When buyers use The Trade Desk (TTD), they face a byzantine fee structure, including platform fees, tech fees, bid-shading fees, OpenPath fees, and data fees.
On this week’s podcast, we speak to Sarah Caputo, founder of consultancy Fraction Method, about her column in AdExchanger about The Trade Desk’s fee structure. She argues that The Trade Desk should reduce its fees and make them more transparent. Why? Advertisers weighed down with fees will see their media performance decline. An accrual of hard-to-parse fees mean buyers can’t pick what fees work for their business needs.
Two fees, in particular, rankle. First, buyers must pay bid-shading fees to The Trade Desk whenever the DSP reduces a buyer’s maximum CPM in first-price auctions. So if the DSP says it bid a $4 CPM when the buyer could have been stuck with a $20 CPM, it will take a double-digit percentage out of that $16 CPM savings.
Second, the fee structures in “Performance” mode vs. “Control” mode require punishing trade-offs between control and fees. There needs to be a middle ground, Caputo says. Plus, why charge bid-shading fees when inventory goes through OpenPath? Is The Trade Desk exacting savings when negotiating with itself? The current setup doesn’t make sense, she says. “My feeling is that you own those pipes. Now what are you predicting in terms of CPM? You literally have access to all the data.”
The market is shifting to avoid this fee structure. The agencies WPP Media and Dentsu recently exited OpenPath over its fee structure and concerns about transparency. And the market-share-gaining Amazon DSP offers lower fees, including 1% programmatic guaranteed fees in some cases, that undercut the competition.
What The Trade Desk really needs to do is right-size its margins, Caputo says. If they lower their take rate, the performance will be more attractive to buyers and allow TTD to compete better with rival DSPs. Doing so will require growing revenue more slowly.
The Trade Desk predicts only a 10% growth rate, slower than that of the digital advertising market overall, so it might already be moving in that direction.
