Ridge Wallet's Sean Frank: AppLovin is a real ad platform — I spent $4M in Q4 and it matched Facebook ROAS

Summary

Ridge Wallet spends over $100 million annually on digital advertising, with Meta typically taking the largest share. So when CEO Sean Frank says AppLovin matched Facebook ROAS, it carries weight.

AppLovin as an ad channel

Frank spent $4 million of Ridge's own money on AppLovin in Q4 2024 and says it matched Facebook return on ad spend. The platform only launched its ecommerce push in August or September 2024, so this is roughly six months of real spend data. Ridge came in through a free ad credit offer, the same way they've tested Snapchat, Reddit, and others, but unlike most of those tests, they kept scaling.

Frank tracks performance through NorthBeam, incrementality holdouts, post-purchase surveys, and coupon codes. Customers were seeing Ridge ads inside mobile games, buying, and then reporting the AppLovin ad in post-purchase surveys. He still has an outstanding invoice of $1.5 million due by end of month.

85% of Ridge's AppLovin traffic came from iOS devices, which Frank flags as a direct rebuttal to the bot-traffic argument. Click farms tend to run on Android. The inventory appears to be casual mobile games, names like Toon Blast, skewing older demographics who actually have money to spend on a premium wallet.

On the short reports

Frank draws a clear line between what he can and cannot verify. The short-seller claims, including alleged App Store violations, children's targeting, and possible data theft from Facebook, he puts in a separate box entirely. He says he has no insight into AppLovin's internal compliance or data practices and won't speak to them. What he will say is that the ads worked by every measurement Ridge uses. He's also publicly posted his spend on Twitter and notes that none of the short sellers have reached out to him, despite him being a verifiable first-party advertiser.

On the stock, Frank thinks AppLovin is probably overvalued at around 100x revenue, roughly comparable to Palantir. He doesn't own any shares. His interest is purely as a buyer of their inventory.

AppLovin reported its ecommerce revenue at a $1 billion annualized run rate in December. Frank's reaction is that this is unsurprising given the scale of spend from advertisers like Ridge alone.

Ecommerce outlook and supply chain

On 2025, Frank's posture is defensive. Tariffs on aluminum goods from China are now running at 85%, which is pushing Chinese manufacturing costs close to US domestic costs, and that's the economic logic behind Ridge's onshoring push. Within eight months, Frank expects roughly 60% of Ridge wallets to be made in the US, with components manufactured in Missouri, finished in Philadelphia, assembled in Arizona, and warehoused in Kentucky. He acknowledges that the US supply chain is structurally fragmented compared to China, where an entire industry can cluster within an hour's radius.

Ridge is down to 60 US full-time employees while doing more revenue than ever. Frank frames this as the direction DTC is heading broadly: lean headcount, no debt, survive the volatility.

Ridge carries no debt and treats channel diversification the same way: test everything, pull ruthlessly if it doesn't convert. AppLovin is the rare case where they didn't pull.