Competitors

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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