When The Trade Desk started paying more attention to the sell side of the ad tech business, they wanted to improve inventory quality and prune out resellers.
Their initial sell-side projects, like OpenPath in 2022 and the S&P500+ in 2024, were controversial. Publishers worried about how being anointed (or not) would affect their business.
And recently, The Trade Desk made another contentious decision. CEO Jeff Green announced plans to build a branched-off version of Prebid that contains its beloved signal, the Transaction ID (which Prebid pulled in its current form from its wrapper).
More details will come at the Prebid Summit next week, but publishers see the move as creating more work for them. And, ultimately, they wonder if a wrapper operated by a price-minimizing buyer could be good for a price-maximizing publisher.
There’s also a lot of trauma to unpack. Publishers have a history of being gaslit by ad tech platforms who proclaim to have their best interests at heart, only to be secretly operating auctions differently from their stated practices or running projects to boost their profits and market share at the expense of their customers.
For publishers who are seeing the Google ad tech antitrust trial play out, hearing an ad tech leader say they’re not moving into the sell side while announcing a sell side project feels like doublespeak.
On this week’s podcast, we share reactions from the industry about The Trade Desk’s latest product move, the details publishers are waiting on and how this project fits into ad tech history – because this is a movie many of us have seen before.
