On September 4, The Trade Desk told the SEC it was cutting about 15% of its global workforce, at a cost of $39 million to $51 million, mostly severance. The same day, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced the company was leaving the S&P 500. It skipped the MidCap 400 entirely and landed in the SmallCap 600, effective September 21, fourteen months after it got in.
Third-quarter guidance is “at least $650 million,” against $739 million a year ago. The stock closed at $139.51 on December 4, 2024. It traded around $12.66 this morning. Jeff Green’s internal email, which the company published, said layoffs “have not been a common practice at TTD. We don’t expect it to become one.”
Six days after that email, Amazon Ads announced that Amazon DSP advertisers can now extend campaigns into conversational ads inside ChatGPT.
I have sold independence before
Oracle Advertising’s pitch, when I carried a bag there, was that Oracle didn’t own media, so its data and measurement had no thumb on the scale. Buyers loved that in the meeting. Then the walled gardens kept their first-party data to themselves, third-party data got harder to use everywhere else, and Oracle’s ad revenue went from roughly $2 billion to $300 million before Safra Catz shut the unit down in 2024. The buyers agreed with us right up to the end. Agreement turned out to be free.
Green has made the same argument for a decade, and he’s better at it than we were. In 2017 he told Forbes the company’s advantage over the big media owners was “objectivity.” In January 2025 he told AdExchanger, “We don’t own content. We never have and never will.” On the August earnings call he said “our independence becomes even more valuable to advertisers, publishers, retailers and technology partners alike in the long term.” He may be right about the long term. The 8-K is about this quarter.
Buyers rank The Trade Desk first and give Amazon the money
Digiday’s DSP scorecard in June had buyers rating The Trade Desk 7.2 out of 10, ahead of Google’s DV360 at 7.0 and Amazon at 6.1. One buyer called it “like driving a Lexus rather than a Toyota.” Customer retention is still above 95%. And Digiday reports Amazon DSP fees are near zero on programmatic guaranteed deals, against The Trade Desk’s historical 15 to 20%.
So buyers keep the account open, say nice things in surveys, and route the incremental dollar to the DSP that owns the inventory and can price the software at nothing. Amazon Ads did $19.8 billion last quarter, up 26%. DV360 runs more than a fifth of open-web display on its own. Every supply owner has figured out the same move: when you own the inventory or the data, the software fee is a rounding error and the money gets made on media. The Trade Desk’s 15 to 20% is the price of not owning anything, and buyers paid it happily while it bought them something the walled gardens couldn’t. Amazon selling ChatGPT inventory through its DSP is the walled garden selling the open web too.
This isn’t an obituary
Green bought about $150 million of his own stock in March, retention is 95%, and the case for an independent buy-side gets stronger every time Amazon or Google reports on its own inventory. Publishers need a buyer that isn’t also their landlord. The open question is whether that buyer gets paid 15% or 2% for the service, and the SmallCap 600 is the market’s current guess.
If your pitch contains the word independent, neutral or objective, write down what the buyer pays for it. A number, in dollars, this quarter. If you can’t produce one, the buyer can’t either, and the buyer will take the Toyota.
S&P put Bloom Energy, Illumina and Everpure into the index in The Trade Desk’s place. None of them sells objectivity.