Full Report

The Trade Desk, Inc.'s management explains the business in its own materials. The slides below do the most of that work, pulled from the documents preserved in Sources. Each source link opens the complete presentation at that slide in a new tab.

Investor Relations Presentation — Q1 2026

The current overview deck: what the platform does, the market it sits in, and the four growth drivers management is betting on. · Open the full document →

Investor Relations Presentation — Q3 2025

The last edition before the 2026 redesign; it still carries gross spend, bid-factor mechanics and the quarterly financial series. · Open the full document →

More from management

Investor Relations Presentation — FY2025 · 48 pages · FY2025 full-year edition and first outing of the redesigned deck; keeps the seven-point 'focus for the future' list the May version dropped. · Open →

Investor Presentation — FY2023 · 51 pages · The FY2023 pitch, including the TAM build-up slide later editions cut — useful for seeing which arguments management has retired. · Open →

Investor Presentation — Q2 2023 · 52 pages · Earliest deck in the corpus; the pre-Kokai, pre-shopper-marketing baseline against which the current story can be compared. · Open →

---

The Trade Desk, Inc.'s management answers for the business every quarter. These are the exchanges that explain it best — verbatim, from the call transcripts preserved in Sources. Each link opens the full transcript at that page in a new tab.

Q1 2026 Earnings Call — Q1 FY2026

The current state of the story in management's own words: a decelerating guide, the Publicis dispute, and where growth is supposed to come from. · Open the full transcript →

Why a record year of new ad supply is the core of the bull case, and why publishers copying the walled-garden model hit a ceiling.

Jeffrey Terry Green (CEO and Co-Founder): In 2025, the advertising ecosystem globally added more supply than perhaps any year previously. It is probably the most lopsided market in advertising history, with multiples more supply than demand. This supply-demand imbalance creates the biggest buyers market in the history of advertising. Buyers have the option to be selective, but they need to leverage data and great real-time technology to know what they are buying. Premium advertisers and premium publishers often have been at odds for most of the internet’s history. But at this moment, both are heavily invested in making the supply chains and market dynamics of the premium open internet successful. In this buyers’ market, some publishers are mistakenly copying the Facebook and YouTube walled garden business model. For most of them, it has a couple of years, and then it hits a scale ceiling. The walled garden strategy only works when a publisher is massive, and a must-have on a media plan. […] Most marketers now have a clear definition of the open internet that includes media beyond the browser. The best of movies, TV, sports and all live events, journalism, and music are all the anchor tenants of the open internet. As a result of this dynamic, the open internet is thriving and evolving very fast. We are convinced that the evolution and changes being made in the open internet today will make it soon become a place where, consistently, an advertiser’s first dollar is spent, not the walled garden leftovers.

p. 2 · Read in context →

The commercial engine in numbers: JBP signings, and a named win-back from Amazon that shows what the pitch actually is.

Jeffrey Terry Green (CEO and Co-Founder): We are seeing these behaviors translate directly into business. March was our biggest month on record for JBP signings. We signed 45 JBPs in March alone. For Q1, our total JBP count grew 55% year over year. And excluding renewals, new JBP deal spend grew 40% year over year during the quarter. To highlight one of these deals, our pharma team recently went head-to-head against Amazon for one of the largest pharmaceutical advertisers in the world. Lured by seemingly low rates, this brand shifted some investment to PG on Amazon last year. Over the past nine months, our team delivered consistent partnership and focused on driving real business outcomes for the client. In Q1, our team won back the business and signed a JBP for 2026 that will increase their spend on our platform by 114% year over year.

p. 4 · Read in context →

The retail-data asset sized against Amazon, and the first hard numbers on the new flat-fee data product.

Jeffrey Terry Green (CEO and Co-Founder): Over the last five years or so, we have created the world’s largest and richest marketplace of retail data. Combined, we believe the retailers in our data marketplace represent more than 80% of sales from top U.S. retailers, compared to Amazon, who represents less than 15% of U.S. retail spend. This is a huge advantage for us. For example, a leading travel brand recently ran a test to evaluate campaign performance with and without activating our new product Audience Unlimited. The results across all KPIs were fantastic. Audience Unlimited delivered 30% lower CPMs on media, 38% lower data costs, a 75% more efficient CPA, and a 2.7x increase in conversion rate compared to the control group. Most importantly, Audience Unlimited increased campaign performance while simultaneously reducing manual effort in the audience selection process.

p. 5 · Read in context →

The two questions that opened the call: the Publicis dispute, which he declines to detail, and the implied Q2 slowdown.

Shyam Vasant Patil (Susquehanna); Jeffrey Terry Green (CEO and Co-Founder): Hey, guys. Good afternoon. Jeff, I had a couple of questions. First one, can you provide some comments on the Publicis discussions? And then second, can you talk about the factors that you see driving the deceleration in your Q2 outlook? Thank you. […] But I will say that since 2018, we have done billions of dollars of business with Publicis through the agreement that we have. And we continue to have great dialogue with Publicis about the next chapter of our partnership. Our negotiations are ongoing. It is probably not prudent for me to say more about it in this forum, so I will just leave it at that on Publicis. […] As to the specifics, some of the fast-growing verticals we believe would be growing even faster if they were absent the current macro uncertainty, where there is geopolitical instability, there are tariffs, there are broader consumer pressures that are impacting growth. But what gives me confidence, really, is that nearly every major brand we speak with is focused on the right question right now, which is how do we get back to growth as a brand?

p. 7 · Read in context →

How a 40% full-year margin is defended off a 30% Q1: headcount below revenue growth, and pacing flexibility rather than named cuts.

Justin Tyler Patterson (KeyBanc); Tahnil Davis (Interim CFO and CAO); Jeffrey Terry Green (CEO and Co-Founder): Great. Thanks. Good afternoon. I am curious to hear more about investment priorities against that 40% EBITDA margin target. Obviously, revenue and margins are both off to a softer start in the first half. I am curious how we should think about the levers to achieve that target. Thank you. […] As a company, we have always been very disciplined around hiring and reinvestment in the business. 2026 is a year of disciplined reinvestment for us. We expect our full-year adjusted EBITDA margin percentage to be at least 40%, approximately in line with last year. We again expect headcount growth to remain below revenue growth, reflecting continued operating discipline and increasing productivity across our business. At the same time, we will continue investing in areas where we see the highest long-term ROI, particularly around platform innovation, AI, retail media, and measurement. One advantage of our model is that we generate strong cash flow and can maintain significant flexibility in how we pace our investments and expenses, which allows us to maintain those high levels of profitability. So our focus is clear: maintain strong profitability, invest where ROI is the highest, and continue positioning the business for greater leverage over the long term. […] And I will just add that maintaining strong profitability has always been a part of our culture at The Trade Desk, Inc., even when we were a much smaller company. In fact, I was very obsessed when I founded the company with racing to profitability. It was my view that that is how we could own our future, but it is also how we could establish a culture that was extremely disciplined.

p. 9 · Read in context →

The clearest statement of why he thinks AI search reopens the search TAM that programmatic was locked out of.

Jeffrey Terry Green (CEO and Co-Founder): I think some people have wrongly assumed that their monetization will look like, "legacy search." Legacy search was born when the average search query was less than two words. No good AI prompt is two words or less. They are much more detailed. And when you have many sentences and are asking a very specific question or prompt, obviously, the answer often is much more valuable as well to the user. So it is not unreasonable to think that many of the LLMs are going to try to get as much ad monetization as possible. If you look at it as there is a subscription, which is quite expensive, and that either needs to be offset or substituted by an ad experience that is extremely profitable, that extremely profitable ad experience cannot just be keyword-based or like legacy search. In fact, in order to make the most amount of money, it might, in some cases, need to include video. If there is a lot of compute cost that goes into that answer, it probably is somewhat correlated to the value of the response to the user, which might make it easier to put on the other side of a video. In both of those cases, I do believe that it can unlock a greater amount of TAM for the LLMs in the sense that they can participate in top-of-the-funnel activity and bottom-of-the-funnel activity, which is different than what search has done.

p. 11 · Read in context →

Asked whether to move into the sell side, he draws the permanent boundary of the business model — and why OpenPath is not that.

Jeffrey Terry Green (CEO and Co-Founder): Coming to the second part of your question, which was about should The Trade Desk, Inc. get into the supply side: the reason we have not is not because we could not technologically. It is not because it would not further shorten the supply chain. It is because we do not want to create the conflict of interest of saying to one group of customers, we want you to get the lowest CPM cost, we are looking for value, and then going straight from advertisers to publishers saying, we want to give you the highest CPM possible, and then trying to serve two masters. This is the flaw of every ad network business model, which, by the way, hundreds of companies are trying to replicate in a lot of ad tech business models today—the flaws of the ad network business model that we disproved twenty years ago. This is a lesson that unfortunately not enough have learned. That said, there are hundreds of publishers who want to do their own yield management, and many companies in CTV are doing their own yield management. They built their own tech to do this, and we plug into that tech directly. This is the reason we built OpenPath in the first place: to plug into companies like that who want to do their own yield management. So we will absolutely look for that opportunity. But as it relates to going all the way to the sell side and doing the yield management for them, we will never do that.

p. 11 · Read in context →

Q4 and Full Year 2025 Earnings Call — Q4 FY2025

The annual framing call — the CPG and auto drag quantified, the take-rate bear case answered, and OpenPath's fee disclosed. · Open the full transcript →

A head-to-head test against the Amazon DSP, quantified — the cleanest illustration of what owning no inventory is worth.

Jeff Green (CEO): Let me give you a couple of examples of how the supply-demand imbalance has helped us. One of the world's leading appliance manufacturers recently ran a test between The Trade Desk and the Amazon DSP, focusing on CTV ad performance in one of their most important markets. They found that, with The Trade Desk, they were able to reach 70% more unique households because we gave them access to a much wider range of relevant touch points with those consumers. With The Trade Desk, they were able to reach those consumers at 30% lower total cost, so significantly better reach for meaningfully lower cost. And the kicker is The Trade Desk platform performed six times better in terms of delivering their campaign goals. All of this happened because we provided the client with objective decisioning across the open Internet. We didn't prioritize our own impressions because we don't own any. We were able to help the client find the ad impressions that were most likely to lead to conversions.

p. 2 · Read in context →

Why the third-party data market stayed small, and the flat-fee structure meant to fix it — a pricing model laid out first here.

Jeff Green (CEO): I have argued that the data marketplace is anemic for one primary reason. There is no price discovery for data. The cost has really been complicated for marketers, so generally, they don't use it. We can see, though, that the value is obvious, especially leveraging AI. And using a flat cost structure, Audience Unlimited helps advertisers use a wider range of the most relevant data to any given campaign for an all-in cost, where value and impact is clearly understood. This innovation wasn't possible before advances in AI, particularly Agentic AI in this case, which allows us to surface the right data segment at the right moment. Of course, Audience Unlimited is completely optional. Clients can use it or continue to buy third-party data a la carte. We are already seeing very positive results with early adopters, and I'm excited for more advertisers to get access as this year progresses.

p. 4 · Read in context →

Management's answer to the decade-old take-rate compression bear case, stated plainly.

Jeff Green (CEO): Finally, I'd like to zoom out and provide a little more perspective. For as long as we've been public, which is around ten years now, there's been a narrative that our margin or take rate must compress because other platforms offer lower upfront prices for non decisioned, non-data-driven buying. In reality, those business models deliver less value overall. Their business model is focused on selling owned and operated inventory. Walled gardens can more than make up for the lower fee on supply side as they mark up and prioritize their owned and operated inventory.

p. 5 · Read in context →

Why he rejects the brand-versus-performance split, and what last-touch attribution does to top-of-funnel spend.

