Hey, good afternoon, everyone. Let's get started. Welcome to AppLovin's earnings call for the quarter ended March 31, 2021. I'm Ryan Gee, Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Finance at AppLovin. Joining me to discuss the results are our Co-founder, CEO, and Chairperson, Adam Foroughi, and our President and Chief Financial Officer, Herald Chen. Please note our SEC filings, earnings release, and shareholder letter discussing our first quarter performance are available at investors.applovin.com. We also posted a short slide presentation that Herald will reference later in this call if you'd like to follow along. During today's call, we may be making forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future financial performance of our company. These statements are based on our current assumptions and beliefs. We assume no obligation to update them except as required by law. Actual results may differ materially from the results predicted.
Please review the risk factors in our most recently filed Form 10-K and in our Form 10-Q to be filed shortly after this call for additional information. We will also be discussing non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of our GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures are included in our shareholder letter available on our IR website. Please be sure to review the GAAP measures and the reconciliation as the 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 shortly. We will be hosting a Q&A session after our prepared remarks, but first, I would like to turn it over to Adam and Herald. Adam, please go ahead.
This past quarter, we achieved many key milestones for AppLovin. We celebrated our 10-year anniversary as a business, our one-year anniversary as a public company, and we cleared over 10 billion app installs discovered through our marketing platform. We can celebrate these milestones because of the hard work and value-driven culture that we have at AppLovin. First, we hire and work with great people from diverse backgrounds. We give them an environment to thrive in, always trying to ensure each person has room to develop their professional and personal skills here more than anywhere else. Second, we are entrepreneurial, and we never settle. We know that in a competitive and challenging market, complacency leads to failure. Third, we maintain focus.
We aim to do big things, but all of our decisions are tied to our core goals, continuing to expand our footprint as a marketing and monetization platform for developers. It was key to the team that we maintain these core principles as we entered a new public chapter for our company. I'm very proud to say we've done just that. This can be demonstrated in our first quarter. First, our software platform business has continued to expand by adding new clients and increasing the amount that existing clients are spending. This strong performance led to a record EBITDA in Q1 of $276 million. Most software businesses lose money while growing. We're growing quickly and just cleared a billion-dollar EBITDA run rate. Next, we successfully completed migrating MoPub into our MAX platform, unifying the two largest mediation solutions in the mobile app market.
We not only had to execute quickly on our side to accomplish this, we also asked publishers to integrate our platform into their app in just 90 days or risk losing their ad revenues. A couple things to call out specifically here. Historically, we grew MAX to become the leading solution in the market by offering the best technology, not by paying bonuses. This is exactly how we'll run our business going forward, focusing on continuing to deliver the best solution in the market. Given the short window of time to move to our unified platform, we made the decision to pay out $210 million in one-time publisher bonuses. We counted these bonuses as contra revenue, and Herald will give you the accounting detail shortly. We see the opportunity to own the largest marketplace in the in-app advertising ecosystem as strategically valuable long-term.
Therefore, this was a decision that was an easy one to make because it helped ensure continuity with the publishers coming over from MoPub. Switching monetization platforms is a big undertaking, and we are proud that over 90% of the MoPub publishers have moved over to MAX. As a result, we now have a significant share of the market using our solution, so much so that the success of our platform will directly influence growth in the total addressable market and success of all major parties in the ecosystem. That's a strong position to be in and a responsibility we will be proud to own. Finally, we acquired Wurl, a leader in powering streaming TV. Together, we will partner to bring performance marketing to CTV.
It is clear just how quickly we pushed forward on items that make the biggest impact to our business when we look back just one year to the IPO and see that software was only 14% of our revenue versus 40% now. At that time, we discussed just how important the first-party data that those games provided was to our software platform success. Today, our software platform business is growing at a significant rate, much faster than we expected, while our apps business has leveled off. In fact, our software business in Q1 2022 is 4 x larger than it was in Q1 2021. In Q1, software contributed over 80% of our EBITDA. For the last several quarters, we've talked about how the apps business is not as strategic as it once was.
