The Trade Desk generated $715 million in Q2, up by only 3% year-over-year.
Shares dropped by more than 20% in after-hours trading immediately after TTD reported its results on Thursday.
“Our revenue growth is below our expectations and below the standard we hold ourselves to,” CEO Jeff Green told investors.
Although he also cautioned that TTD’s underwhelming top-line numbers last quarter are not reflective of the underlying health of the business.
Green noted that certain categories – notably automotive and many CPG brand – are facing major headwinds, from macroeconomic and political turmoil to persistent commodity pressures, including declining West African cocoa harvests to rising aluminum costs.
Those headwinds are largely hitting the biggest legacy advertisers.
CPG giants like Procter & Gamble, for example, “were once the biggest in advertising,” Green said, “and they are still one of the biggest.”
That’s reflected in The Trade Desk’s customer mix. Green said that “almost all” of the spend flowing through the DSP comes from Fortune 500 companies. But the real acceleration is happening outside of TTD’s 500 largest brand accounts, where growth is at 50% year-over-year so far in 2026.
In other words, TTD is seeing what Green called “green shoots” from smaller challenger or ecommerce-native brands, as well as more than 30% growth in its EMEA and APAC businesses – a shift from previous years when growth was concentrated mainly in the US.
He also called out audio ads, which are now TTD’s fastest-growing media type, a sign that CTV has matured and is growing off a larger base. Audio accounted for 7% of total spend in Q2.
But even with these green shoots, Wall Street is worried about something more fundamental: pricing.
For investors, many of TTD’s problems and market vulnerabilities come down to the company’s persistently high take rate – within a point or two of 20% for the past decade. In its 10 years as a public company, TTD’s take rate has risen five times and dropped five times, Green told analyst Justin Patterson of Keybanc Capital Markets, who asked whether Green had changed his “pricing philosophy” and would consider cutting fees to win back business.
“If we can grow faster or win more business by changing that price or changing the approach, we’ll always look at it and consider it,” Green said. But, he added, TTD is confident in its pricing and has been able to keep its take rate consistent over years while also adding incremental value with new products and partnerships.
“I don’t think that the net number has to change dramatically because we’re extremely confident that we’re adding more value than we cost,” he said.
Meanwhile, as usual, Green also used TTD’s earnings call to take shots at walled garden platform products, specifically citing the Amazon DSP – which touts its zero-margin take rate – and Google’s new Buyer Direct program, which funnels programmatic direct deals to publishers that use GAM and caps ad tech vendor and data fees at roughly 10%.
In Green’s view, these services do not represent the interests of buyers, though. Buyer Direct is explicitly a publisher tool, and the buy-side ad tech on offer from Amazon and Google respectively is likewise built to serve their own media, including Amazon Prime, Amazon Sponsored Product Ads, YouTube and ads across Google.
Those platforms may trumpet their low fees, but the costs are just being shuffled, Green argued, and in the process they deliver lower-quality inventory on the open web.
“These approaches look more like ad networks of 2006 than reflect the progress that our industry has made in the last 20 years,” Green said.
Which begs the somewhat facetious but also fair question: What progress has our industry made in the last 20 years?
