Take Clean Master, Cheetah’s antivirus and Android optimizer. Some of Cheetah’s own apps seem built for data collection. If you ask Cheetah CMO Xinhua Liu what Cheetah is, Liu – who quips that the “M” in his CMO title also stands for “monetization” – will say, “We are a data company.”Īnd that’s because the Cheetah gathers quite a lot of data on its users, everything from device ID, language, how often an app is being used, at what time of day it’s being used and when an app is uninstalled.

The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2014.

The result is an ad stack that combines Cheetah’s own inventory with access to MobPartner’s network of third-party publishers, audience segmentation and post-install reporting.īut that wasn’t always the case for Cheetah Mobile, which started life in 2009 as a spinoff of Chinese PC-focused software company Kingsoft, becoming known over the years as a publisher of utility apps for Android, including Battery Doctor, image editor app Photo-Grid and Clean Master. In the months since, Cheetah has been working to integrate the MobPartner tech, now called Cheetah MediaLink, alongside Cheetah’s O&O, dubbed Cheetah Apps. It’s a big claim, but Cheetah Mobile – no connection to Experian Marketing Service’s CheetahMail – has started to put its money where its mouth is, first by shelling out $58 million to acquire French mobile ad tech player MobPartner in mid-March, followed roughly one week later with the announcement that it had taken the lead on a $24 million Series B investment in Facebook ad partner Nanigans. It’s part of Cheetah’s grand plan to become “one of the top five mobile ad vendors in the world,” said Cheetah Mobile CTO and co-founder Xu Ming. Known more as an app publisher than an ad tech player, the Beijing-based mobile media company launched its own global ad platform on Monday.

Cheetah mobile cleanmaster