Jeff Green (CEO): There is this narrative on Wall Street that performance budgets are more DTC or they're more mid-market and then there's brand budgets that are separate from that. That paradigm, I just reject. I think everything is performance now; it's just a matter of where you are in the funnel. The problem with framing it that way is you reinforce a serious problem in the ecosystem, which is that all of the measurement frameworks that have existed to date just give credit to the last person who touched the ball before it went in the net. The rest of the team gets nothing. In the brand-building business, it is by its very nature at the top of the funnel where you win hearts and minds; it tends to be more expensive media. Nobody types in 'Buy Mercedes-Benz' into Google without seeing the commercial or hearing about the company before that. Giving all the credit to the last touch has been a serious mistake. Brands like Hershey’s and others are creating a better framework to reward the things that matter and make everything perform. Of course, the players on the back of the field—if we're using the sports analogy, the goalie and the defender—they matter as much as the striker. But let's not just give all the money to the person who kicked the goal. Otherwise, we all play sports like five-year-olds. We hover around the ball and try to be the last one to touch it before it goes in. That, unfortunately, is too often the state of marketing.

p. 13 · Read in context →

Q3 2025 Earnings Call — Q3 FY2025

The best single explanation of the products and the market structure: what each supply-chain tool does and why a rival pricing to zero doesn't scare him. · Open the full transcript →

The definition the whole thesis rests on: the open internet is where price discovery exists because buyer and seller are different entities.

Jeff Green (CEO): A reminder, the open Internet is the portion of the Internet where price discovery and competition exists. In the open Internet, every transaction is arm's length. Walled gardens are built around owned and operated inventory instead of third-party inventory. Price discovery comes when the buyer and seller are different entities.

p. 1 · Read in context →

Antitrust-trial evidence used to argue DV360 became a YouTube buying tool — the competitive claim with numbers attached.

Jeff Green (CEO): Nearly every big tech player in advertising, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, is primarily focused on expanding and monetizing their owned and operated inventory and content. Google is clearly focused on search, their AI chatbot Gemini, and YouTube. Amazon's primary advertising efforts are focused on growing sponsored listings, and secondarily on Prime Video. Both are putting Amazon-owned and operated inventory first. Facebook continues to focus on monetizing Instagram and Facebook as destinations, and TikTok the same. None of these companies are focused on monetizing the open Internet. This was helpfully made public throughout the antitrust trial of the Department of Justice versus Google when they revealed numbers that Google normally does not report on. Exhibits and industry experts estimated that in 2019, the open Internet and owned and operated inventory on YouTube were equally split in share of wallet on DV360. However, between 2019 and today, roughly all of the incremental dollars and growth from DV360 has gone to YouTube. YouTube spend increased by about 800%, while Google's buying of the open Internet stayed essentially flat for the same period of time. During that time, the Trade Desk seems to have surpassed Google in the amount bought on the open Internet, again, according to others.

p. 2 · Read in context →

Kokai adoption and the measured performance delta versus the prior platform — the case for why clients migrate.

Jeff Green (CEO): Today, nearly all of our clients have tried Kokai, with nearly 85% using Kokai as their default experience. When we build a new iteration of our platform, our primary goal is to deliver more value to our customers by increasing their performance. By this standard, Kokai is the best upgrade we have ever made to our product relative to all previous versions and certainly relative to Solimar. Campaigns that have switched to Kokai are seeing impressive results. Since its launch, Kokai has delivered, on average, 26% better cost per acquisition, 58% better cost per unique reach, and a 94% better click-through rate compared to Solimar.

p. 3 · Read in context →

The supply-chain product stack explained in one pass: what OpenPath, OpenAds, Pubdesk and Deal Desk each do.

Jeff Green (CEO): This year, we've launched and grown several products that are solely focused on substantially upgrading supply chains so that buyers get more for their money. OpenPath is an integration between TTD and a direct source of inventory. OpenPath plugs into auctions we trust. It is a collection of clean pipes for connections that are directly into inventory. We have grown OpenPath by many hundreds of percentage points this year, which means our clients are getting clear views of exactly what they're buying, and publishers have a clearer sense of what advertisers are willing to pay when they describe their inventory in a transparent and accurate way. OpenAds is an auction that we develop and sometimes host as an option for publishers. We then bid into a fair auction and even enable other buyers or DSPs to do the same thing too. The market needs a healthy auction, and some sell-side players have continually weakened the integrity of the auction. So we're developing an open-source option that raises that bar. We just launched it, and we're already working to integrate with more than 20 of the biggest publishers on the web. We expect this to dramatically improve the supply chains of mobile in-app ads and browser-based ads, which, of course, can use the help in an AI scraping world. Pubdesk is improving the supply chain by publishing data for the sell-side. Resellers, sellers, and publishers can log into the platform and see what we paid the supply chain, what signals we value, and adjust their sites and inventory to get more. This is largely fueled by the Sincera team and data that we acquired earlier in the year. Deal Desk is a better way to manage one-to-one deals. Not only does it facilitate the buy, but using AI, it predicts how a deal will perform relative to the open market. This product enables them to do deals, but also gives them the unprecedented data and tools to avoid bad deals. It is important to note that this product will be foundational to a healthy forward market that can replace the outdated upfronts.

p. 4 · Read in context →

Amazon's ad revenue decomposed — sponsored listings versus Prime Video versus DSP — to argue the overlap is small.

Jeff Green (CEO): Amazon has made significant strides in advertising recently, and it's important to take a closer look at their approach. This year, they're projected to generate around $70 billion in advertising revenue. Based on our analysis, it appears that approximately 90% of this revenue comes from sponsored listings, likely more than 95%. In my opinion, these sponsored listings are in direct competition with Google Search and the new AI-driven search engines. Amazon’s advertising efforts are focused on competing with Google, which is driving most of their advertising revenue and growth. The second source of their advertising revenue is Prime Video, which we estimate generates a couple of billion dollars at most, significantly less than that 10% of their total advertising revenue. This revenue source competes with platforms like Netflix, Disney, and Paramount. While their advertising growth is impressive, the story of Amazon's advertising primarily revolves around their growth in owned and operated ad inventory. Their demand-side platform (DSP) is definitely a lower priority. To clarify, our DSP targets a crucial question in advertising: what ads should brands or advertisers purchase on the open Internet? Ideally, we define DSPs as platforms for purchasing across the open Internet. Amazon's DSP, however, is primarily focused on buying ads for Prime Video, with minimal investment geared towards the open Internet. Our estimates indicate that only a small fraction of their DSP activities involve decision-making for the open Internet; the majority is either for Prime Video or nondecision buying such as programmatic guaranteed. In my estimation, close to 97% to 99% of Amazon's advertising efforts center around monetizing their owned and operated inventory, with only a small portion dedicated to the open Internet. In the advertising space, Amazon competes first with Google and then with Netflix and Disney, leaving us with minimal competition.

p. 8 · Read in context →

Asked whether rivals can simply price the DSP at zero, he gives the answer he has given since the IPO roadshow.

Jeff Green (CEO): Shyam, let me also just answer the other part of your question that you directed towards me, by the way, extra points for the multipart question. I just wanted to also answer the part about the question on pricing. I actually love this question as well in part because when we were on the IPO roadshow, I remember getting into a discussion with a very large room full of people, where one of the— in my view, one of the smarter PMs on Wall Street asked the question, doesn’t, in the end, Google just kick your app because they can price it at zero? I will answer it now the exact same way that I answered it then, which is something to the effect of — I hope they do eventually price it at zero because it will be easier to point out then the problem of advertising today. Google doesn't break out the money they make from their DSP buying the open Internet because the Google P&L — this isn't material on the Google P&L. They make their money in other ways. So pricing the DSP at zero will inspire the question, is this a trick? If you make the DSP zero, where are you making your money? In my opinion, DSPs that price at near zero or at discounts to get close to zero only do that because they're primarily selling owned and operated inventory that has a cost of goods sold of near zero, and that's where they make the money. So when we orient the conversation around price, I think it's a trap for us and the buyers. If we orient the conversation around value, we win nearly every time.

p. 9 · Read in context →

Q1 2025 Earnings Call — Q1 FY2025

The recovery quarter, where the founding thesis, the OpenPath economics and the post-reorg evidence are all set out together. · Open the full transcript →

The founding thesis restated from the original business plan: few scaled DSPs, most conflicted, one objective winner.

Jeff Green (CEO): I want to share something that we put in The Trade Desk business plan 16 years ago, before we'd written even a single line of code. We argued to potential investors then that at the end state, there will be 10 or fewer scaled DSPs. We think most of them will be conflicted. We thought then that most DSPs would compromise their objectivity with buyers in order to promote their own content. Walled gardens bias their own content at the expense of media buyers who look to seek value and performance across the entire ecosystem. Their business models are inherently flawed because over the long-term, their fiduciary duty to grow for shareholders is at odds with what is in the best interest of the agencies and advertisers, which is to objectively buy media from all over a competitive, massively scaled digital media landscape where no single company can possibly own all of the good media.

p. 2 · Read in context →

The guidance philosophy in a downturn — measure the quarter in share taken, not growth delivered.

Jeff Green (CEO): When the large brands are facing comparatively tough times, we are focused on grabbing land. In macro environments with headwinds, our short-term success is better measured in how much land we grab. In this environment, we want to win market share from our competitors. We did the same thing during the pandemic. While consumers stayed home to stay safe, they also accelerated their move to streaming. We adjusted our business to work-from-home, and we grabbed land. In other words, we won share from everyone else.

p. 2 · Read in context →

OpenPath's results on the publisher side, and the explicit limit: it is not a move into the sell side.

Jeff Green (CEO): We are seeing example after example of the benefits that OpenPath is providing. Arena Group publishes major titles such as Men's Journal and Parade. They boast more than 100 million visitors per month. With OpenPath, they were able to increase their fill rates by 4x and improve programmatic revenue by 79%, all because they are able to provide advertisers, our clients, with clear visibility into what they're buying. I could list dozens more examples. The New York Post saw its digital advertising fill rate increase more than 8x, and programmatic revenue increased 97% with OpenPath. In the world of CTV, VIZIO saw its programmatic revenue increase by 39%. And another major network saw their fill rate increase 7x, leading to a revenue increase of over 25%. To be clear, OpenPath does not represent The Trade Desk getting into the supply side of the market. OpenPath is not built to help publishers with yield management or ad serving.

p. 2 · Read in context →

The measurement gap that drives demand for the open internet, stated as a concrete example.

Jeff Green (CEO): Let me outline a conundrum that marketers are currently facing, and I hear this from CMOs and agency leaders on an almost daily basis. Walled gardens are easy to use, and marketers can use them for easy access to what I would call cheap reach, or put another way, let me reach as many people as possible as quickly and cheaply as possible, all as measured by those walled gardens themselves. The problem begins when the metrics provided by those walled gardens don't line up with actual business outcomes over time. So for example, walled garden measurement may tell an advertiser they've accounted for one million toothbrush sales this quarter, but they only actually sold half a million. Those measurement disparities over time create misalignment for marketers and the businesses they're supporting, all because of the attraction of cheap reach.

p. 4 · Read in context →

What clients actually get from the platform migration, in campaign metrics rather than adjectives.

Jeff Green (CEO): And across all verticals, clients that are adopting Kokai are realizing major benefits. For example, on average, clients that have shifted over have seen a 42% reduction in cost per unique reach. We're also working with clients beyond typical brand and reach metrics. Kokai is delivering on lower funnel KPIs, including 24% lower cost per conversion and 20% lower cost per acquisition. These improvements are helping unlock performance budgets from new and existing clients. And thanks to the work we've done in our data marketplace to increase the discoverability of third-party data, campaigns on Kokai use roughly 30% more data elements per impression.

p. 5 · Read in context →

One quarter after the miss, the specific evidence offered that the reorganization worked.

Shyam Patil (Susquehanna); Jeff Green (CEO): Can you elaborate on the progress that you're seeing from the product and go to-market changes that you implemented towards the end of last year? I mean, it sounds like those efforts are beginning to gain traction and contributed pretty meaningfully to the strong start. […] I want to highlight a couple of green shoots we're observing. Kokai adoption picked up momentum as we exited December, and now about two-thirds of our clients are utilizing Kokai, which is ahead of our timeline. Additionally, we’ve focused on integrating AI across the platform, making significant strides in the last quarter like never before in our company's history. Since we started introducing Koa in 2017, these investments in AI and our platform improvements, including Kokai, have led to outstanding campaign performance. Kokai is achieving lower funnel KPIs, such as a 24% reduction in cost per conversion and a 20% decrease in cost per acquisition. These enhancements are unlocking performance and budgets from existing clients, as well as attracting new clients who are more performance-focused. Our product and engineering teams have become more collaborative and effective than they have been in years, and we now have over 100 scrums operating and delivering products weekly. The new reporting structures are successful and fostering greater engagement with brands and agencies. We have more work ahead and have yet to fully benefit from these upgrades, but the trend is promising, confirming that we’ve made the right decisions. Our strong JBP pipeline also supports this. Over 40% of our spending is now aligned with JBPs, which are partnerships built on long-term commitments and visions for collaboration, growing 50% faster than overall spending. This synergy enables our business to grow at a faster pace.

p. 7 · Read in context →

Why walled gardens can charge high take rates and still win on cost — the supply-chain economics the open internet must match.

