Brands that monetize with subscriptions are navigating two shifts that are reshaping the market faster than most playbooks can keep up. 

AI has moved from feature to infrastructure, shifting competitive advantage from budget size to data quality and the speed to act on it. Meanwhile, the geographic map is being redrawn: North America is maturing, Android is on the rise, and the next subscriber is increasingly coming from India, LATAM, and the Middle East.

The category picture is fragmenting, and the gaps are widening. Short Drama and OTT are surging, Gaming is pulling back spend, while GenAI is rethinking its monetization model. To help make sense of this changing landscape, this report analyzed 1.7 billion paid installs of 2,900 subscription apps in 13 categories, and $2.1 billion in UA spend.

What’s inside:

• Where Android and iOS UA spend is going, and which categories are winning
• How monetization models are diverging across Streaming, Short Drama, Gaming, GenAI, and more
• What the subscription funnel looks like by category: trial adoption, conversion rates, and install-to-paid benchmarks
• How subscription marketers are using AI today, and where the capability-usage gap is widest