Unity announced some eyebrow-raising adtech hires during its Q224 financials today.
Jim Payne is Unity’s new chief product officer for advertising, and brings with him some formidable experience. He was cofounder of MoPub, which was acquired by Twitter, and Max, which was bought by Unity’s biggest adtech rival, AppLovin.
Payne is joined at Unity by new SVP of corporate development Alex Blum, another adtech veteran who has “invested in, operated, or incubated more than 10 ad tech companies”, said CEO Matthew Bromberg.
“Mobile advertising is an approximately $150 billion opportunity, and itʼs a market that wonʼt be won or lost over short distances,” Bromberg said in a letter to shareholders. “Customers want robust competition in this space, and weʼre going to increase the pace of our product innovation to meet that challenge.”
The company also announced the departure of CFO Luis Visoso, appointing current chief accounting officer Mark Barrysmith as interim CFO. Unity has already begun the search for a permanent CFO, it said.
CFO Visoso’s departure follows on from the resignations of chief product and technology officer Marc Whitten and SVP and CMO Carol Carpenter. We also broke the news in January that IronSource’s entire exec team would be leaving this summer, following Unity’s merger with IronSource in July 2022, a landmark deal worth $4.4bn.
CEO Bromberg also seemed to reference the Runtime Fee fiasco, stating that Unity is “re-dedicating” itself to becoming “the partners we once were, only better”.
Unity’s Q224 financial results exceeded guidance for both revenue and Adjusted EBITDA, it said. Total company revenue for the period was $449m, down 16% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $113m, up from $88m in the same quarter last year.
Second quarter Create Solutions revenue (from its “strategic portfolio”) was $129m, up 4% YoY, and down 2% quarter-over-quarter. The rise was driven by 14% growth in subscriptions after price increases and as its customers upgrade to higher-priced payment plans.
Grow Solutions revenue (again from its “strategic portfolio”) was $296m, down 9% YoY and up 1% quarter-over-quarter.
Unity’s “non-strategic portfolio” took an almighty hit with revenue of $23m, down 71% YoY as a result of its “portfolio reset”. “We expect revenue from our non-strategic businesses to continue to decline and be in the single digits by the end of this year,” said Bromberg.
