The Trade Desk leaves its mark
The Trade Desk and its CEO Jeff Green have been making waves in the ad tech industry since the company launched in 2009. The Trade Desk went public in 2016 and is now valued at close to $45 billion. For a sense of scale: The Trade Desk generated $1.9 billion in revenue in 2023. Google’s ads business, which includes its own properties such as Search and YouTube, generated $65.5 billion in revenue in 2023. Amazon’s ad revenue reached $47 billion in 2023.
The Trade Desk has been an irritant to Google, especially in the past year. Green has blasted Google’s proposal to deprecate third-party cookies and stand-up Privacy Sandbox, the ad platform that is supposed to rewire the way DSPs buy programmatic ads through Chrome web browsers, which Google also owns.
Last month, Google was forced to alter its ambitious proposal, by saying it would give users the option to deactivate third-party cookies instead of forcing the change. “I have been saying for years now to the advertising industry, to Google, and even to Wall Street that I think it is a strategic mistake for Google to get rid of third-party cookies,” Green wrote on LinkedIn.
The victory lap did not go unnoticed. In fact, Viant CEO Tim Vanderhook responded on LinkedIn: “The Trade Desk didn’t call Google’s reversal on deleting 3rd party cookie. They manufactured the outcome.”
Vanderhook’s clapback at The Trade Desk illustrates that the DSP battle is growing, but is also an SSP battle.
The Trade Desk has been changing strategies in recent years to account for signal loss on the open web. The Trade Desk developed UID2, and it built bridges with publishers and media owners to tap more directly into their ad supply. In 2022, The Trade Desk launched OpenPath to “reduce hops in the supply chain,” meaning it would get closer to publishers minimizing the number of steps ads take from DSP to their destination. Also, this summer, The Trade Desk created a list of its top 500 sellers and publishers, creating ways for advertisers to reach a more curated selection of publishers. These moves have sometimes put The Trade Desk at odds with agencies, ad tech vendors and publishers that want it to stay out of the supply side, according to ad leaders.
“The Trade Desk really touts its ‘clean’ marketplace,” said an ad tech executive from a supply-side platform, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They have put a lot of pressure on the supply side to deduplicate inventory, to only send them the best path to supply. They're trying to cut out ‘hops,’ they want to get direct. They want to reduce any possibility of instance of fraud. The Trade Desk has taken a lot of steps in that area.”
“They tell you they don’t want to build an SSP, but they are going direct to publishers,” the SSP executive said.