Jeff Green (CEO): As it relates to OpenPath itself, it's been pretty amazing. We've just been in the market for a couple of years now, but we've been obsessed with improving the visibility and transparency of our supply chain. Really what we're trying to do is make certain that the supply chain is efficient. So if you just zoom out, really all we're trying to do is make it so that there aren't so many middlemen, so many taxes, especially those that don't add more value than they extract, so that the open internet isn't operating at a disadvantage. Because we always look at this as, to a large extent, this is the open internet competing against walled gardens. Walled gardens lose on objectivity, they lose on transparency, but in some cases, they've won on supply chain efficiency because they control it all. So even with really large take rates that they all have, their cost of goods sold is so low that they can make very healthy margins, and then they have short supply chains because they control those too. So in order to compete with that, we need a supply chain that is quite efficient.

p. 10 · Read in context →

Q4 and Full Year 2024 Earnings Call — Q4 FY2024

The call where the thesis was tested: the first shortfall in 33 quarters, what management blamed, and what it changed. · Open the full transcript →

The admission that broke an eight-year streak, and his framing of the cause as execution rather than market or competition.

Jeff Green (CEO): While we’re proud of these milestones, I want to acknowledge upfront that for the first time in 33 quarters as a public company we fell short of our expectations. During COVID, we revised our expectations once like many in the market, but for the first time in 8 years, we missed the expectations we set, and it was our fault. When we contemplated going public about 10 years ago, many advised against it, often due to concerns over low valuations because no ad tech company had earned Wall Street’s trust for an extended period. I saw that as a challenge and still do. I knew we had the business model, the total addressable market, the vision, the determination, and the team to break that mold and achieve what had never been done before. The only way to do that was to make commitments and follow through. Many said it couldn’t be achieved. Our success has been partially driven by our ability to earn the trust of investors, partners, our industry, and our clients. Few things are as important to us. I want to emphasize that we take this moment seriously. We assure our investors, partners, and clients that their trust is well-placed and deserved. Our best days lie ahead, but before discussing that, I want to share what went wrong and the changes we are implementing to mak the most of our unique and growing opportunity. To begin, let me clarify what falling short of our expectations does not signify. This wasn't due to a smaller opportunity than anticipated, nor did competition play a role. In Q4, we faced challenges due to a series of small execution missteps while also preparing for the future. If this were a sporting event, we would still have a championship caliber team, but in this particular instance, we made too many turnovers.

p. 1 · Read in context →

The four structural changes made in response — reorg, brand coverage, JBPs, and a rebuilt engineering process.

Jeff Green (CEO): First, we implemented the largest reorganization in company history in December. While we usually make structural changes at year-end to enhance our business, this one was larger than usual. We clarified roles and responsibilities for most employees, resulting in a change in reporting structures. Additionally, we streamlined client-facing teams, minimizing complexity and clarifying duties. Some teams now focus on brands, while others concentrate on agencies. Our commitment to agencies remains strong, while we expand direct relationships with brands, particularly through Joint Business Plans, which grow 50% faster than the rest of our business. […] Fourth, we revamped our product development process, returning to smaller, agile teams that provide weekly updates instead of relying on waterfall methods, which are less suitable for our fast-changing industry. Our engineering team is divided into nearly 100 scrum teams, enhancing collaboration with the business team on what has been accomplished and what’s upcoming. I anticipate this will continue to boost Kokai enhancements and complete the transition of all clients from Solimar to Kokai this year.

p. 2 · Read in context →

The CFO's own account of the miss, plus the take-rate disclosure investors watch most closely.

Laura Schenkein (CFO): However, for the first time, in our 8.5 years as a public company, excluding the first quarter of 2020, our results came in below our expectations. As a company, we take great pride in our ability to forecast accurately, and we take full ownership of this shortfall. Importantly, this miss was not due to lack of opportunity or increased competition, it was on us. We are implementing the strategic changes Jeff outlined in our business and I believe that will give us an opportunity to continue delivering strong revenue growth throughout this year and beyond. For 2024, we ended the year with $12 billion in spend on our platform and $2.4 billion in revenue, representing a 26% increase in revenue year over year. Full year adjusted EBITDA margin was above 41% and full year free cash flow was over $630 million. As expected, our take rate in 2024 once again remained within a very consistent historical range.

p. 5 · Read in context →

The first and hardest question of the call — what went wrong — and the answer given to a long-time covering analyst.

Shyam Patil (SIG); Jeff Green (CEO): Hi, Jeff, as you know, I've been covering you guys since you've been public and following the company long before that. And until now, for over eight years, you guys have had an amazing run where you've hit your guidance every single time. Just wondering, can you just talk about what went wrong in the fourth quarter where you guys came in below your expectations. Thank you. […] I acknowledge that we fell short of our expectations, which is different from missing Wall Street's projections. When we outline our guidance, it feels like a commitment to us. It's understandable for shareholders to question what this means for our potential. I want to clarify that our shortfall was due to a series of minor execution errors. We were trying to execute while preparing for the future, leading to several small mistakes that compounded. To draw a comparison, we have a championship-caliber team, as proven over the past eight years, but we turned over the ball too many times this time, resulting in our loss.

p. 6 · Read in context →

Where he concedes the org was thin — no COO — and the TAM arithmetic he points to for reacceleration.

Jeff Green (CEO): I want to highlight one area where I believe we can enhance our team. I’m very proud that we have achieved this for 32 quarters in a row. While I’m disappointed we didn’t succeed this time, we anticipated that eventually we would miss. I’ve encouraged the team, and I’m eager to show everyone what comes next; we know people will be watching our response. I am genuinely thankful for this experience. I think we need to continue expanding our team and looking for ways to improve our go-to-market strategy. Unlike basketball, where you can only have five players on the court, in business, we have the opportunity to add more people to our team. I see potential for us to become more efficient. We have managed to operate without a COO for a while, and there is no reason we shouldn’t bring in a top-tier COO. As we aim for greater operational rigor, we will need someone to assist us in that effort. This is an obvious area for us to improve our operational efficiency. […] We have a $1 trillion TAM. We currently control a little over 1% of it. We think we have 98% of the TAM left, and the CTV should be fast-growing outside the United States should be growing faster than the United States for obvious reasons. Audio is untapped. I think Spotify highlighted this in their earnings. I think there's a tremendous opportunity for them and for us and for the open Internet. That can come from that. I think there's a lot of inefficiencies in the supply chain, but now we're just at the right size where we can change it, where we're big enough to create changes. And those are four of them, but honestly, I think I'm leaving out a whole bunch of them.

p. 12 · Read in context →

More calls

Q2 2025 Earnings Call — Q2 FY2025 · 12 pages · The fullest single answer on Amazon as competitor versus potential partner, plus mid-year Kokai adoption and the Deal Desk beta. · Open →

Q3 2024 Earnings Call — Q3 FY2024 · 14 pages · The ten macro tailwinds framework that management referenced for the next year running — the pre-miss statement of the growth case. · Open →

Q2 2024 Earnings Call — Q2 FY2024 · 13 pages · Go here for the UID2 and retail media build-out at the peak of the 26%-growth era, before the Kokai migration slipped. · Open →

Q1 2024 Earnings Call — Q1 FY2024 · 13 pages · The Kokai rollout and UID2 adoption described while everything was still on plan — a useful baseline against later calls. · Open →

Q4 and Full Year 2023 Earnings Call — Q4 FY2023 · 19 pages · Prepared remarks only, but the fullest early statement of the CTV and retail media strategy that later chapters build on. · Open →

Q2 2023 Earnings Call — Q2 FY2023 · 21 pages · Where Kokai is introduced as the platform overhaul — the origin of the migration that dominates 2024 and 2025. · Open →

Q1 2023 Earnings Call — Q1 FY2023 · 22 pages · The original case for OpenPath and supply path optimization, laid out before it became a contested initiative. · Open →

Q4 and Full Year 2021 Earnings Call — Q4 FY2021 · 21 pages · The Solimar, UID2 and Walmart DSP era — how management framed the platform and identity bets at the start of the decade. · Open →

---

The Trade Desk, Inc.'s annual reports contain management's most considered account of the business. These are the sections, passages and visual pages worth opening in the originals preserved in Sources.

The Trade Desk, Inc. — FY2025 Annual Report (Form 10-K) — FY2025 (year ended December 31, 2025)

The latest 10-K: revenue +18% on gross spend +11%, one segment, and a client base where two holding companies each cleared 10% of billings. · Open the full document →

Item 1. Business — Overview and Our Industry — p. 7 · Read the full section →

Management's own definition of the business and the fee model: a percentage of client platform spend, plus value-added services and data.

What TTD sells, to whom, and exactly what it charges for.

We are a global leader in advertising technology. We empower ad buyers to create, manage and optimize digital advertising campaigns across ad formats, channels and devices. Our platform’s depth, artificial intelligence (“AI”) capabilities and rich ecosystem of inventory, publisher and data partner integrations enable superior reach and decisioning for clients. […] Our clients are advertising agencies, advertisers and other service providers for agencies or advertisers, with whom we enter into ongoing master services agreements (“MSAs”). We generate revenue by charging our clients a platform fee generally based on a percentage of our clients’ total platform spend and from providing value-added services and data to support their advertising campaigns.

p. 7 · Read in context →

The four demand trends management is underwriting: CTV, a $1 trillion ad TAM, AI and privacy-era data.

Digital advertising is reported to represent the largest and fastest-growing segment of the global advertising industry, with estimated annual spend of over $700 billion and representing more than 70% of the total market spend. […] Rapid Growth of CTV. We are witnessing a generational shift from linear television to connected television (“CTV”) as Internet and television programming converge. […] Expansion of Global Advertising TAM and Programmatic Advertising. The total addressable market (“TAM”) for global advertising is reported to have surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in 2024. […] AI Driven Personalization and Automation. AI is fundamentally changing the media landscape, from the creative process all the way to the execution of advertising campaigns.

p. 7 · Read in context →

Item 1. Business — Our Clients and Our Advertising Inventory and Data Suppliers — p. 16 · Read the full section →

Both sides of the platform in numbers: 60-day-cancellable MSAs and two >10% holding companies against 430 supply integrations.

Contract terms, holding-company concentration, and the size of the supply and data ecosystem.

Our MSAs, some of which may include joint business plans and other incentive programs, do not contain any material commitments on behalf of clients to use our platform to purchase ad inventory, value-added services or data. Generally, these MSAs have one-year terms that renew automatically for additional one-year periods, unless earlier terminated, and are terminable at any time upon 60 days’ notice by either party. […] If all of our individual client contractual relationships were aggregated at the holding company level, two holding companies would have each represented more than 10% of our gross billings in 2025 and one holding company would have represented more than 10% of our gross billings in 2024. […] We obtain digital advertising inventory from over 430 directly integrated ad exchanges, publishers and supply-side platforms, providing us with access to a breadth of programmatic advertising inventory across televisions, streaming devices, mobile devices, computers and digital-out-of-home devices. […] As of December 31, 2025, we have integrated our platform with more than 370 third-party data vendors whose products are available for purchase through our platform.

p. 16 · Read in context →

Item 1A. Risk Factors — Client Concentration and Access to Inventory — p. 24 · Read the full section →

The two supply-and-demand dependencies with named counterparties: agency holding companies on one side, Google on the other.

"The loss of advertising agencies, advertisers or holding companies as clients" — two exceeded 10% of 2025 gross billings.

