AppLovin surges as the ad tech company prepares Q4 “bazooka” in what CEO says will be “a fun quarter”

AppLovin, which initially failed to impress traders with a revenue beat and better-than-expected Q3 sales guidance, is now on fire, up double digits as of 10:50 a.m. ET.

And that’s in large part because CEO Adam Foroughi said the real “fun” starts in Q4, when the company will open its self-service ad portal on a referral basis to onboard new advertisers and boost its footprint in areas outside of gaming, with a full-scale launch planned for the first half of 2026.

Here’s what Foroughi said (emphasis added):

“We think our advertisers are going to cause an onboarding moment that’ll be multiples bigger than what we were manually curating. Now it’s not necessarily true that we’re going to take our queue that’s built over the last year and just say, everyone, you’re in.

They’re still going to have to get invited to get into the platform. So it will be still curated onboarding. The reality is, Q4 is going to end up being a fun quarter. You’ve got the advertiser cohort that we didn’t have last Q4 that was growing in the quarter to the point where we reported huge numbers and then had huge numbers in Q1, but we’re going to have those advertisers primed and ready to go for the full Q4.

We’re going to have those advertisers inviting their friends onto our platform in Q4, and we’re going to be opening up international all at the same time. So there’s going to be a lot of fun moments, moments for us and our customers in this e-commerce or web-based category that’ll set sort of a new baseline for that business. And then obviously, then we will go through hopefully another inflection when we really truly open up the platform and try to get into a state where we’re more stable long-term.”

Morgan Stanley analyst Matthew Cost boosted his price target on the stock to $480 from $460. “We are fundamentally bullish on the self-serve initiative, which the company made clear will simplify onboarding and workflows, widen the funnel of non-gaming advertisers, open the product to international markets, and put the infrastructure in place to allow AI-generated ads and agentic support over time,” he wrote.

Bank of America analyst Omar Dessouky described the messaging around this catalyst as AppLovin loading a fourth-quarter “bazooka.” However, he also lowered his expected multiple for the company while keeping the price target unchanged thanks to a big boost to earnings estimates, citing “execution risk” associated with this launch.