Moloco playable ads: requirements and specs

Why "Moloco requirements" is a different question than "AppLovin requirements"

AppLovin, Vungle, Unity Ads, Mintegral, and TikTok each ship an installable playable-ad SDK with its own click-through function, its own package layout, and its own hard size cap — that's the shape of requirement this page's sibling pages (like our Unity Playworks/Luna export guide) walk through network by network.

Moloco isn't built that way. It's a programmatic demand-side platform (DSP) — it buys mobile ad inventory across exchanges and supply partners and runs its own machine-learning bidding on top, rather than distributing a network SDK that publishers integrate directly. Advertisers manage creatives through Moloco's own Ads Manager, not through a downloadable SDK repo. That structural difference is worth naming honestly, because it means a generic "here are Moloco's five packaging rules" list would be misleading if it implied Moloco works like AppLovin or Vungle under the hood. It doesn't — and the practical result is that Moloco's actual creative documentation lives in its Ads Help Center rather than in SDK integration docs.

What Moloco's own creative guide actually says

Moloco's Ads Help Center publishes a dedicated Playable and Interactive End Card (IEC) creative guide, covering two related but distinct creative types: Standalone Playable ads and Interactive End Cards (an interactive card shown at the end of a video ad). We read that guide directly. The concrete technical requirements it states are:

• File size: under 5 MB.
• Format: a single HTML5 file (.html/.htm).
• No zip on upload: the guide is explicit that the ad file must not be compressed into .zip format for upload — the opposite of Google Ads, Meta, Mintegral, and TikTok, which all expect a ZIP archive.
• Fully self-contained assets: all image and sound assets must be data-URI-encoded into that single file before upload — no separate asset files.
• No external requests: the creative must not make any external references, including dynamic asset loading over the network or plain HTTP requests.
• No XMLHttpRequest and no mraid.js: both are explicitly disallowed in the standalone playable/IEC.
• No JavaScript redirects anywhere in the ad file's assets.
• Orientation: the creative should work in both portrait and landscape, and be compatible across device types (phone, tablet, desktop).
• Click-through: the guide instructs advertisers to write code that calls FbPlayableAd.onCTAClick() with no parameters — either as a click event listener or an inline onclick attribute — for the store-redirect action to register correctly.

That last point is genuinely notable: FbPlayableAd.onCTAClick() is the same click-through function Meta's own playable ad spec uses. Rather than inventing a proprietary CTA hook, Moloco's guide has advertisers reuse the Meta-style convention — which is common enough across the playable-ad ecosystem that a creative already wired for Meta's click API has a real head start on meeting Moloco's stated requirement, even though the two are separate networks with separate upload flows.

Moloco also documents a review step worth knowing about: its Ads Manager includes a preview tool where you trigger the CTA yourself before submitting, and a successful click shows an on-screen confirmation that the action registered — a useful sanity check that a network SDK's automated review usually doesn't surface directly.

What this means if you're building for Moloco today

The self-contained, data-URI-only, zero-external-request shape Moloco asks for is close in spirit to what AppLovin and Meta already require — a single HTML file with everything embedded, no relative paths, no runtime fetches. PlayableKit converts a Unity Playworks/Luna export straight to that shape: single file, never zipped, click-through wired to Moloco's documented convention.

What PlayableKit supports right now

The Playable Ad Validator checks your export for structural problems (missing entry file, broken inline scripts, missing engine assets), and the size checker tells you exactly how big your build is before any network's limit becomes a rejection reason. Both are free, with no signup.