Our clients include advertising agencies, many of which are owned by holding companies, where decision making is decentralized such that purchasing decisions are made, and relationships with advertisers are located, at the agency, local branch or division level. If all of our individual client contractual relationships were aggregated at the holding company level, two holding companies would have each represented more than 10% of our gross billings for 2025. […] A holding company may be acquired by, or consolidate with, another holding company that does not utilize our platform, or a holding company may choose to exert control over its individual agencies in a way that may otherwise result in an overall reduction in our revenue. If so, any consolidation of, or loss of relationships with such holding companies and consequently, of their agencies, local branches or divisions, as clients could significantly harm our business, financial condition and results of operations.

p. 24 · Read in context →

Item 1A. Risk Factors — Identifier Dependence and Agency Payment Terms — p. 38 · Read the full section →

Two structural exposures: TTD does not control the identifiers its targeting relies on, and agencies owe it only what advertisers pay them.

"Third parties control our access to unique identifiers" — the dependency behind the whole targeting stack.

Third parties control our access to unique identifiers, and if the use of “third-party cookies” or other technology to uniquely identify devices or users is rejected by Internet users, restricted or otherwise subject to unfavorable regulation, blocked or limited by preference signals, technical changes on end users’ devices and web browsers, or our clients’ ability to use data, including on our platform or related offerings is otherwise restricted, our performance may decline, and we may lose advertisers and revenue. […] For example, if publishers or supply-side platforms decide to limit the data that we receive in order to comply (in their view) with state privacy laws, a potential federal privacy law or in response to other legal or industry developments, then our service may prove to be less valuable to our clients and we may find it more difficult to generate revenue. […] Digital advertising mostly relies on the ability to uniquely identify devices or users across websites and applications, and to collect data about user interactions for purposes such as serving relevant ads and measuring the effectiveness of ads.

p. 38 · Read in context →

Item 7. MD&A — Executive Summary — p. 77 · Read the full section →

The five numbers management leads with, and the opportunity list it says the spending is aimed at.

Item 7. MD&A — Components of Our Results of Operations — Revenue — p. 81 · Read the full section →

The accounting that defines the model: revenue booked as agent, net of supplier costs, which is why receivables and payables dwarf revenue.

One segment, net (agent) revenue recognition, and the reason the balance sheet looks outsized.

We have one primary business activity and one operating segment. […] We charge our clients for total spend on our platform, which includes spend and fees on advertising inventory, value-added services and data to support those purchases, in addition to the platform fee that is generally based on a percentage of our clients’ total spend on the platform. Generally, we report revenue as an agent on a net basis, which represents gross billings net of amounts we pay suppliers for the cost of advertising inventory, supplier-provided components of value-added services and data (collectively, “Supplier Components”). […] Accounts receivable is recorded at the amount of gross billings to clients, net of allowances, for the amounts we are responsible to collect; and our accounts payable are recorded at the amount payable to suppliers. Accordingly, both accounts receivable and accounts payable appear large in relation to revenue reported on a net basis.

p. 81 · Read in context →

Item 7. MD&A — Results of Operations for the Year Ended December 31, 2025, Compared with the Year Ended December 31, 2024 — p. 85 · Read the full section →

Revenue grew 18% on 11% gross-spend growth: management attributes the gap to pricing and higher use of value-added services and data.

Management's explanation of the revenue-versus-spend gap: mix, utilization and pricing of value-added services and data.

Revenue increased by $451 million, or 18%, for the year ended December 31, 2025, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2024. The overall increase was driven by an 11% increase in gross spend on our platform, which was primarily driven by more overall advertising campaigns executed by new and existing clients, […] The increase in revenue was also driven by a higher proportion of revenue earned from client spend due to increased utilization of our value-added services and data; and higher platform fees. […] increased pricing associated with value-added services and data, enabled both our clients and us to capture increased value and drove higher utilization of our value-added services and data.

p. 87 · Read in context →

Note 12—Segment and Geographic Information — p. 145 · Read the full section →

Why there is no segment detail to analyze: one segment, the CEO reviews consolidated results only, and the US is 86% of revenue.

One reportable segment, and the disclosure that the CODM sees no expense detail below the income statement.

The Company’s chief operating decision maker is its Chief Executive Officer (“CEO”), who manages the Company and reviews financial information on a consolidated basis. The Company has one primary business activity, its advertising technology platform, as described in Note 1 – Nature of Operations. The platform is used by clients globally in a similar manner across geographies, channels and verticals. Accordingly, the Company operates in one operating segment on a consolidated basis: advertising technology platform. […] The CEO is not regularly provided significant expense information at a greater level of disaggregation than those expenses reported on the consolidated statements of operations.

p. 145 · Read in context →

The Trade Desk, Inc. — FY2022 Annual Report (Form 10-K) — FY2022 (year ended December 31, 2022)

Included for contrast: the pre-AI, pre-Kokai self-description, a Delaware incorporation, and a client-count metric TTD has since stopped giving. · Open the full document →

Item 1. Business — Overview — p. 6 · Read the full section →

The same business three years earlier: a "self-service, cloud-based ad-buying platform," no AI framing, and a Delaware corporation.

FY2022 self-description and fee model, against FY2025's "global leader in advertising technology."

The Trade Desk, Inc. (the “Company,” “we,” “our,” or “The Trade Desk”) offers a self-service, cloud-based ad-buying platform that empowers our clients to plan, manage, optimize and measure more expressive data-driven digital advertising campaigns. […] Our clients are advertising agencies, brands and other service providers for advertisers, with whom we enter into ongoing master services agreements (“MSAs”). We generate revenue by charging our clients a platform fee based on a percentage of a client’s total spend on advertising. We also generate revenue from providing data and other value-added services and platform features. […] The Trade Desk is a Delaware corporation established in 2009 and headquartered in Ventura, California.

p. 6 · Read in context →

Item 1. Business — Our Clients — p. 10 · Read the full section →

A disclosure since retired: over 1,000 clients on a defined $20,000 spend threshold, where FY2025 gives only holding-company concentration.

The client-count metric and its definition, dropped from later filings.

Our clients consist of purchasers of programmatic advertising inventory and data. As of December 31, 2022, we had over 1,000 clients, consisting primarily of advertising agencies or groups within advertising agencies that have independent relationships with us, manage budgets independently of one another, are based in different jurisdictions and are served by unique Trade Desk teams. Many of these agencies are owned by holding companies, where decision making is decentralized such that purchasing decisions are made, and relationships with advertisers are located, at the agency, local branch or division level. Our client count includes only those parties that have signed MSAs with us and have spent more than $20,000 on our platform.

p. 10 · Read in context →

More annual reports

The Trade Desk, Inc. — FY2024 Annual Report (Form 10-K) — FY2024 (year ended December 31, 2024) · 102 pages · The last 10-K before the 2025 derating: revenue $2.44 billion, filed two days after the first securities class action was brought. · Open →

The Trade Desk, Inc. — FY2023 Annual Report (Form 10-K) — FY2023 (year ended December 31, 2023) · 101 pages · Revenue $1.95 billion, and the first TTD 10-K to carry an Item 1C cybersecurity disclosure. · Open →

The Trade Desk, Inc. — FY2021 Annual Report (Form 10-K) — FY2021 (year ended December 31, 2021) · 127 pages · The year the CEO Performance Option was granted — the award that drove years of G&A charges and derivative litigation. · Open →

---

Source: S&P Capital IQ consensus via Xpressfeed · Generated 2026-07-25.

The forward tape has been marked down across the board over the past six months: FY2027 and FY2028 consensus is lower on both revenue and normalized EPS, and EPS has been cut harder than revenue in both years. The company keeps clearing the top line — seven revenue beats in the last eight quarters — but Q1 2026 normalized EPS landed 12.4% below consensus, the only double-digit miss in the visible record. Consensus still has revenue compounding at high single digits, while gross margin drifts lower and FY2026 free cash flow falls. The street reads as unresolved: 19 holds, and price targets spanning $11 to $38.

FY2028 EPS consensus is down 23% in 180 days and revenue down 18% — the whole forward tape has been cut

Most of the damage landed between the 180-day and 90-day marks; the last 30 days have been close to flat, with FY2028 normalized EPS unchanged. That EPS was cut deeper than revenue in both years means the downgrades run through profitability assumptions, not just the top line.

Currency: USD · Scale: money in millions, absolute · Point-in-time consensus; Δ90d is Now versus 90d.

Metric	FY	180d	90d	30d	Now	Δ90d
EPS (normalized)	FY2027	$2.46	$2.40	$2.15	$2.15	-10.4%
EPS (normalized)	FY2028	$2.92	$2.72	$2.24	$2.24	-17.7%
Revenue	FY2027	$3.87bn	$3.66bn	$3.50bn	$3.48bn	-4.9%
Revenue	FY2028	$4.51bn	$3.96bn	$3.76bn	$3.71bn	-6.1%

Beat / miss record

Current sequences by metric: Revenue: 5 consecutive beats; EPS (normalized): 1 consecutive miss.

Currency: USD · Scale: money in millions, absolute · Consensus is captured before each actual first became effective.

Quarter	Metric	Consensus	Actual	Surprise	Outcome
Q1 FY2026	Revenue	$678.67m	$688.86m	+1.5%	Beat
Q1 FY2026	EPS (normalized)	$0.32	$0.28	-12.4%	Miss
Q4 FY2025	Revenue	$840.68m	$846.79m	+0.7%	Beat
Q4 FY2025	EPS (normalized)	$0.58	$0.59	+1.7%	Beat
Q3 FY2025	Revenue	$719.34m	$739.43m	+2.8%	Beat
Q3 FY2025	EPS (normalized)	$0.44	$0.45	+1.8%	Beat
Q2 FY2025	Revenue	$686.03m	$694.04m	+1.2%	Beat
Q2 FY2025	EPS (normalized)	$0.41	$0.41	-0.9%	Miss
Q1 FY2025	Revenue	$575.28m	$616.02m	+7.1%	Beat
Q1 FY2025	EPS (normalized)	$0.25	$0.33	+33.2%	Beat
Q4 FY2024	Revenue	$759.56m	$741.01m	-2.4%	Miss
Q4 FY2024	EPS (normalized)	$0.57	$0.59	+3.6%	Beat
Q3 FY2024	Revenue	$620.46m	$628.02m	+1.2%	Beat
Q3 FY2024	EPS (normalized)	$0.39	$0.41	+4.3%	Beat
Q2 FY2024	Revenue	$578.12m	$584.55m	+1.1%	Beat
Q2 FY2024	EPS (normalized)	$0.36	$0.39	+9.5%	Beat

FY2026: revenue up about 10% but consensus EBITDA up 5% and free cash flow down 5%

Consensus gross margin runs 76.7% in FY2026 against 78.7% in FY2025, and 73.6% by FY2029. Normalized EPS has one strong middle year (+16% in FY2027) before flattening to mid-single-digit growth in FY2028 and FY2029.

Currency: USD · Scale: money in millions, absolute · YoY uses the prior fiscal year from the feed; analyst count and range use the first displayed period.

Metric	FY2025A	FY2026E	FY2027E	FY2028E	FY2029E	YoY	Analysts	Low / high
Revenue	$2.89bn	$3.18bn	$3.48bn	$3.71bn	$4.04bn	—	37	$2.85bn / $2.91bn
EBITDA	$1.17bn	$1.26bn	$1.38bn	$1.47bn	$1.55bn	—	36	$1.13bn / $1.24bn
EPS (normalized)	$1.76	$1.85	$2.15	$2.24	$2.33	—	20	$1.68 / $1.84
Gross margin	78.7%	76.7%	76.8%	75.9%	73.5%	—	—	—
Free cash flow	$823.05m	$780.00m	$883.32m	$966.97m	$1.10bn	—	—	—

36 analysts put FY2027 revenue anywhere from $2.63bn to $3.80bn, and the FY2027 EBITDA range is half the mean

FY2027 revenue carries 36 analysts and EBITDA 34, so the width is not a coverage effect. GAAP EPS is the widest line of all: $0.48 to $1.50 for FY2027 across 32 analysts.

Currency: USD · Scale: money in millions, absolute · Spread/mean is absolute high-low divided by absolute mean.