With the continued scaling of our software platform, we've proven that the two businesses can operate independently from one another. More directly, given the success of our software platform, we will no longer look at games as a cost center. This means we will be exploring how to structure our apps business so that it can run more efficiently as its own standalone business unit. This exploration may result in operational changes and possibly plans to sell or spin off some of the studios. Among them are nearly 20 very capable game studios, their founders, and their teams. We will operate the studios with a more profitable spend on user acquisition, which we already started to do in late Q1. Traditionally, we were willing to spend more on new users, valuing the scale, audience, and data as the justification.
This led to operating at around breakeven, while typically gaming companies operate at 20% or higher EBITDA margins, which we will now aim to reach over time. Mobile app discovery and monetization are critical for app developers now more than ever, with MAX as the market's leading monetization solution. App discovery is the fastest-growing user acquisition channel for developers today. With customers paying us for performance, we're shielded against macroeconomic volatility. We have a powerful machine learning engine that is only 18 months old and will continue to improve. MAX allows us to serve ads to the 700 million daily active users we help monetize. We have a team seasoned in navigating a complex ecosystem and a dynamic privacy landscape. With the growth opportunities across our software business and feature initiatives and the high cash flow our business generates even today, we're very excited about our future.
Now I'll turn it over to Herald to outline the details of Q1 financials and our outlook.
Thanks very much. As Adam mentioned, with the growth in margins from our software platform, plus a new operating approach for our apps portfolio, we're excited about our near and long-term growth prospects and cash flow outlook. To help you better understand that thesis, going forward, we'll be providing greater insights into the economic drivers of our two businesses and regarding the overall cash generation of our company. For a quick preview of what I'm going to describe in more detail shortly, our guidance for the software platform business is to generate over $1 billion of revenue in the second through fourth quarter of this year.
Based on an estimated margin expansion to 70% and a flow through to cash of another estimated 70%, that business alone will generate over $500 million of unlevered free cash flow in the next three quarters alone. Let's get back to the quarter and I think in Q1, we made some key decisions and good progress to our goals. I'll highlight a few in detail before we take your questions. The first topic is our overall strong trending in margins. We have strong quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year growth on both the top and bottom line when adjusting for the $210 million of contra revenue we booked in Q1, which was a bonus paid to publishers related to the MoPub transaction.
Our growth in Q1 was driven by the growth in our software platform revenue more than making up for a modest decline in our apps revenue. Let me spend a few minutes on the contra revenue so you can appreciate the growth in margin expansion that we saw in the quarter. First of all, just the accounting of contra revenue. We pay these publisher bonuses to our vendors that are currently or may become a future customer of ours. Since GAAP requires offsetting revenue for fees you pay to customers or potential customers, these publisher migration bonuses of $210 million are accounted for as contra revenue. Second, these fees are non-recurring and result from the MoPub transaction. Historically, we did not incur these fees of any significant size.
When you shut down one of the largest players in mediation and ask their publishers to move over in 90 days, those publishers, in turn, incur real revenue loss and cost to migrate. Going forward, we do not see publisher bonuses as a significant cost for our normal business, and we do not have them before MoPub, nor do we project anything significant going forward. Because the MoPub-related fees are non-recurring, we add it back to adjust the EBITDA. Any non-MoPub related publisher bonuses we would see after Q1, we will not be adding back to adjust the EBITDA. Therefore, it is just a one-time occurrence in this quarter, in this past quarter. For reporting purposes, on the revenue side, we cannot add back the contra revenue.
For internal purposes, of course, we combine the two numbers, which adds up to an amount 38% greater than our Q4 number. Overall, if you consider the $210 million of contra revenue as part of our $1.05 billion purchase price for MoPub, the total price for that acquisition was $1.26 billion. That's a very attractive price for such a strategic and financially accretive asset. On the cash flow side, Adam mentioned we had a record $276 million in EBITDA with a reported margin of 44%. When normalizing revenue for the publisher bonuses or adjusting EBITDA margin with 33%, which you can see in purple here.
