Popular FAST Apps, Top Grossing Apps, & Pixalate at Cannes

Discover what apps made it to the Top Grossing Mobile and CTV list, explore the most Popular FAST Apps; Also: Catch Pixalate at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity  ✨✨✨✨✨

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Discover the latest in #programmatic research in Pixalate's weekly recap.

TLDR

• Pixalate at Cannes Lions - Join the Pixalate team at the heart of the action aboard our EVA Yacht, docked at IGY Vieux-Port de Cannes

• Top Grossing CTV Apps - May 2025: Find out the CTV apps that earned the most revenue via open programmatic advertising

• Top Grossing Mobile Apps - May 2025: Find out the Mobile apps that earned the most revenue via open programmatic advertising

• Most Popular FAST Apps - Q1 2025 - Discover the most popular Free Ad-Supported Television (FAST) apps

Top Sports Apps for Programmatic Ad Quality - May 2025: These Sports apps delivered the most trustworthy inventory in May 2025

Pixalate at Cannes Lions

Cannes Lions 2025 starts tomorrow! Join the Pixalate team at the heart of the action aboard our EVA Yacht, docked at IGY Vieux-Port de Cannes. From June 16–20, our team will be on deck daily to share the latest in programmatic insights and explore impactful industry partnerships. Click here to RSVP

Top Grossing CTV Apps - May 2025

These CTV apps earned the most revenue via open programmatic advertising. This week, we revealed the top grossing Connected TV (CTV) apps in May 2025. The rankings are based on an analysis of 6K CTV apps and 2B global ad impressions.

At Pixalate, we calculate estimated programmatic ad spend through proprietary statistical models that incorporate programmatic monthly active users (MAU), the average session duration per user, an average CPM for the category of a given app, and ad density.

You can download the May 2025 reports here:

 Top Grossing CTV Apps

Top Grossing Mobile Apps - May 2025

We also revealed the top grossing mobile apps. Alongside the leading CTV apps, we released rankings of the mobile apps that generated the most open programmatic advertising revenue in May 2025. These insights are based on an analysis of 27B global open programmatic impressions across 6M mobile apps on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

You can download the May 2025 reports here: 

Top Grossing Mobile Apps

Most Popular FAST Apps - Q1 2025

Discover the most popular Free Ad-Supported Television (FAST) apps. Pixalate's FAST app report series is based on an analysis of 5B global open programmatic advertising transactions across more than 6K unique CTV apps in Q1 2025. In particular, our data science team reviewed global open programmatic advertising volume and ranked the top apps after removing Invalid Traffic (IVT). Download the Q1 2025 reports here:

 FAST Apps

Top Sports Apps for Programmatic Ad Quality - May 2025

These 'Sports' apps delivered the most trustworthy inventory in May 2025. We identified the top Apple App Store and Google Play Store apps in the 'Sports' IAB category for open programmatic advertising quality. Download the May 2025 reports here: 

United States    United Kingdom

Pixalate in the News: AdTechRadar

Hundreds of mobile apps may be illegally sharing kids’ data. Recently, AdTechRadar spotlighted Pixalate’s Q1 2025 State of Children’s Privacy on Mobile Apps report, revealing 286 U.S.-registered mobile apps likely violating COPPA. The report identifies high-risk apps that may be sharing children’s data with advertisers via the programmatic bid stream, just as new FTC rules on children’s privacy are set to take effect.

Read the report here:

State of Children's Privacy on Mobile Apps: USA

PARTNERSHIP: TARA Media Fortifies Ad Supply Path Refinement Process with Pixalate Partnership

TARA Media partners with Pixalate to fight ad fraud. AdTech agency TARA Media Strategies is now leveraging Pixalate's pre-bid filtering and bot detection technology to eliminate MFA sites, block invalid traffic (IVT), and normalize publisher names across supply partners. The partnership enhances transparency and performance for TARA Media’s programmatic ad campaigns across CTV, display, and more.

Read the full press release:

Pixalate and TARA Media

Jalal Nasir, Patrick McClure, Alex Braelow 🔜 Cannes Lions, Nina Talcott, Sindhu Abbasi