Metric	Period	Mean	Low–high	Spread/mean	Analysts
Revenue	FY2027E	$3.48bn	$2.63bn–$3.80bn	33.7%	36
EBITDA	FY2027E	$1.38bn	$821.00m–$1.51bn	50.1%	34
EPS (GAAP)	FY2027E	$1.18	$0.48–$1.50	86.5%	32
Revenue	FY2028E	$3.71bn	$2.41bn–$4.05bn	44.1%	20
EBITDA	FY2028E	$1.47bn	$780.00m–$1.67bn	60.4%	18

Street snapshot

The mean target is $24.32 and the median $24.50 across 30 estimates, so the average sits near the middle of a wide band. Four analysts carry sell or underperform ratings and none is marked no opinion.

Currency: USD · Scale: money in millions, absolute · Analyst counts shown explicitly.

Street view	Reading	Analysts
Recommendation mix	Buy 11, Outperform 2, Hold 19, Underperform 1, Sell 3	36
Consensus score	2.53	36
Target price	mean $24.32; median $24.50; high $38.00; low $11.00	30

---

Visible Alpha broker models via S&P Xpressfeed · 31 brokers · 319 line items · freshest revision 2026-07-21.

Coverage is deep and the headline is not really in dispute: 29 brokers model FY-2027 revenue and the quartile band around it is tight. What the models disagree on sits underneath, in the gross spend base and the take rate that converts it. The FY-2026 revenue step-up is priced rather than volume-led — median take rate moves from 20.4% to 21.6% and then flattens, leaving gross spend to carry growth from FY-2027 on. The bulk of the incremental spend brokers fund is CTV, and margins are held flat, so these models describe a volume-and-mix story rather than an operating-leverage one.

Take rate carried FY-2026; from here the models need gross spend to do the work

Median take rate steps from 20.4% in FY-2025 to 21.6% in FY-2026, then settles back at 21.4% in FY-2027 and 21.5% in FY-2028. So the FY-2026 revenue step-up is modeled as pricing, and from FY-2027 the revenue line depends almost entirely on the spend base beneath it.

Line	FY-2025A	FY-2026E	FY-2027E	FY-2028E	YoY	Brokers
Spend base	—	—	—	—	—	—
Gross spend	$14.14bn	$14.90bn	$16.59bn	$17.84bn	+5.4%	22
Pricing	—	—	—	—	—	—
Take rate(%)	20.5%	21.4%	21.1%	21.3%	+0.9pt	24
Revenue	—	—	—	—	—	—
Revenue	$2.89bn	$3.18bn	$3.48bn	$3.74bn	+10.0%	31

CTV supplies the growth; mobile in-app and web spend is modeled to go backwards

Line	FY-2025A	FY-2026E	FY-2027E	FY-2028E	YoY	Brokers
Gross spend - Visual and TV	$6.95bn	$7.67bn	$8.74bn	$9.77bn	+10.4%	15
Gross spend - Mobile In- App & Web	$4.84bn	$4.37bn	$4.57bn	$4.66bn	-9.7%	14
Gross spend - Display, Social, Native and others	$1.54bn	$1.69bn	$1.70bn	$1.96bn	+9.6%	15
Gross spend - Audio	$728.67m	$877.26m	$1.01bn	$1.21bn	+20.4%	14

The live debates: the FY-2027 take rate, and whether mobile spend ever stabilises

Under a point separates the take-rate quartiles for FY-2027, but that point applies to a gross spend base several times larger than revenue, so it is the most valuable disagreement in the set. Mobile in-app and web is the widest of the channel disputes — brokers do not agree whether it stabilises or keeps shrinking.

Line	Period	Median	Q1–Q3	Min–max	Brokers
Take rate(%)	FY-2027E	21.4%	20.8%–21.6%	18.8%–22.6%	24
Gross spend - Mobile In- App & Web	FY-2028E	$4.67bn	$4.54bn–$5.02bn	$3.33bn–$5.93bn	10
Gross spend - Visual and TV	FY-2028E	$9.58bn	$9.17bn–$10.40bn	$8.12bn–$11.58bn	12
Gross spend	FY-2028E	$17.80bn	$17.32bn–$18.42bn	$16.33bn–$20.24bn	16
Free cash flow	FY-2028E	$937.06m	$876.09m–$1.07bn	$394.24m–$1.55bn	18

Revenue compounds but margins do not: adjusted EBITDA margin holds near 40% to FY-2028

On the operating (adjusted) basis, EBITDA margin stays in a roughly 40% band across all four years even as revenue compounds. FCF margin runs below FY-2025 in the outer years, and diluted share count is roughly flat from FY-2026, so per-share cash flow improves on the dollar cash flow rather than on shrinkage of the share base.

Line	FY-2025A	FY-2026E	FY-2027E	FY-2028E	YoY	Brokers
Margin	—	—	—	—	—	—
EBITDA margin(%)	40.6%	39.7%	40.0%	40.4%	-0.9pt	31
FCF margin(%)	27.1%	24.6%	25.4%	26.0%	-2.5pt	27
Income from operations - Operating	$1.06bn	$1.13bn	$1.24bn	$1.35bn	+6.0%	29
Cash and shares	—	—	—	—	—	—
Free cash flow	$783.03m	$782.44m	$883.85m	$978.25m	-0.1%	27
Free cash flow per share($)	$1.58	$1.64	$1.85	$2.05	+4.1%	27
Shares - Diluted(M#)	496.13m Number	477.24m Number	478.99m Number	477.08m Number	-3.8%	28

The KPI tail is thin: retention and client counts rest on one to four brokers

Customer retention rate carries a single broker, and its FY-2027 value was last revised in 2022 — that is one desk's standing assumption, not consensus. Total client count rests on four brokers at FY-2027, and the US/International revenue split on two. The geographic gross spend split carries four to six.

Headline P&L consensus, momentum and beat/miss live in the CapIQ tab.

---

Source: S&P Capital IQ transcripts via Xpressfeed · latest indexed call 2026-05-07 · generated 2026-07-25.

Latest call digest

The Trade Desk, Inc., Q1 2026 Earnings Call, May 07, 2026 · 2026-05-07T21:00:00

Q1 2026 call — May 07, 2026. Jeff Green and Interim CFO Tahnil Davis reported Q1 revenue of $689 million, up 12% year-over-year, with $206 million of adjusted EBITDA at a 30% margin. Guidance: Q2 revenue of at least $750 million, Q2 adjusted EBITDA of approximately $260 million, and full year 2026 adjusted EBITDA margin of at least 40%, described as approximately in line with 2025.

Prepared remarks were almost entirely forward-looking and thematic. Green organized them around three topics — the macro environment, the state of the global advertising market, and platform innovation — and opened by acknowledging that "the macro environment has certainly become more complex in 2026." His central argument was that 2025 added more ad supply than any prior year, creating what he called the biggest buyers' market in advertising history, which raises the value of objective decisioning by a DSP that owns no media. He spent unusual time on broken measurement and last-touch attribution, on retail data (retailers in the data marketplace representing more than 80% of sales from top U.S. retailers, versus Amazon at less than 15% of U.S. retail spend), on the new Audience Unlimited product, and on agentic AI via a first partnership with Stagwell. Commercial proof points cited: March was the biggest month on record for JBP signings with 45 signed in March alone, total Q1 JBP count up 55% year-over-year, and new JBP deal spend excluding renewals up 40% year-over-year. Davis flagged continued pressure in Home & Garden and Food & Drink as CPG brands navigate geopolitical uncertainty and input cost inflation, and noted automotive would be growing faster absent tariffs.

Q&A went somewhere else. Two topics that received no mention in prepared remarks opened the call: the Publicis negotiations and the departure of Chief Strategy Officer Samantha Jacobson to OpenAI, reported by Adweek hours before the print. Four of the nine questions pressed directly on the implied deceleration in the Q2 outlook or on the path back to growth. Green declined to elaborate on Publicis ("It's probably not prudent for me to say more about it in this forum.") and could not comment on whether record March JBP signings related to the agency dispute. On deceleration he pointed to macro and to the Fortune 500 concentration of his client base rather than to anything company-specific, and separated "cyclical" from "structural" without dating a reacceleration. Justin Patterson's question on how a 40% full-year margin is reached from a 30% Q1 drew a restatement of the target plus general discipline commitments — headcount growth below revenue growth, deliberate investment prioritization — rather than named levers. Green framed 2026 four separate times as "a year of disciplined reinvestment."

What was actually committed: the Q2 revenue floor, the Q2 EBITDA estimate, and the full-year margin floor. Nothing else in the call carried a number attached to a future period.

Participant coverage from the latest call.

Group	Participants	Count
Management	Operator; Chris Toth — Vice President of Investor Relations, The Trade Desk, Inc.; Jeffrey Green — Co-Founder, CEO, President & Chairman, The Trade Desk, Inc.; Tahnil Davis — Chief Accounting Officer & Executive VP, The Trade Desk, Inc.	4
Analysts	Shyam Patil — Senior Analyst, Susquehanna Financial Group, LLLP, Research Division; Vasily Karasyov — Founder, Cannonball Research, LLC; Matthew Swanson — Analyst, RBC Capital Markets, Research Division; Justin Patterson — MD & Equity Research Analyst, KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc., Research Division; Mark Zgutowicz — Senior Equity Analyst, The Benchmark Company, LLC, Research Division; Youssef Squali — Head of Internet, Truist Securities, Inc., Research Division; Timothy Nollen — Research Analyst, SSR LLC; Jessica Reif Cohen — Managing Director in Equity Research, BofA Securities, Research Division; Jason Helfstein — MD & Senior Internet Analyst, Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division	9

Curated latest-call exchanges; one row per analyst topic.

Analyst	Firm	Topic	What changed in Q&A
Shyam Patil	Susquehanna Financial Group, LLLP, Research Division	Publicis negotiations and the Q2 deceleration	Two-part opener. Green called the reported conflict overdramatized, noted billions of dollars of business with Publicis since 2018 and that negotiations are ongoing, then declined further comment in that forum. On Q2 he attributed the slowdown to macro conditions and to the fact that most revenue comes from Fortune 500 brands, which respond differently to global headwinds than smaller advertisers. No company-specific driver was named.
Vasily Karasyov	Cannonball Research, LLC	Chief Strategy Officer departure to OpenAI	Karasyov noted the Adweek piece ran the same day, before results. Green confirmed Samantha Jacobson is taking a role at OpenAI, said she remains on the Board, and pivoted to describing senior leadership hires the company has been making. The prepared remarks had not mentioned the departure.
Matthew Swanson	RBC Capital Markets, Research Division	Cyclical versus secular drivers of reacceleration	Asked which parts of a return to growth are within management's control. Green separated structural from cyclical, said reacceleration "isn't really about reinventing ourselves" but about executing against an expanding opportunity, and said a stabilizing macro would provide a tailwind that is not present now. No timeframe was offered.
Justin Patterson	KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc., Research Division	Levers to the 40% full-year EBITDA margin	The sharpest financial question, noting both revenue and margins started the year softer. Davis restated the at-least-40% full-year target and cited headcount growth below revenue growth, cash flow flexibility in pacing investments, and prioritizing highest-ROI areas. Specific levers bridging a 30% Q1 margin to the full-year figure were not itemized.
Mark Zgutowicz	The Benchmark Company, LLC, Research Division	Agency-related weakness and CPG/auto comps	Asked whether anything agency-related or one-time sits inside the Q2 guide, framing it as below industry expectations for digital and video growth. Green said there is "not really anything incremental to add on the agency front" and did not address the one-time-item part. He agreed CPG and auto comps ease later in the year but argued the more important point is the discipline those advertisers have adopted.
Youssef Squali	Truist Securities, Inc., Research Division	LLMs and AI search as an ad opportunity	Asked for gating factors, P&L impact and where conversations stand with key players. Green declined to discuss the specific discussions, compared the LLMs to Netflix a decade ago given expensive content, argued detailed prompts support richer ad formats than legacy search including video, and closed by saying the opportunity is in the first inning, "a couple of pitches in, max." No revenue timing was given.
Timothy Nollen	SSR LLC	Whether to build sell-side services; OpenTTD	Green gave the most categorical answer of the call: the company will never do yield management for publishers, because serving buyers and sellers simultaneously recreates the ad network conflict. He tied OpenPath and OpenTTD to plugging into publishers who run their own yield management, and said it is the hub he referred to in prepared remarks.
Jessica Reif Cohen	BofA Securities, Research Division	Timing and impact of agentic trading	Green rejected the framing of being "impacted" by AI and said the company will lead the agentic shift in programmatic. He criticized competitors' agentic approaches as recreating ad networks one advertiser-to-publisher connection at a time, and described the Stagwell work as starting with campaign creation and editing before moving to optimization. No adoption timeline or revenue contribution was given.
Jason Helfstein	Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division	Agentic economics; whether record JBPs relate to the agency dispute	Final question of the call. Green said the agentic problem is optimization rather than commercial terms. On the yes/no follow-up, he said he could not comment on whether the record March JBP signings relate to the agency discussions — leaving the most direct read-through on the Publicis situation unanswered.