That is we think is the normal run rate of the business, and that is a 500 basis point increase over 28% in the fourth quarter of 2021. This margin expansion was entirely driven by the strong growth of our high-margin software business. In fact, the margin was slightly reduced by our apps business, where the reduction in apps revenue was in large part offset by user acquisition spend, but was still dilutive to our overall margin. As mentioned in our shareholder letter, we currently estimate that our software platform business currently runs at a normalized EBITDA margin of 65%-70% and our apps business at an estimated EBITDA margin of 5%-10%. Therefore, faster growth of software relative to apps drives margin expansion.
We will be providing more details on this in our Q2 earnings report, where we will be providing segmented financials for the first time. Our strong outlook for software platform revenue and margin, plus operating cost management, allows us to raise our EBITDA guidance for this year, and we'll talk about that further in a minute. Of note, at our current operating scale, we are able to translate a significant percentage of our EBITDA to unlevered free cash flow given our low CapEx, working capital requirements, and moderate tax rate. We estimate that normalized run rate percentage of adjusted EBITDA translating to unlevered free cash flow to around 65%-75%. Next slide, we want to talk about our software expansion for the quarter.
You've heard now a few times from Adam and me, we believe that software platform growth is key to our long-term growth and cash flow. Let's take a deeper look at our Q1 software performance. First of all, as noted in purple, you can see all of the one-time contra revenue is taken against our software revenue. When adding to GAAP revenue of $119 million, the total is $329 million for Q1. That represents a 33% quarter-over-quarter growth rate on top of strong quarter-over-quarter growth over our prior three quarters. We saw strong customer adoption across all of our solutions, including AppDiscovery, AppLovin Exchange, Adjust, and MAX, as we started to pick up revenue from the integrated MoPub customers.
Our customers continue to find success with our solutions, are growing their business, and in turn, are spending more on us. Of note, in Q1, we received approximately $40 million of revenue from MoPub Twitter and expect the revenue from the acquisition to grow over the course of the year. However, going forward, it will be difficult to discern what revenue comes explicitly from MoPub now that it has been fully integrated into MAX. Across the board on our software KPI, we had very solid performance when normalized for the contra revenue impact. We had 258% net dollar-based revenue retention in the quarter over prior year, showing the resiliency of our customers and continued increase in the use of our software solutions. We also had a solid increase in the number of new customers.
Our normalized SPEC count reached 519, an increase of 58 customers, but we still believe that a small percentage of customers available to us in the marketplace. The additions were across the business, including from new additions from customers migrating from MoPub, as well as for new customers from AppDiscovery and Adjust. On top of more customers, we saw the average revenue increase on average from all of our SPECs reaching normalized $603 thousand. A steady increase over the past three quarters. Of note that when taking the $210 million of contra revenue out of the equation, we still were able to grow net dollar-based retention and the total number of SPECs. For the third topic, we wanted to provide you an update on our guidance, where we're increasing our 2022 adjusted EBITDA target.
For 2022, our operating outlook for the software platform remains the same as previously given. However, we are adjusting our formal guidance by the $210 million contra revenue to GAAP revenue guidance of $1.14 -1.29 billion. We are continuing to expect $2 billion in software platform revenue in 2023, which will be a 10x increase from 2020 and a 65% increase over the midpoint of the revised software platform guidance in 2022. We believe we have the market solution, technology, and team to reach that goal. Further, given our scalable cost structure, which we articulated earlier, we believe the cash flow from a $2 billion revenue software platform business would be substantial.
Switching to the app side, as Adam mentioned, the scale of our software platform and the many features of our MAX solution means we are much less reliant on the data from our apps to drive financial performance for our clients. Therefore, we're planning to manage that business to optimize for operating and financial efficiency with a perspective on how to best drive cash flow from that business over the long term. In the near-medium term, that may include lowering our investment in user acquisition, which will drive up margins but lower overall growth. We will also do a review of our app portfolio, which could lead to a wide variety of transactions or no change at all.
