AppLovin Corp Ordinary Shares - Class A

APP: XNAS (USA)

Morningstar Rating for Stocks	Fair Value	Economic Moat	Capital Allocation
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AppLovin: Another Short-Seller Report; Tracking Pixels or PIGs

Mark Giarelli

Mar 28, 2025

On March 27, 2025, Muddy Waters Research released a short-seller report on AppLovin, alleging management overstates return on advertising spending, aggressively retargets to “steal attribution,” and most importantly, violates Google’s and Meta’s (and others) terms of service by creating persistent identity graphs to train its advertising optimization model. A PIG is a collection of user identifiers from multiple platforms, obtained against the TOS, and combined to create a persistent digital profile for a specific user. After report’s release, shares quickly fell 20% from $325 to $260.

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AppLovin Corp Ordinary Shares - Class A

AppLovin: Another Short-Seller Report; Tracking Pixels or PIGs

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