Theme tracker

Themes are curator-classified across supplied calls.

Theme	Status	Quarters mentioned	Read-through
CTV shift toward biddable, decisioned buying	persisted	Q2 2023, Q3 2023, Q4 2023, Q1 2024, Q2 2024, Q3 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026	The single constant across every call in the index. The argument has not changed — premium content owners eventually move from insertion orders and programmatic guaranteed to biddable — but the emphasis has shifted from persuading publishers to open up (2023-2024, when Laura Martin pushed back that Disney, Paramount and Fox disagreed) to describing it as already underway. Analyst questions on CTV have thinned considerably since 2024, which reads as the debate being settled rather than the topic being dropped.
Amazon and DSP competitive intensity	persisted	Q4 2023, Q1 2024, Q2 2024, Q3 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025	Raised by analysts on nine consecutive calls from Q4 2023, peaking in Q1 and Q2 2025. Management's answer has been stable — Amazon prioritizes owned-and-operated inventory and cannot credibly claim objectivity — with Green adding in Q4 2025 that Google was a better competitor than Amazon is or likely will be. Notably, no analyst asked about Amazon on the Q1 2026 call; the question budget went to guidance and management turnover instead.
Agentic AI	emerged	Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026	Absent from the transcripts before Q2 2025, then the fastest-rising topic in the set. By Q4 2025 Green was arguing complexity is a moat that agentic AI enhances rather than disintermediates; by Q1 2026 it had a named commercial anchor in the Stagwell partnership and drew three of nine analyst questions. It has become the principal forward-looking story, which is worth noting because it is also the least quantified one.
CPG and automotive vertical weakness	emerged	Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026	Green said on the Q4 2025 call that CPG and auto companies began navigating category headwinds beginning in Q2 2025, that together the two verticals represent over a quarter of the business, and that the company would have been at least 5% higher in growth rate excluding them. Q1 2026 continued the theme through Home & Garden and Food & Drink softness and a tariff drag on autos. This is the most concrete, quantified explanation management has given for the growth step-down.
Organizational change and senior leadership turnover	persisted	Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026	Began with the Q4 2024 recalibration after the first guidance miss, and has appeared on every call since. The CFO seat alone has had three voices in four calls — Laura Schenkein through Q2 2025, Alex Kayyal presenting as CFO in Q3 2025, and Tahnil Davis as Interim CFO in Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 — and Q1 2026 added the Chief Strategy Officer's departure. Analysts have asked about it on four of the last six calls.
Measurement and attribution reform	persisted	Q2 2023, Q3 2023, Q4 2023, Q1 2024, Q2 2024, Q3 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026	Present throughout, but its weight changed sharply. In Q4 2025 it was framed as a coming framework; in Q1 2026 it became a structural centerpiece of the prepared remarks, with Green saying he has "never seen more discussion in the history of our space" about how broken last-touch attribution is. The escalation is worth watching: it positions an industry-wide fix, not a Trade Desk product, as the unlock for the next phase of growth.
Cookie deprecation, Privacy Sandbox and UID2	dropped	Q2 2023, Q3 2023, Q4 2023, Q1 2024, Q2 2024	Dominated 2023 and the first half of 2024 — the Q4 2023 call alone was built substantially around it, with three separate analyst questions on cookie deprecation, Privacy Sandbox and advertiser readiness. It disappears from Q3 2024 onward and no analyst has raised it since. UID2 followed a slower version of the same arc, from a headline identity strategy in 2023 to no mention at all on the Q1 2026 call, though it still surfaces operationally as the pipe most retail data partners use.
Kokai platform migration	dropped	Q2 2023, Q3 2023, Q4 2023, Q1 2024, Q2 2024, Q3 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025	Present on all eleven prior calls in the index and the dominant product story through 2025 — the Q2 2025 call carried a commitment that all clients would be on it by year-end, and Q4 2025 reported almost 100% of clients running through it. The Q1 2026 call does not mention Kokai once. Read most naturally as the migration being finished and the narrative rotating to Audience Unlimited and agentic AI, but it does mean the platform that carried the growth story for two years has no update in the latest quarter.
Google antitrust proceedings as a catalyst	dropped	Q2 2024, Q3 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q3 2025	A recurring analyst question from Q2 2024 through Q3 2025, when Youssef Squali asked about closing arguments due that November. It does not appear on the Q4 2025 or Q1 2026 calls in any form. The catalyst that was repeatedly framed as a potential share-shift tailwind has simply stopped being discussed, without a stated resolution either way in the call history.

Guidance ledger

Quotes, calls, and speakers are source-verified; outcomes are curator-classified.

Verbatim guidance	Call	Speaker	Curator outcome	Outcome note
“For Q2, we expect revenue to be at least $750 million.”	The Trade Desk, Inc., Q1 2026 Earnings Call, May 07, 2026 · 2026-05-07T21:00:00	Tahnil Davis	pending	Guided on the most recent call; the reporting quarter has not been covered by any call in the supplied history.
“Taken together, we continue to expect our full year 2026 adjusted EBITDA margin percentage to be at least 40%, approximately in line with 2025.”	The Trade Desk, Inc., Q1 2026 Earnings Call, May 07, 2026 · 2026-05-07T21:00:00	Tahnil Davis	pending	Full-year 2026 commitment. Q1 2026 adjusted EBITDA was $206 million on $689 million of revenue, a 30% margin, so the target implies materially higher margins across the balance of the year.
“For the first quarter, we expect revenue to be at least $678 million, representing 10% year-over-year growth.”	The Trade Desk, Inc., Q4 2025 Earnings Call, Feb 25, 2026 · 2026-02-25T22:00:00	Tahnil Davis	kept	Q1 2026 revenue was reported at $689 million on the May 07, 2026 call, above the floor.
“We estimate adjusted EBITDA for Q1 to be approximately $195 million.”	The Trade Desk, Inc., Q4 2025 Earnings Call, Feb 25, 2026 · 2026-02-25T22:00:00	Tahnil Davis	kept	Q1 2026 adjusted EBITDA was reported at $206 million, above the estimate.
“For Q4, we expect revenue to be at least $840 million.”	The Trade Desk, Inc., Q3 2025 Earnings Call, Nov 06, 2025 · 2025-11-06T22:00:00	Alex Kayyal	kept	Q4 2025 revenue was reported at $847 million on the Feb 25, 2026 call.
“We estimate adjusted EBITDA for Q4 to be approximately $375 million.”	The Trade Desk, Inc., Q3 2025 Earnings Call, Nov 06, 2025 · 2025-11-06T22:00:00	Alex Kayyal	kept	Q4 2025 adjusted EBITDA was reported at approximately $400 million, above the estimate.
“we expect Q3 revenue to be at least $717 million, reflecting 14% year-over-year growth”	The Trade Desk, Inc., Q2 2025 Earnings Call, Aug 07, 2025 · 2025-08-07T21:00:00	Laura Schenkein	kept	Q3 2025 revenue was reported at $739 million on the Nov 06, 2025 call. The guide was issued with an explicit macro-stability condition attached.
“in Q2, we expect revenue to be at least $682 million, reflecting 17% year-over-year growth”	The Trade Desk, Inc., Q1 2025 Earnings Call, May 08, 2025 · 2025-05-08T21:00:00	Laura Schenkein	kept	Q2 2025 revenue was reported at $694 million on the Aug 07, 2025 call.
“We expect revenue to be at least $575 million, reflecting 17% year-over-year growth.”	The Trade Desk, Inc., Q4 2024 Earnings Call, Feb 12, 2025 · 2025-02-12T22:00:00	Laura Schenkein	kept	Q1 2025 revenue was reported at $616 million on the May 08, 2025 call, comfortably above the floor set immediately after the Q4 2024 miss.
“We estimate Q4 revenue to be at least $756 million, which would represent growth of about 25% on a year-over-year basis.”	The Trade Desk, Inc., Q3 2024 Earnings Call, Nov 07, 2024 · 2024-11-07T22:00:00	Laura Schenkein	missed	Q4 2024 revenue came in at $741 million, below the floor. Management addressed it directly on the Feb 12, 2025 call, calling it the first shortfall in 33 quarters as a public company and taking full ownership.
“We estimate adjusted EBITDA to be approximately $363 million in Q4.”	The Trade Desk, Inc., Q3 2024 Earnings Call, Nov 07, 2024 · 2024-11-07T22:00:00	Laura Schenkein	missed	Q4 2024 adjusted EBITDA was $350 million, below the estimate, alongside the revenue shortfall.
“We estimate Q3 revenue to be at least $618 million, which would represent growth of 25% on a year-over-year basis.”	The Trade Desk, Inc., Q2 2024 Earnings Call, Aug 08, 2024 · 2024-08-08T21:00:00	Laura Schenkein	kept	Q3 2024 revenue was reported at $628 million on the Nov 07, 2024 call.

Q&A pressure map

Question counts and firms are curator tallies; analyst coverage shown above.

Topic	Questions	Firms	Pressure / response
Deceleration, guidance and the path back to growth	13	Susquehanna Financial Group, LLLP, Research Division, Cannonball Research, LLC, KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc., Research Division, Evercore ISI Institutional Equities, Research Division, Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division, RBC Capital Markets, Research Division, The Benchmark Company, LLC, Research Division	The heaviest and most persistent line of questioning across the last eight calls, clustered in Q4 2024 (five questions after the first guidance miss) and Q1 2026 (four). Analysts have repeatedly asked the same thing in different words: what specifically drives reacceleration and when. Management's answers have been consistent in structure — structural drivers are intact, macro is the constraint, execution is the near-term job — and consistently without a date or a quantified bridge. Mark Mahaney had to repeat his Q4 2024 question verbatim to get the reacceleration factors addressed.
Amazon, DV360 and DSP competitive intensity	11	Truist Securities, Inc., Research Division, Cannonball Research, LLC, Wolfe Research, LLC, Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division, RBC Capital Markets, Research Division, Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated, Research Division, Susquehanna Financial Group, LLLP, Research Division, KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc., Research Division	Sustained from Q2 2024 through Q4 2025 and answered the same way each time: competitors sell their own inventory, so they cannot be objective. Shyam Patil's Q3 2025 question sharpened the point — won't Amazon simply price to zero to take share — and the answer addressed structural conflict rather than pricing. The absence of any Amazon question on the Q1 2026 call is itself notable.
AI and agentic economics	8	KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc., Research Division, Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division, Truist Securities, Inc., Research Division, BofA Securities, Research Division	Rising fast since Q2 2025. Analysts have moved from asking what the company is building to asking about monetization, competitive scale versus Amazon and Google's parent-company AI resources, and timing. Youssef Squali asked twice — Q4 2025 on how agentic changes the monetization model, Q1 2026 on gating factors and P&L impact — and neither answer put a number or a period on it. Green's Q1 2026 framing of the LLM opportunity as a couple of pitches into the first inning is the closest thing to a timing statement in the set.
Organizational change and leadership turnover	6	Susquehanna Financial Group, LLLP, Research Division, KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc., Research Division, Cannonball Research, LLC, Evercore ISI Institutional Equities, Research Division	Recurring since Q4 2024. Vasily Karasyov has effectively kept a running audit, asking in Q4 2025 what the reorganization from a year earlier had actually achieved, and in Q1 2026 for the details behind the Chief Strategy Officer's exit to OpenAI. Answers have described process changes — clearer ownership, unified go-to-market coverage, JBP pipeline growth — rather than operating metrics tied to those changes.
OpenPath, supply path and platform neutrality	6	BofA Securities, Research Division, SSR LLC, Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division	A quieter but recurring pressure point that has changed character. Through Q1 2025 the questions were about scaling and publisher adoption; by Q4 2025 Alec Brondolo asked directly whether press reports of transparency and conflict-of-interest concerns mean OpenPath lacks product-market fit, and Tim Nollen asked in Q1 2026 whether the company should build sell-side services at all. Both answers were direct and specific, including the 4.5% OpenPath fee and a flat commitment never to do yield management for publishers.
Kokai adoption and measurable ROI	6	RBC Capital Markets, Research Division, Cannonball Research, LLC, KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc., Research Division, Evercore ISI Institutional Equities, Research Division	Concentrated in Q2 2025, when Mark Mahaney pushed on whether the cited 20-point KPI improvement compounds over time or is a one-step gain. The line of questioning has since gone quiet as adoption completed, and no analyst asked about Kokai on the Q1 2026 call.
CPG, auto and tariff exposure	5	Susquehanna Financial Group, LLLP, Research Division, Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division, The Benchmark Company, LLC, Research Division, Cannonball Research, LLC, Evercore ISI Institutional Equities, Research Division	Emerged with the tariff environment in Q2 2025 and became a direct challenge by Q4 2025, when Jason Helfstein asked what has to happen to accelerate growth if CPG and auto stay weak. Management has answered this cluster with more specificity than most — vertical share of business, the estimated growth drag, named advertisers on both sides of the divide — which stands out against the more abstract answers elsewhere.
The Publicis relationship and agency dynamics	3	Susquehanna Financial Group, LLLP, Research Division, The Benchmark Company, LLC, Research Division, Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division	New on the Q1 2026 call and the clearest instance of questions not being answered. Green declined to go beyond confirming ongoing negotiations, told Mark Zgutowicz there was nothing incremental to add on the agency front without addressing the one-time-items part of that question, and told Jason Helfstein he could not comment on whether record March JBP signings relate to the agency discussions. These are explicit declines rather than deflections, but three separate analysts left the call without the read-through they asked for.