Based on this new approach, we are lowering the revenue guidance by $200 million and now targeting a range of $2-2.15 billion in revenue from apps in 2022. The combination of our changes in software and apps guidance leads to a revised total guidance of $3.14 -3.44 billion on a GAAP basis. With regard to adjusted EBITDA, given our record performance and strong margins, we're raising adjusted EBITDA guidance to a midpoint target of $1.2 billion. This target again represents a 65% increase over prior year. This is also an increase from our previous guidance of high 20% margin against a total revenue forecast at midpoint of $3.7 billion, which equated to just over $1 billion.
Key drivers of this increase in EBITDA guidance are the much higher growth of our software platform business, which as I said, has a much higher margin profile. We have lower investment requirements than originally earmarked for new initiatives, and we now have a higher margin expected from our app business as we optimize it. From an overall margin perspective, this equates to a 36% 2022 adjusted EBITDA margin at midpoint of GAAP revenue guidance and a 34% adjusted EBITDA margin when excluding the contra revenue. Therefore, the 34% target is our runway margin to focus on, which would be an 800 basis point increase over the prior year. Since we do generate a significant amount of cash flow, I wanted to touch briefly on our go-forward capital allocation perspectives. Figuratively stated, we're not focused on M&A for the app side of the business.
We will opportunistically look on the software side, although there too, we've assembled many of the key assets we wanted over the past 18 months. With regard to the stock buyback side, we do have our $750 million authorized program and have used just over $45 million thus far. We are planning to use that authorization when appropriate and are open to doing so given the right opportunity. We appreciate the public markets are highly volatile and difficult to predict. In these markets, we believe cash is king, and cash flow growth is king and queen. That's exactly where our team is focused. We believe in our strategic position, growth, and cash generation potential, and we will work hard quarter- after- quarter to post the numbers that will earn your trust.
Thank you for taking the time to get an update on our business. With that, we'll open the call for cross-questions. Ryan Gee?
Thanks, Ryan. Yeah, at this time, we'll open the call up to any questions from our participants. If you'd like to ask a question, please use the Raise Hand function on the Zoom client, and we'll try and get to as many as we can. Once I call your name, do remember that you need to unmute yourself when prompted to by Zoom before speaking. Let's pause a second and compile the roster. All right. Youssef, you're first in line. Please make sure that you do select unmute to ask your question. Go ahead, Youssef.
Excellent. Can you hear me?
We can hear you.
Beautiful. Thank you. Hey, guys. So just a couple questions for me, maybe just at a high level. How long do you think this review of the apps business will last? In the meantime, what kind of performance do you expect from it? I think it was down $40 million sequentially. That's one. To a question we often get from investors is around just this shift in strategy away from the apps. Historically, you guys have positioned yourselves as strategically leveraging the apps to, you know, as a source of first-party data or one P. Maybe just refresh us as to why is that not as important anymore. Thank you.
Hey, Youssef. I think the two questions are both tied together. Really what we're focused on with the games business as it is today is operate it efficiently. We've got 20 or so studios distributed all over the world. Some are run very well. They generate a good amount of profitability. Some are generating losses. We're gonna go through the portfolio and ensure that every single one of them is held to a standard the same way any independent gaming company would be. What gives us confidence in that is that our software business is frankly growing so much faster and so much larger than what we thought when we first went public a year ago.
We were talking about $650 million of revenue in software for the entire year this year, and we're now talking about over double that amount and around half that amount the first quarter. It's quadrupled in the last twelve months. When we see that scale, what we know is that we have to really become a market solution. We've got a lot more software platform enterprise clients to come use our platform. We've got a lot more to scale with the MAX and MoPub marketplace now. That gives us the confidence that our games are only a small percentage of that software business.
The other data point that's really important to point out to you too is, for four quarters in a row, our games business has been fairly flat in both audience and revenue, whereas our software business has grown immensely. That gives us a lot of confidence in the trajectory of the software business, and we wanna focus entirely on growing that and achieving the $2 billion that we put out as a goal next year.
Great. Thank you.
