jeff green

The Trade Desk, once a Wall Street darling, now faces the challenge of rebuilding goodwill across the investor community and the ad tech industry.

Bold, accountable leaders who publicly embrace conflict and challenge industry fraud are essential to spark innovation in digital advertising and ad tech, writes Alessandro De Zanche.

From headline to punchline, AdExchanger’s weekly comics distill ad tech industry news into something our readers can laugh about. These are our faves of the year.

Unauthorized ID stuffing, rampant reselling and misaligned signals inflict incredible damage on the programmatic ecosystem. If publishers want to compete with the walled gardens, we must raise our standards. 

The Trade Desk is cutting its workforce. A company spokesperson confirmed the news with AdExchanger. The layoffs affect less than 1% of the company.

Spencer has exited The Trade Desk after 12 years, marking another major leadership change amid friction with ad tech trade groups and intensifying competition across the DSP landscape.

Two sources at ad tech platforms that observe programmatic bidding patterns said they’ve seen Omnicom agencies shifting spend from The Trade Desk to Amazon DSP in Q3. The Trade Desk denies any such shift.

The Trade Desk posted solid Q3 results on Thursday, with $739 million in revenue, up 18% year over year. But the main narrative for TTD this year is less about the numbers and more about optics and competitive dynamics.

Magnite says it’s not mad at The Trade Desk for prioritizing OpenPath or labeling all supply-side platforms as “resellers.”

The Trade Desk is going after Amazon; Facebook creators are going after Meta; and everybody’s going after Warner Bros. Discovery.

TTD shared new details about OpenAds features that let publishers see for themselves whether it’s running a fair auction. But tension between TTD and Prebid hung over the event.

Enjoy this weekly comic from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem … 

Morgan Stanley downgrades The Trade Desk; Warner Bros. Discovery and Nielsen announce a new deal; and brands aren’t sold on virtual influencers.

The Trade Desk has won the battle for supremacy on the open internet, says Needham & Company’s Laura Martin. But it might just be losing the war for the future of the web to walled gardens and AI search.

When The Trade Desk sneezes, ad tech catches a cold.

The Trade Desk continued its shaky 2025 earnings schedule when it reported Q2 results on Thursday.

The Trade Desk currently has no concrete plans to deprecate its legacy Solimar user interface in order to push adoption of its new UI, Kokai.

If you felt a strange gust around 5 p.m. ET on Thursday, it was probably just the cumulative sighs of relief across Wall Street as The Trade Desk shook off its Q4 blues with a better-than-expected first quarter earnings report.

The Google antitrust ruling will have wide-reaching implications for the tech industry at large, not just the ad businesses therein. But in the meantime, it’s only natural to see programmatic veterans letting off a bit of steam.

Why is programmatic media buying so dang complicated? That question was an ever-present topic at the 2025 ANA Media Conference in Orlando, Florida this week.

The Trade Desk’s weak Q4 emboldened the company’s critics; DOGE’s cuts to federal agencies are hurting ad agencies; and President Trump fires the two remaining Democratic FTC commissioners.

What exactly are joint business partnerships? Plus, AI chatbot responses may be susceptible to Russian propaganda.

To zero in on premium inventory, The Trade Desk is analyzing metadata signals about ad placements and pushing adoption of its alternative ID. It’s also betting the farm on CTV.

Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk, calls it like he sees it. And he doesn’t see a future for Google monetizing the open internet via its SSP and ad server business.

The Trade Desk has said it will buy Sincera, a startup that aggregates and supplies metadata to ad tech companies. This is TTD’s second-ever public acquisition.

Every week, we publish an original comic creation inspired by trends in the online advertising industry. These are the stories – and the highly specific double entendres – behind AdExchanger’s top 10 comics of 2024.

For all intents and purposes, 2024 is already over. Which means now is a fine time to see how far CTV advertising has come by looking back at some of this year’s most-read stories on AdExchanger.

Curation is a reaction to programmatic’s worsening queries-per-second problem, says Permutive’s Joe Root. DSPs are biased toward impressions that have an identifier attached, so SSPs are using curated deal IDs as a stand-in for third-party cookies.

Despite CEO Jeff Green’s denials, the rumors turned out to be true: The Trade Desk has spent the last three years quietly building its streaming OS, called Ventura, to compete with the likes of Roku, Amazon’s Fire TV and Google’s Android.

“It’s hard not to be bullish about CTV when it’s both our largest channel and our fastest growing,” said The Trade Desk Founder and CEO Green during the company’s earnings report on Thursday.