad charts I’ve seen in a long, long time. Across all demographics in society, we’re spending more time alone but older Americans in particular live alone at historic rates. On average, Americans ages 60 and older spend more than half their waking hours alone. Modern-day Requiem for a Dream opens with Sara alone in her Brighton Beach apartment, scrolling away at Bingo Cash on her iPhone.

I don’t believe AppLovin is responsible for the underlying sociology fueling the growth of their product nor would I even argue they are an accelerant in the trend. Likewise, I have no desire to invigorate the 2 AM, post-edible dorm room argument about whether the invention of the iPhone was a net positive or negative for society. But this is a newsletter about the interplay of AI, media, and commerce, and especially around the holidays, it’s vital to view our business in the broader societal context in which it exists.

Basically what I’m saying is this: it’s the Wednesday before Christmas. Pick up the phone and call your grandma, uncle, an old neighbor, mentor, or anyone who has had an impact on your life and might want to hear your voice.

Happy Holidays and thank you for reading– see you all in 2025! 

Sr. Director, Business Development, Advertising, Pinterest

Color me among the folks who believe Pinterest is due for a breakout in the back half of the 2020s. It’s one of the last truly sunny corners of the internet with a wholly sane vision and a business that sits right along the nexus of advertising and commerce. While the whole has never been as good as the sum of the parts, Pinterest has avoided drifting into irrelevance and could prove to be a beneficiary of a potential TikTok divestiture. It’s a good place to build for a few years.

Industry Manager, Large Customer Sales, Pharma, Reddit

So uh, about those restrictions coming to health and wellness on Meta in 2025. That money is gonna have to go somewhere and let me say, I’d LOVE to be a Reddit rep with that book of business.

Director, BD & Innovation, Generative AI, Optimum

When the regional cable company is hiring an AI leader, it might be a sign of some kinda top. 

This one isn’t really directly related to anything I write about here but it’s the most bonkers five-year chart I’ve ever seen. Yes, that really is a 100X+ gain from Dec 2022 until now.