Okay, next up is Eric Sheridan at Goldman Sachs. Eric, go ahead and make sure you unmute before you talk.
Okay. Can you guys hear me now?
Go ahead, Eric.
Great. Hope everyone's well on the team. I wanna come back to some of the acquisitions you've done and talk more broadly there. You know, you finished MoPub. Obviously, there's connected TV with Wurl. Where do you see now the collection of assets you have in terms of positioning yourself for compounded growth, different verticals on the advertiser side, potential budget unlock, not only in 2022, but as we look beyond 2022 over the next couple of years? We'd love to get as much color as we can about that. Thanks.
Great question. In mobile, we're really confident in our position. We've got the largest marketplace. We've got AXON, our machine learning technology that's only 18 months old. It's gonna continue to improve. That's how these things go. Then we have a performance model. We're not looking to take budget from others. We're looking to give our advertisers results that are measurable and within their financial goals. That unlocks unlimited budget. As we think about how to increase our market over time and create growth vectors for many years to come, we really think about finding the consumers that we know how to serve as well with recommended offerings across other app platforms. That's what made the connected TV interesting for us.
Wurl being one of the leading software solutions to bring content online and connected TV for a lot of the brands that have content need to distribute it through a channel. The ad slots in that content will have immense reach, will be very valuable on the full screen, and we think can present a really large performance model on television. We're gonna be focused on continuing expanding the software business and pushing our machine learning software in as many places as we can go.
Okay, great. Thanks, Eric. Next, we'll go to Stephen Ju at Credit Suisse. Go ahead, Stephen.
All right, great. Thanks. Can you hear me?
We can. Go ahead.
Awesome. All right, great. You know, Adam, reading between the lines of your shareholder letter, seems like now is the time to go after the larger ad market.
As opposed to just the spend from the mobile game sector. With MoPub now in the house, is there any sort of directional update you can give us in terms of the mix of ad revenue now coming from non-gaming clients and what the relative growth between, you know, gaming versus non-gaming, is now and where that could be? Thanks.
MoPub and MAX together, we sit on top of 700 million daily actives around the world, and these consumers in large part on our platform, they're playing games. I can assure you they don't just play games, it's not the only thing they do in their life. They're very good audience at that level of scale to monetize into both games and non-games. We traditionally focused our solutions for the game developer and really built a lot of performance technology there. MoPub brought us access to the global marketplace, and that's how they monetize their inventory. The marketplace has enabled direct access for companies like The Trade Desk, which we announced a partnership with last quarter to buy into our exchange.
As we continue to integrate and push forward after this MoPub transaction, those types of relationships, we're gonna see more and more monetization potential that's very large audience from non-gaming customers to augment the current in market leading solution we have in the mobile gaming category.
Thank you.
Okay. Next, we'll go to Clark Lampen at BTIG. Clark, go ahead and just remember to unmute your line.
Yeah. Can you guys hear me?
We can. Go ahead, Clark.
Okay, awesome. Maybe I'll follow up on Stephen's question there for a moment because, you know, Adam, you mentioned The Trade Desk onboarding. In prior quarters, we've seen in the shareholder letter that there's really been a spike in sort of customers coming on platform. With ALX and MAX now, you know, kind of under the AppLovin umbrella for the first full- quarter, could you give us a sense of, you know, customer response to the unified platform, you know, or maybe if it's possible, if there's any sort of, you know, backlog or just sort of qualitative read on demand? Herald, I think if I understood this right, as we look at the 2022 EBITDA guidance, most of the adjustment here is really, you know, sort of change of plan around apps and maybe a FMM adjustment.
Given, you know, what you've talked about with strategy, does this change your sort of willingness to move potentially into new spaces like OEM, you know, sort of blockchain and NFTs and some of the things you talked about last quarter? Thanks.
Yeah, as we think about like the integration that we just did, we put together the largest really open marketplace in mobile apps that's ever existed. Over 700 million daily active users in one exchange is a very large amount. We've heard really positive feedback from the customers coming over. They were traditional DSPs buying on MoPub, thinking that MoPub was the biggest solution, and by coming into this unified solution, they're getting over 2 times the amount of scale for their business. That's obviously made the reception really strong. On the publisher side, being able to have that much scale in one software solution just creates a lot more liquidity.
