CTV advertising is booming, with the channel growing by 13% in 2025 to $26.6 billion and projected to hit $51 billion by 2029.
In this environment, you’d expect to see sustained overperformance from The Trade Desk, a CTV aggregator with video representing a high-40s percentage of its business. But for some time now, TTD has only experienced deceleration.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s ad business is pulling away.
This divergence reveals how buy-side priorities in the CTV market are shifting. Advertisers have grown wary of how The Trade Desk earns margin, where its algorithm steers inventory and how these strategies compete with buyer goals.
The growth gap tells the story
TTD’s downward trend kicked off in 2024, when CTV ad spend grew by 16%.
After averaging 26% growth through the first three quarters of 2024, TTD’s Q4 growth slowed to 22%, resulting in the company infamously missing its own revenue guidance for the first time in 33 quarters. More concerning, TTD’s Q1 2025 guidance of 17% growth represented a significant deceleration.
Amazon, by contrast, maintained 19% advertising growth in Q3 2024 on a base of tens of billions. Executives credited DSP improvements, deeper CTV partnerships with Roku and Disney and first-party audiences across Prime Video, Fire TV and live sports.
Fast-forward to today: Amazon reported 23% YOY ad revenue growth in Q4 2025, outpacing CTV market growth by 10%.
But The Trade Desk reported just 14% growth in Q4. And its Q1 2026 guidance projects a 10% growth rate, continuing its downward trend.
The pricing problem
This divergence doesn’t just come down to Amazon’s size, its first-party data advantage or that it has its own retail media and CTV inventory to sell. Competition between the two companies has also exposed flaws in The Trade Desk’s margin-based revenue model.
TTD’s legacy model thrived when platform fees could be buried in CPMs. For much of programmatic’s history, reconciliation from UI to invoice hasn’t always been obvious. Activating features within a DSP often created incremental fees without clear disclosure. Regulators and sophisticated buyers now call some of these practices “junk fees” and “dark patterns.”
The Trade Desk launched its OpenPath direct-to-publisher connections as a transparency play: By cutting out intermediary take rates, the DSP could return that efficiency to buyers.
But, in late 2024, TTD introduced a 4.5% publisher fee for OpenPath supply. On each OpenPath impression, TTD now collects its buy-side platform fee (a percentage of CPM often in the mid-teens), the 4.5% publisher fee and a Predictive Clearing bid-shading fee charged to the buyer (which is embedded in the CPM, typically absent from contract and invoice). The DSP also charges separate fees for other data, identity or measurement add-ons.
In other words, TTD earns revenue on both sides of the transaction. And the increase in demand flowing to OpenPath since TTD branded all SSPs as “resellers” in August looks like algorithm steering from the buy side.
TTD locked in this algorithmic bias with the launch of its AI-driven Performance Mode, which activates OpenPath prioritization and Predictive Clearing by default. Buyers can adjust custom settings using the platform’s Control Mode, but, if they do, they must pay additional fees to access Performance Mode deal bundles.
It’s not a coincidence that these platform changes coincided with TTD’s reported Q4 EBITDA margin of 47% and an effective take rate of about 21%.
Amazon is selling a different story: massive authenticated reach, trillions of first-party signals and zero fees on first-party programmatic guaranteed deals.
When one platform’s 20+% take rate gives it a reputation as “The Cha-Ching Desk” and the other is selling value at scale, the CTV dollars will tilt accordingly.
WPP and Dentsu exited OpenPath over concerns about economics and opacity. And because bigger DSP margins compound into higher customer-acquisition costs and weaker ROAS, don’t be surprised if other agencies follow suit.
Information asymmetry is collapsing
For years, the core advantage in ad tech was information asymmetry: Whoever best understood the auction mechanics, fee structure and log data had the most power.
That advantage is evaporating. Enterprise advertisers, who are moving hundreds of millions from linear TV to programmatic CTV, are asking better questions and sharing experiences. AI tools now sit on every media buyer’s desktop, ready to highlight hidden fees, reconcile invoices and redline MSAs. The bridge from contract language to platform behavior to P&L impact is becoming machine-readable.
When transparency becomes commoditized, opaque economics shift from feature to liability.
In this new reality, The Trade Desk’s moat won’t be a black-box bid engine. Instead, it should prioritize strategic advisory and service where it’s genuinely differentiated. And it should pivot toward treating contract clarity as a first-class product feature.
What this means for the industry
While TTD’s growth is stalling, CTV advertising isn’t slowing down. Digital video captured nearly 60% of all TV ad spend in 2025. The opportunity is massive.
But market growth doesn’t automatically translate to proportional share.
The path forward isn’t complicated. Platforms should disclose all fees at the point of activation and on invoice line items, not buried in a CPM.
For TTD, here are a few suggestions: Surface Predictive Clearing pricing transparently in invoices. Allow buyers to manage Performance Mode settings without being pushed into Control Mode, where fees compound. And be more open not just about supply-chain quality but the margins baked into programmatic deals.
The Trade Desk can turn its deceleration trend around. It has real assets to capitalize on: 95%+ customer retention, strong service partnerships and scaled relationships on both sides of the supply chain.
Those are differentiators worth paying for – as long as CTV buyers truly understand the costs.
“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
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