Language shifts

Only language evidence verified against the referenced component is shown.

Observation	Verbatim evidence	Call ID	Component
The Q1 2026 call opens with an explicit acknowledgment that conditions have worsened rather than the growth-and-share framing that opened every 2024 call. Green has moved from describing macro as a backdrop to naming it as a complicating force in the current year.	“The macro environment has certainly become more complex in 2026.”	1996530678	2
"Geopolitical uncertainty" is new CFO vocabulary. The Q1 2026 financial remarks lead with challenges before results, where the equivalent Q2 2024 remarks led with strong performance and closed with a statement of being extremely pleased.	“The start of 2026 has brought unique challenges, including geopolitical uncertainty that our clients are currently navigating.”	1996530678	3
"A year of disciplined reinvestment" entered the vocabulary on the Q4 2025 call and was repeated four times across the Q1 2026 call by both Green and Davis. It functions as the explanation for margin pressure and, implicitly, for why growth is not the near-term measure of success.	“it's important to think about 2026 as a year of disciplined reinvestment”	1980876042	7
Confidence language has shifted from results to forward conviction. On the Q4 2025 call Green paired an unusually blunt self-assessment of the print with an assertion of undiminished optimism — a construction that had no precedent in the 2023 and 2024 calls in this set.	“Despite the fact that I don't think that this is our best earnings report ever, I hope you can hear it that I am as optimistic as ever”	1980876042	10
The Q4 2025 harvest metaphor is a hedge on timing: the organizational upgrades are asserted to be right, while the returns are placed in the future. Green paired "green shoots" with "we have not harvested most of those seeds" in the same sentence.	“Even though we have not harvested most of those seeds, we are seeing green shoots and are extremely confident that we've made the right moves to scale and improve this business.”	1980876042	2
Conditional guidance language appeared in 2025 and has since disappeared. Q1 2025 and Q2 2025 guides were both issued subject to macro stability; the Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 guides carry no such conditional clause, even as macro commentary in the surrounding remarks grew more cautious.	“Assuming the macro environment remains stable and we don't see disruptions from large global brands, which make up a significant portion of our business due to tariff uncertainty, we expect Q3 revenue to be at least $717 million”	1954388562	3
The earlier caution vocabulary was narrower and quarter-specific. In Q3 2024 the qualifier was a single phrase attached to the next quarter; the 2026 equivalents are structural statements about the operating environment.	“we are cautiously optimistic for Q4.”	1901030220	3
Accountability language entered the vocabulary with the Q4 2024 miss and has stayed. Green's ownership statement there is the origin point for the recalibration, reorganization and reinvestment framing that runs through every subsequent call.	“for the first time in 33 quarters as a public company, we fell short of our own expectations”	1928886322	2
By Q1 2026 that accountability language has become forward-looking and conditional on execution rather than retrospective — an unusual construction for a company whose prepared remarks otherwise argue its position has never been stronger.	“We recognize that at this moment, where the macro is more uncertain and we are evolving parts of our business require clarity, accountability and strong execution.”	1996530678	2

The call history is unusually consistent on strategy and unusually thin on timing. Management has told the same story about objectivity, CTV and the open internet for twelve straight quarters while reported growth stepped down from 25% in Q1 2025 to 12% in Q1 2026, and the guidance record since the Q4 2024 miss has been clean — every subsequent revenue and EBITDA guide in this history was met. What the transcripts do not contain is a dated, quantified path back to faster growth: each time analysts have asked, the answer has been macro plus execution. The debate the calls sharpen is therefore not whether the thesis holds but whether 2026's disciplined reinvestment, agentic AI and measurement reform are the mechanism of reacceleration or the vocabulary that accompanies its absence.

---

Competitors describe The Trade Desk, Inc.'s market in their own filings and calls. These verified passages and visual pages show where their strategies meet, using source documents preserved in Sources.

Amazon.com, Inc. (Amazon Ads / Amazon DSP) (AMZN)

Amazon runs the demand-side platform most often named as the direct threat to The Trade Desk's core business, and it is buying its way into exactly the inventory TTD depends on — Roku, Netflix, Disney, Spotify, SiriusXM. Only the advertising discussion is used here; AWS, Stores, devices and Project Kuiper/LEO are outside the comparison. Amazon does not disclose DSP revenue separately, so the exhibits are management's qualitative claims plus the total-ads line they sit inside.

Amazon's own framing of the Amazon DSP push, from the Q2 2025 call. The commercially material word is “exclusively”: Amazon states that access to Roku's 80 million connected-TV households runs through its own DSP, and pairs it with a direct integration to Disney's ad exchange. Both are supply arrangements in the channel that drives most of The Trade Desk's growth; the “80 million” figure is Amazon's own claim about authenticated CTV households, not an audited market measure, and the $15.7bn is total Amazon Ads revenue across retail, Prime Video, Twitch and third-party inventory — not DSP revenue, which Amazon does not break out.

Andrew Jassy (President and Chief Executive Officer): Moving on to Amazon ads. We're pleased with the strong growth, generating $15.7 billion of revenue in the quarter, growing 22% year-over-year. […] Another area we're excited about is our demand-side platform, or Amazon DSP. Our DSP enables advertisers to plan, activate, and measure full-funnel investments. Our trillions of proprietary browsing, shopping, and streaming signals, paired with extensive supply-side relationships and our secure clean rooms, provide advertisers the ability to optimize advertising, deliver greater precision, and drive efficient and effective advertising outcomes. And in June, we announced a momentous partnership with Roku, giving advertisers access to 80 million connected TV households—the largest authenticated connected TV footprint in the U.S.—exclusively through Amazon DSP. […] We also announced an integration between Disney's real-time ad exchange and Amazon DSP. This collaboration allows advertisers to gain direct access to Disney's premium inventory across platforms like Disney+, ESPN, and Hulu while allowing them to leverage insights from both companies.

p. 2 · Read in context →

Answering an analyst who asked management to disaggregate advertising growth between the core business, DSP and Prime Video, Amazon's CEO describes the DSP as having spent 20 months closing feature gaps and now being “fully featured.” That is a statement about historical weakness as much as current strength — the gap-closing is the argument for why Amazon can now compete for the enterprise programmatic budgets that independent DSPs have held. No revenue figure is attached to the DSP claim, and “largest connected TV presence in the U.S.” is Amazon's characterisation of its Roku partnership. The parser's “platform i expanding” is an OCR artefact of the source page, preserved as indexed.

Andrew Jassy (President and Chief Executive Officer): Our demand-side platform, Amazon DSP, is also growing rapidly. We have addressed customer feedback over the past 20 months and closed key gaps, making our DSP fully featured. Our partnership with Roku provides the largest connected TV presence in the U.S. Furthermore, we have added integration opportunities with ad inventory from Netflix, Spotify, and SiriusXM for our DSP customers. This combination is powerful, and our demand-side platform i expanding quickly, giving us a positive outlook on our progress while noting that we still have work to do. However, we are far from reaching our growth potential there.

p. 10 · Read in context →

The most recent quarter in the file. Two things to separate: the $17.2bn is all of Amazon Ads growing 22%, and the “leader in omnichannel advertising platforms” line is Amazon citing a third-party analyst report (Forrester) rather than a share statistic. What is new versus the prior exhibits is the data direction of travel — Amazon Audiences applies Amazon's shopping and streaming signals to Netflix inventory, extending the retail data advantage onto premium third-party CTV supply rather than only Amazon-owned screens.

Andrew R. Jassy (Chief Executive Officer): Moving on to Amazon Ads. We continue working to be the best place for brands of all sizes to grow their businesses, and we are pleased with the continued strong growth across our full-funnel offerings, generating $17.2 billion of revenue in the quarter and up 22% year over year. Forrester recently recognized Amazon as a leader in omnichannel advertising platforms, with unmatched supply and insights for connected TV and commerce media. We deepened our Netflix partnership with Amazon Audiences, which enables advertisers to apply Amazon’s exclusive signals from shopping, browsing, and streaming to Netflix’s highly engaged viewers to reach the right audiences and drive even stronger performance. We also partner with Comcast to expand local advertising to thousands of brands, and expanded interactive video ad capabilities to partners starting with Samsung TVs.

p. 4 · Read in context →

Viant Technology Inc. (DSP)

The closest thing in the peer set to a like-for-like comparison: a buy-side-only, independent DSP with a CTV-led mix, selling against the same walled gardens. Viant's 10-K names The Trade Desk as a competitor, and on its calls management repeatedly benchmarks itself against TTD by name — on growth rate, on account wins, and on whether TTD is still “independent” after OpenPath. It is roughly a fiftieth of TTD's size, so the exhibits are worth reading as positioning by a challenger, not as evidence of share shift.

Asked by an analyst how the competitive environment evolves as Google and Amazon build out their DSPs, Viant's CEO turns the question onto The Trade Desk. The specific charge is that OpenPath and supply-path monetisation move TTD into sell-side territory and therefore out of the “objective buy-side only” category. Read against the Q1 FY2026 exhibit above — recorded two quarters later, where Viant puts TTD back inside that category — the framing is inconsistent, which is itself a reason to treat it as competitive positioning rather than analysis. “wit some” is an OCR artefact in the indexed page.

Tim Vanderhook (Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer): I mean, I view the competitive space as getting smaller and smaller. Trade Desk has made specific moves around OpenPath and charging for what used to be SSP territory. So we made in our prepared comments Google wants to sell you YouTube. Amazon wants to sell you Prime Video. And Trade Desk wants to redirect your spends through OpenPath, their own SSP where they are making incremental margins. Viant takes a different approach from that, and so we see less competition. You look at truly objective buy-side only platforms. Historically, there was The Trade Desk and ourselves. I think wit some of The Trade Desk's recent moves, that puts them more in the, I guess, no longer independent or objective when it comes to the pathways.

p. 9 · Read in context →

Alphabet Inc. (Google advertising — YouTube, Google Network, DV360) (GOOGL)

Google is both the largest buyer-side platform competitor (Display & Video 360, Google Marketing Platform) and the owner of the CTV property that competes hardest for the budgets TTD sells against. Only the advertising discussion is used — Cloud, TPUs, Gemini infrastructure, Waymo and Other Bets are excluded. The Google Network line is the most directly comparable disclosure in the peer set: it is Google's own revenue from third-party, non-owned inventory, the same open-web pool TTD monetises.