Our entire objective with MAX was to drive up competition in the marketplace so that we can increase the amount of money that a publisher earns and know that on the other hand, that publisher is gonna go invest in user acquisition. That's what you're seeing really fuel our growth. You're seeing the increase in SPECs where we've almost tripled them in the last 12 months. You're seeing the net dollar retention, I think it was around 265% just this past quarter. These are the same customers a year ago spending nearly triple on our platform today. That's because the efficiencies that we're bringing to the market is enabling them to do that and grow their businesses faster than the market's growth. Yeah. Clark, thanks for the question. The other question you had was just around margins and investing in new initiatives.
I think last quarter we talked about hitting the high 20s growth margins this year. There were three big investments we needed to make. One was the infrastructure to really grow the software platform as fast as we were going to, particularly given MoPub. The second was the investment in new initiatives, and we put bucket aside not knowing exactly what that would look like. The third was we had a lot of new apps and game studios we onboarded to go invest behind that. I think very simply the first one we're still doing and actually are done, that's in place. We've onboarded, you know, the vast majority of what we wanted to on MoPub, and we put that infrastructure in place.
Now we'll be continuing to grow with MoPub and the software platform to grow. I think the other two pieces do have changes to them. On the new initiative side, we're pursuing the NFT blockchain as well as the OEM strategies, and I'll touch on that in a second. We're still as bullish as we were in the first quarter about those. We just don't think it takes as much dollars this year in terms of investing behind it to go achieve that. We've talked about the app side, which is a very different approach in terms of the investment there. We told you before that the M&A dollars would not be allocated there.
Now we're telling you that importantly, that we're running these at low single-digit% margins when they really should be in the 20s% margins. There's a lot of room for us to improve that from an OpEx standpoint. We're still remain extremely excited about the new initiatives we talked about, you know, CTV with Wurl being one, OEM another, and then the NFT blockchain. We would expect in the next, you know, 12 months, if not sooner, to be coming back at you to describe some of the progress we're making on all those fronts.
Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.
Okay. We'll go next to Matthew Cost at Morgan Stanley. Go ahead, Matt.
Everyone, thanks for taking the questions. I guess just looking at the ad network revenue in the quarter, you know, very strong. It looks like revenue per SPEC, if I have this right, was at an all-time high. I guess what are the sources of strength in 1Q, particularly while you were going through the transition of MoPub into MAX, that you would call out? Within that, could you talk to the contribution from, you know, from MoPub in the quarter? Then just secondly, kind of more philosophically, I guess historically, the way that I certainly thought about what made your ad network unique was that you had a flywheel between the data that came from the apps business and then fed, you know, the algorithms in the ad network.
I guess in a future where the apps could be spun or sold, or at the very least smaller in scale relative to the scale of the ad network, you know, what differentiates AppLovin's ad network now as you sort of drive to this next leg of growth, if it's not just running the same playbook that got you from where you started to where you are? Thanks.
Yeah, great question. I think it really is all interrelated again. If you look at the ad business, the inflection point on it was the release of AXON 18 months ago and the continued expansion of dollars that are invested by our own customers over the last year. It's coming from efficiencies in the machine learning. These systems just get better as they get more data. Now, what's interesting about that, to your data question, is that when we started with AXON, the only data we had were our own games. That was the entire reason we got into games. When we went public a year ago, our own games made up 35%-40% of the software business, and we reported that to you in TSTV. Now that number continues to shrink, and that's because we're still seeing an adoption of the technology.
We're seeing customers come online. We're serving more ads. We're getting a bigger feedback loop from doing all of those things, and we're seeing the machine learning continue to improve without a necessity for our own games to be fueling the data. That's what gives us the confidence to go, "Let's just run both these businesses the most efficiently." That'll maximize shareholder value and allow us to continue to grow the software business, but generate actual real margin from the game business at the same time.
