Thrad at Appsforum London: Apps are Now Both the Supply & the Demand for Paid Ads In AI
by on 11th Sep 2026 in News
Thrad, the ad network for AI conversations, attended Appsforum London 2026, a two-day programme for app growth, monetisation, and retention leaders whose session titles included Is the App Dead?, The End of Segments: Marketing to an Audience of One, and Alternative Ways to Monetise Your Users. Thrad's answer to all three is the same: the consumer now starts with a question, not an icon, and apps sit on both sides of that conversation.
Every app is becoming an AI app: companions, assistants, study tools, and creative apps now carry conversations that are neither a banner slot nor a paywall, and Thrad's ads are live inside iOS and Android apps today. Placements render as a distinct sponsored unit alongside the assistant's response, in native formats built for the medium, and the publisher keeps control of the user interface and experience. Thrad's network is connected to hundreds of demand partners and matches each ad to the query itself, which holds user retention constant while monetising a surface facing subscription fatigue. Inside one of its publisher apps, Thrad returned a 66% higher eCPM than other partners, three times the impressions and a 4.4% click-through rate, lifting the blended eCPM of the whole stack by 55%.
On the other side, apps also become advertisers. App install is the most natural performance case for ads in AI conversations, because the prompt is the intent. Thrad runs app-install campaigns across ChatGPT and its AI publisher network on CPC and CPM from day one, moving to CPI and CPA as conversion data builds. Current campaigns span mobile games, fintech and wallet apps, rewarded apps, and productivity tools.
Measurement follows three questions: did the model consider you, did the user engage with your suggestion, and did a downstream action happen. An audience of one is exactly what a conversation is, and a placement matched to the intent a person has just typed is the N=1 format the industry spent two days describing at Appsforum.
Giorgio Toledo, COO of Thrad, said: "App marketers are worried about signal loss and subscription fatigue at the same time, and those are the same problem seen from two sides. The conversation carries the intent the identifier used to carry, and it carries the monetisation the paywall used to carry. The teams that separate themselves twelve months from now will be the ones who treated it as an install channel and a revenue line in 2026. Action creates information. Inertia does not."
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