In the gaming industry, layoffs are spreading like wildfire. AppsFlyer, an app marketing and analytics company that just turned profitable, has announced the layoff of 100 employees, accounting for 7% of its workforce. This implies that the company has over 1,400 employees globally, and it also has an office in China. Oren Kaniel, CEO and co-founder of AppsFlyer, confirmed the layoffs in an official blog post, citing the need for continued investment in AI and the acceleration of growth opportunities as the key reasons. Affected employees will receive special allowances and other job-seeking benefits.
AppsFlyer is a well-known name in the industry, especially for its annual mobile gaming marketing reports that provide valuable insights for marketers. The company specializes in mobile game attribution and marketing analytics, serving as a crucial partner for global mobile developers and game publishers. It not only monitors ad placements on major overseas media channels but also offers analytical tools to help marketers understand user acquisition, clicks, registrations, and payment behaviors, thereby enhancing the overall effectiveness and efficiency of their marketing efforts.
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Surprisingly, Kaniel revealed that AppsFlyer achieved profitability for the first time in 2024, with positive cash flow over the past two years and exceeded its targets for revenue, ARR, and EBITDA. However, since its founding in 2011, it took the company 13 years to turn a profit.
Layoffs in data companies and service providers are not new. Adjust, another attribution company acquired by AppLovin, also cut 120 jobs at the end of 2024. Kaniel explained, “Over the past few years, we have focused on supporting our customers, partners, and the broader mobile gaming ecosystem through a highly challenging period, which meant making significant investments in privacy-enhancing technologies and ecosystem support. Although these efforts led to short-term trade-offs, such as reduced profit margins and lower operational efficiency, they solidified AppsFlyer’s position as a leader in privacy-first measurement and data collaboration.”
With the evolving privacy ecosystem, precise user targeting has become more challenging, forcing data companies and tool providers to increase their investment in ad technology. The continuous advancement of AI has made it an indispensable leading technology for data companies, and increasing investment in AI is almost an unavoidable topic.
Moreover, the ongoing consolidation in the data analytics field, such as Sensor Tower’s acquisition of data.ai and Unity’s acquisition of ironSource, has inevitably led to redundancies. Against the backdrop of the gaming industry’s overall push for cost reduction and efficiency improvement, layoffs seem to be an inevitable outcome.