Great. Just on the ad network side, if you wouldn't mind.
Yeah. I think you asked what the contribution was for MoPub in the quarter, and it was just over $40 million specifically. We know that number because Twitter was still running that business for us in the quarter. Subsequently now we integrated entirely into MAX. MoPub, as everyone knows, was completely shut down March 31 of this year, and it's fully integrated into our numbers rolling forward. We won't be able to parse it out because all the data in the consumer customers are all integrated. We expect, you know, to increase that number quarter- over- quarter as we've, you know, shown ultimately in our software guide for the year.
Great. Thank you.
Okay. Thanks, Matt. We'll go next to David at J.P. Morgan. David, go ahead.
Thank you. Just one on the MoPub integration. I know it's early, but for the publishers that have migrated over, can you maybe say how much traction you're seeing in pushing these clients toward in-app bidding? How are you thinking about cross-selling some of these new relationships into your AppDiscovery products or anything else you offer? Thanks.
Yeah. The MAX solution itself, really, we built and pushed the market to in-app bidding and us and our partnership with Facebook really were the first two big bidders on the marketplace. Clients that are coming over to MAX just get in-app bidding out of the box. What we have seen is just a strong performance for the publishers that have come over, and frankly, just because of scale. We've got so much liquidity on the platform, it allows us to get more differentiated demand, and the technology was built much later than the other mediation solutions. That's why we had such a strong trajectory to MAX before Mobile, and why we continue to expect it to be the leading solution in the marketplace.
Thank you.
Yeah. Ryan, you want to go next?
Yeah. Thanks, David. We'll go next to Tim Nollen at Macquarie. Go ahead, Tim.
Okay, great. Thanks. I've got a couple questions related to the contra revenue, because I guess I had thought of the $200 million-ish number that you'd mentioned before as being more of a cost. If it's a contra revenue item, just to make sure, that is not just, MoPub, customer revenue that's being shifted over to MAX, but there must be some other revenue in your system that's also being moved over to MAX. Just wanna make sure I understand that because the $40 million versus the $210 million number. I just wanna make sure I understand what that difference is.
Relatedly, if you've got 90%, I think you said, of customers moved over to MAX, does that mean, you know, most of this is behind you and the other 10 are gonna come, or what happens to that other 10? Thanks.
Yeah, thanks, Tim, for the question. Yeah, sorry, just for the clarification. Yeah, on the revenue side that we take to our software business, specifically coming out of MoPub customers, was the $40 million. The $210 million we're referring to is the fees that we paid to our vendors or our publishers to move their inventory onto MAX, right? Those are not necessarily customer-wise, but vendor stocks for the inventory where we're modifying their inventory. The accounting treatment of that, because many of those publishers are our customers as well, which then you have to have as a contra revenue against the revenue they contribute to us. Many of those publishers who aren't our customers, we want them to be our customers, and therefore accounting says to also charge that to contra revenue.
They are two different numbers, two different populations at this point. We're hopeful that those publishers will become customers on our AppDiscovery platform. Then in terms of the migration, we do have a predominance of 90% plus of the publishers now on our platform. By the way, that will take time for them to fully scale onto the platform and then for the demand side to catch up. I think the remaining 10% are certainly other providers out there. You know, some wanna work with us, some don't, but we got all the key vendors that we wanted to and publishers on our platform and feel very good about that. It exceeded our expectations of what we'd be able to do.
Okay. If we wanted to get an, call it an organic revenue growth number, that would be then, I guess, what was it, $835. Is that the total? Minus the $40? That would be your organic growth number.
I think that. Exactly. That's exactly right.
Thanks.
Okay. Thanks, Tim. We'll go next to David Pang. David, go ahead.
Great. Can you hear me?
We can hear you, David.
All right, thanks. Given the challenges of one of your key competitors, how are you ensuring that AXON won't face a similar challenge and is learning on quote unquote, "good data"?
