AppLovin's Dead Friend Recommendations
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A story about how AppLovin's social recommendation feature had to be shut down after an unfortunate incident involving a deceased person.
"My previous CTO Furkan had an ad tech company called AppLovin. Initially, the premise was 'what apps are your friends loving?' - we'll recommend those apps to you. If they knew what apps you had and knew you were my friend through the address book, they could tell me that Sam loves this app.
They switched to trying to do this for app installs. If I'm playing a game and they want you to download that game because they get paid $9, they would show my face from your address book saying 'Shaan's playing Candy Crush right now, tap here to play Candy Crush 2.' It was a super effective ad unit - they were printing money.
But something really bad happened where the CEO of Expedia got an ad showing his deceased wife was playing a game. Someone from his address book who had this app was shown to him and he's like 'What the hell is this?' It got back to them and they had to turn it off. You have to be really careful with these data features that give information about yourself or others."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.