The analytical company Sensor Tower studied how mobile game ad impressions are distributed across platforms in the United States.
This is detailed in the State of Game Advertising 2026 report, which focuses on game promotion from October 2025 to September 2026.
According to Sensor Tower, the largest advertiser among the reviewed mobile games in the U.S. was Gossip Harbor, with 51% of its ad impressions appearing on AppLovin.
For other popular projects, the distribution appears differently:
- Pokémon GO — 47% of impressions are on AdMob;
- MONOPOLY GO! — 31% of impressions are on AdMob;
- Kingshot — 62% of impressions are on YouTube, Facebook*, and Instagram*;
- Whiteout Survival — 51% of impressions are on the same three platforms;
- RAID: Shadow Legends — 42% of impressions are on YouTube, Facebook*, and Instagram*.
Sensor Tower notes that casual game developers prefer to place ads within other applications. In contrast, creators of mid-core products (for example, strategy games) tend to use video ads on social media more frequently to generate traffic.
Analysts also recorded a substantial increase in the number of ad creatives. While in the first quarter of 2025, the largest mobile advertisers in the U.S. launched an average of 135 new creatives per month, in the first quarter of 2026, this figure rose to 465. This represents a 3.4-fold increase.
Moreover, 70–75% of the new creatives are video-based. Sensor Tower associates the rise in this number with the spread of AI tools that simplify and reduce the costs of producing advertising materials.
*Meta is recognized as an extremist organization in Russia, and its activities are banned in the country.