Yeah. I mean, look, machine learning obviously has opportunity and sensitivities and really does require a good data feed. A lot of this just comes down to execution. We're focused on our own execution, not what others around us are doing. Really the key with us has always been we felt like if we got data and got a playground to be able to write the models, we had the technological capacity and the infrastructure to build very sustainable machine learning technology. We did just that, and you've seen now for the past few quarters, growth has just really outpaced the market. We're very confident in our own platform's ability to just be stable and continue to lead the growth going forward.
Okay, thanks.
Okay, skipping ahead here. We'll go to Franco Granda. Franco, go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon, everyone. Can you hear me okay?
We can.
Yep.
Perfect. Despite the phasing out of IDFA in 14.5, it appears that probabilistic attribution is still very prevalent, you know, across the industry. There are rumors that iOS 16 might be cracking down on this. There's this thought that using Private Relay, similar to Google's plans, Apple would be able to do this in a non-disruptive way. I guess two questions on this. First, just how big of a task is it for non-compliant ad tech businesses to move away from fingerprinting? Two, if a change like this were to happen, would this be an opportunity for you to gain share in a similar way that when ATT was connected? Thanks.
Yeah. Look, I think really, like, if you go up a level in the market, like, these privacy changes have continued to come over the last few years. First with GDPR, then with IDFA, which frankly was the biggest, and now whatever Apple does in the future. While we can't predict exactly what's gonna change in the market, there's a couple certainties. One is people are gonna play games on their mobile devices. That we know for certain. The other certainty is we have a very large-scale platform, 700 million plus daily active users on it that we're monetizing. The third is that our technology and team is really nimble. We can move quickly. Whenever these market shifts happen, you always expect to see winners and losers. It's just the way it always shakes out.
Why we've been able to succeed so far in the last decade is that we move faster than everyone else, and we pride ourselves on being able to do that. While these changes can be disruptive to businesses, we look forward to change.
Thanks.
Okay. We'll take our last question here from Martin Yang at Oppenheimer. Go ahead, Martin.
Hey, Ryan, can you hear me?
We can hear you. Go ahead, Martin.
Thank you. My question is about the first quarter software platform revenues. Even backing out MoPub, it's very strong seasonally and also net expansion rate, quite extraordinary. Was that a surprise to you?
I mean, look, like, when we put out our guidance into next year, 10x of the software business from just four years ago, right? For a business of this level of scale, we're reporting on net revenue, and we've now talked about 65% or 70% EBITDA margin out of this business. To be able to do that, you have to have a lot of confidence in your business. Even though I think we surprised ourselves with how fast the trajectory of the growth became, we are not surprised with our ability to execute and continue to grow this business going forward.
Let me be more explicit. Do you feel you've benefited from some of the hiccups from your competitor in the first quarter?
Okay. The way these markets work is that it's not zero-sum, but on the flip side, if one competitor ends up decaying in performance, another one doesn't just increase. 'Cause the reality is we effectively have models that are trying to match up ad slots with advertiser offers, do the matchmaking well, and drive to the performance that the advertiser wants to go achieve. We're not really competing against others where what we're taking or we're getting, we need to make sure that the matchmaking is accurate and we're driving the value to the other advertisers that are buying on our platform. The impact from one doesn't impact us. That said, long term, we wanna make sure, and we really do a strong job of this on the MAX platform, that every marketing platform in the market is performing well.
The better the marketing solutions are in the industry, the bigger the market's gonna become, the faster the growth, more audience discovery, and more consumers will be playing more games, which is gonna fuel our growth and the ecosystem's growth. That's why I referenced in my talk track that we have so much of the market on our ecosystem on the MAX platform now that we're really the success of our platform is gonna drive the increase in TAM of the entire sector.
Got it. Thank you, Adam.
Okay. There's no more questions in the queue. I'd like to turn it back to the guys, and thank you all for joining us today. Do you guys have any closing remarks you'd like to say?
Okay. Thanks for joining us. We know there's a lot of ground to cover. We appreciate people taking the time, particularly in the, you know, these volatile markets. Thank you so much. Take care, everyone.