The single most useful line Google publishes for sizing the open internet. “Network” is Google's revenue from advertising served on third-party publisher properties rather than its own — structurally the same pool The Trade Desk buys in — and it is shrinking (down 4% here; down 2% to $7.8bn in the Q4 FY2025 call, down 1% in Q2 FY2026) while Google's owned YouTube inventory grows double digits. Google gives no reason for the decline on this page, and the trend does not distinguish between budget leaving the open web and budget leaving Google's share of it.

Philipp Schindler (President & Chief Business Officer): Google Services revenues were $90 billion for the quarter, up 16% year-on-year, primarily driven by the continued growth of Search, adding some further color to our results. Certain Other delivered 19% growth, primarily driven by retail and finance. YouTube advertising revenues grew 11%, driven by direct response followed by brand. Network advertising revenues were down 4% year-on-year.

p. 3 · Read in context →

Google's stated position in the living room, the channel that carries most of The Trade Desk's growth. The “three consecutive years” streaming watch-time claim is attributed to Nielsen on the prior quarter’s call (Q4 FY2025, p4) and carries no source on this page; it measures viewing time, not advertising share, and YouTube's inventory is largely unavailable through independent DSPs. The second fragment is the collision point in miniature — curated premium supply, packaged by genre and sold with cross-format CTV measurement, is the product independent platforms sell too.

Philipp Schindler (President & Chief Business Officer): Turning to YouTube, which now has led streaming watch time in the U.S. for three consecutive years. We're in an unmatched position to connect brands with the audiences they care about in the moment they engage. […] We've also made it easier to buy premium ad space in top-tier podcast shows by curating the most watched podcasts into popular genres. For example, Super Group partnered with YouTube creator Liza Koshy on a multi-format Shorts and long-form CTV campaign, resulting in a 93% lift for their Glowscreen product and a 55% overall brand lift. […] Brands are benefiting from growth in the living room where we continue to scale greater brand deals.

p. 4 · Read in context →

Nexxen International Ltd. (NEXN)

Nexxen sits on both sides of The Trade Desk: it runs its own enterprise DSP that competes for the same advertiser budgets, and it is simultaneously a supplier — licensing smart-TV ACR data to TTD and routing smart-TV home-screen inventory into TTD's Ventura ecosystem. That dual position makes its disclosures unusually informative about how supply-path optimisation and CTV pricing are landing on the sell side. Nexxen's transcripts in this file are web-page captures with cookie-banner text interleaved by the parser; quotes are drawn from clean paragraphs only.

A guidance cut attributed in part to a large DSP customer pushing supply-path optimisation. Nexxen does not name the customer here or elsewhere on the call — it describes only “our leading DSP customer” — so the identification should not be assumed, though Nexxen names The Trade Desk as one of its major DSP partners on the following quarter's call. The second fragment is the strategic response and the reason Nexxen belongs in a competitive set at all: build up its own DSP and data platform to “reduce third-party reliance.”

Ofer Druker (Chief Executive Officer): While we are encouraged by our momentum and strategic progress, we are disappointed to lower guidance due to near-term headwinds, including softness in select channels and a shift in our leading DSP customer reinforcing its SPO strategy. […] Our strategy is evolving, not changing, as we are doubling down on our DSP, discovery, and broader data platform to drive enterprise adoption, strengthen end-to-end revenue opportunities, and reduce third-party reliance.

p. 10 · Read in context →

Nexxen defining a new CTV inventory pool — the smart-TV home screen — and naming The Trade Desk as the first DSP to plug into it (the sentence continues onto the next page: “following an agreement between V, The Trade Desk, and Nexxen International Ltd. to bring this inventory into The Trade Desk Ventura ecosystem”). This is the partnership face of the relationship, and it cuts in TTD's favour: exclusive-feeling access to a surface Nexxen says was previously sold only through direct deals. The ten-minutes-per-day figure is Nexxen's citation of Nielsen; no inventory volume or pricing is given.

Ofer Druker (Chief Executive Officer): scaled programmatic access to home screen inventory on CTV OEMs. I would like to provide some background, as this type of CTV media has not historically been available for programmatic activation. When a user turns on their smart TV, they land on the operating system home screen, which presents them with a menu of apps and content to consume. […] According to Nielsen, viewers spend an average of about ten minutes per day on this screen deciding what to watch, making it a highly visible and valuable surface. Until now, advertising space on this page has been sold and managed through direct deals and ad servers. Our innovations transform this surface into a fully programmatic advertising opportunity. […] Vidaa, which rebranded as V, is a CTV operating system for Hisense and other OEM brands, and is our first OS partner to adopt this technology, which is now integrated across V-powered devices globally. As announced by The Trade Desk last week, we are pleased to welcome them as our first strategic DSP partner to adopt the solution

p. 9 · Read in context →

A sell-side read on CTV pricing. Nexxen reports its own CTV revenue down 17% year over year and lists “more competitive CTV CPMs” among the causes — i.e. falling prices per thousand impressions as streaming supply expands. Falling CPMs are ambiguous for a buy-side platform: cheaper inventory can pull budget in, while platform revenue tied to a percentage of spend moves with the price paid. This is one company's channel mix, not an industry CPM index.

Sagi Niri (Chief Financial Officer): We also observed year-over-year decreases in CTV and display, as well as reduced spending within our government, retail, and education verticals. CTV revenue declined 17% year-over-year in Q3, or 13% ex-political, to $24.5 million. […] Results were impacted by decreased activity from select third-party deals, partners within our ONP and PMP channels, tariff-related spending reductions from certain customers, and more competitive CTV CPMs.

p. 11 · Read in context →

Criteo S.A. (CRTO)

Criteo competes for open-internet performance budgets and is the scaled incumbent in retail/commerce media — the adjacent pool The Trade Desk has been building toward. It is also the first ad-tech company to take demand into ChatGPT, which puts it directly alongside TTD in the emerging AI-surface inventory race. Only the advertising business is relevant; Criteo has no CTV buying platform of comparable scale, which is why it carries two exhibits rather than three.

Criteo's claim to first-mover status on advertising inside ChatGPT, with a stated 1,000+ brands live. The relevance to The Trade Desk is that AI assistants are being contested as a new inventory surface by more than one buy-side platform at once; Criteo's angle is commerce intent rather than open-web reach. No revenue is attached to the ChatGPT integration, and “over $1 trillion in e-commerce transactions” is Criteo's description of data visibility, not spend it monetises.

Michael Komasinski (Chief Executive Officer, Director): This is powered by our unique commerce data foundation with visibility into over $1 trillion in e-commerce transactions annually and reach across billions of daily active users, products, and interactions, allowing us to operate at scale. […] We became OpenAI's first ad tech partner, integrating our demand into ChatGPT's advertising offering with a focus on experiences that are relevant, additive, and built on user trust. This positions us at the forefront of a new high-intent Discovery Channel for our advertiser clients. […] We now have over 1,000 brands live with incremental budgets from both existing and new clients, strong agency traction, and early expansion across international markets.

p. 3 · Read in context →

Criteo's stated position in retail media, the category The Trade Desk has been pushing into through retail data partnerships. The supply claims are specific and checkable in kind — 70% of the top 30 US retailers, 235 retailer clients — and are about exclusive on-site inventory that is not biddable through an independent DSP. The third fragment is where the two businesses meet head-on: “offsite” retail media is retailer data activated against open-web and CTV inventory, which is the same motion TTD sells. The 2000% ROAS figure is a single campaign result reported by Criteo.

Michael Komasinski (Chief Executive Officer, Director): Turning to Retail Media. Retail Media is the fastest growing segment of digital advertising and a growth engine for Criteo. We have a clear leadership position and unmatched supply at scale, including 70% of the top 30 retailers in the US and half of the top 30 retailers in EMEA. […] As a trusted partner to 235 retailers, we see agentic commerce reshaping how consumers discover products, not where commerce happens. […] Offsite, which extends Retail Media beyond retail properties, is becoming more strategic and increasingly always on. One of the world's largest computer brands partnered with us on our largest Commerce Max offsite activation to date this quarter. The campaign reached seven million unique Costco shoppers and delivered more than 2000% ROAS during Cyber Week.

p. 5 · Read in context →

Adobe Inc. (Adobe Advertising) (ADBE)

Adobe operates a full demand-side platform of its own, and the interesting thing is what its filings now say about it. Only the Publishing and Advertising segment and the Adobe Advertising product description are used here — Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and the Digital Experience marketing suite are outside the comparison. Adobe is last in this set because the exhibits document a competitor stepping back from the category rather than contesting it.

Adobe describing a product that competes with The Trade Desk's — “an end-to-end, demand-side platform” spanning video, display and search across channels and screens — while filing it under a segment Adobe itself labels “legacy,” alongside eLearning, web conferencing and PostScript printing. The classification, not the product description, is the exhibit: this is a scaled software company declining to treat programmatic buying as a growth business.

Our Publishing and Advertising segment contains legacy products and services that address diverse market opportunities including eLearning solutions, technical document publishing, web conferencing, document and forms platform, web App development, high-end printing and our Adobe Advertising offerings. […] Adobe Advertising delivers an end-to-end, demand-side platform for managing advertising across digital formats and simplifies the delivery of video, display and search advertising across channels and screens. […] We generate revenue in our legacy Publishing products and services by licensing our technology to original equipment manufacturers that manufacture workflow software, printers and other output devices, and we generally generate revenue in Advertising through usage-based offerings.

p. 7 · Read in context →

A year later, the standalone description of Adobe Advertising as a demand-side platform is gone from the segment discussion, and from fiscal 2026 the segment that housed it stops being reported separately at all. The scale involved is small: p61 of the same filing puts total Publishing and Advertising revenue at $256 million in fiscal 2025, down 7% and about 1% of Adobe's revenue — and that figure covers the whole legacy bundle, not the DSP alone. For a competitive read on the DSP market, the signal is disclosure being withdrawn rather than a competitor scaling up.

Publishing and Advertising. Our Publishing and Advertising offerings contain legacy solutions including eLearning solutions, technical document publishing, web conferencing, document and forms platform, web App development, high-end printing through Adobe PostScript and Adobe PDF standards and our Adobe Advertising offerings. […] Effective in the first quarter of fiscal 2026, we will combine our prior segments—Digital Media, Digital Experience and Publishing and Advertising—into a single operating and reportable segment due to changes in how management intends to evaluate results, allocate resources and execute the strategic opportunities outlined above.

p. 18 · Read in context →

More peer documents

Viant Technology — FY2025 Form 10-K — FY2025 · 115 pages · Page 14's Competition section names The Trade Desk in Viant's own market definition (“public companies exclusively serving our industry, such as The Trade Desk”), repeated as a risk factor on p26; p45 discloses that a former TTD Chief Legal Officer sits on Viant's board. · Open →

Viant Technology — Q4 FY2025 earnings call — Q4 FY2025 · 15 pages · Pages 12–14 are management's read on The Trade Desk–OpenAI, why they think it does not fit the RTB protocol on privacy grounds, and a jab at agency lock-in (“you do not need to go to Trade Desk Academy for two weeks”). · Open →

Alphabet — Q4 FY2025 earnings call — Q4 FY2025 · 11 pages · Page 1 puts YouTube's annual revenue above $60bn across ads and subscriptions; p5 has the Network line at $7.8bn down 2%, the cleanest quarterly datapoint on Google's shrinking third-party inventory business. · Open →

Alphabet — FY2025 Form 10-K — FY2025 · 99 pages · Page 54 lists the buying surfaces Google sells through — Google Ads, Google Ad Manager, Display & Video 360, Google Marketing Platform — and p20 carries the risk-factor version of the ad-tech remedies exposure quoted here from the legal note. · Open →

Nexxen — Q1 FY2026 earnings call — Q1 FY2026 · 33 pages · Pages 10, 11 and 18 track the TTD relationship forward: TTD, StackAdapt, Basis and others onboarding to the home-screen solution, AdForm joining the data-licensing roster, and management's account of why they led with The Trade Desk (“the standards and the reputation”). · Open →

Criteo — Q2 FY2025 earnings call — Q2 FY2025 · 15 pages · Page 3 lays out the cross-channel/full-funnel/self-service strategy and the plan to scale “curated supply with retailer data deals easily accessible through any DSP” — Criteo positioning itself as a data layer inside other platforms, TTD included. · Open →