The Trade Desk declined to comment on specific teams impacted.
The 15% layoff figure makes the no-distress framing a hard sell. The Trade Desk’s market cap has fallen by over 80% since its peak in 2024, from $69 billion to under $7 billion. Meanwhile, Magnite, once a distant also-ran in the DSP space, is closing that gap, sitting near $4 billion.
The drop comes even as The Trade Desk has put in efforts over the last 12 months to respond to advertisers’ wants, with a redesigned Kokai and a slate of new agentic tools.
Brian O’Kelley, the AppNexus founder and longtime adtech aficionado, argues The Trade Desk was never built to be like the tech companies that are now its most threatening rivals. Google and Amazon, he tells me, are ad networks and publishers—they own the inventory they sell, which lets them capture an outsized share. The Trade Desk’s pitch was that it was objective and independent of owning the inventory, but that meant it missed out on that additional margin.
O’Kelley is skeptical of The Trade Desk’s open-web bet specifically. Programmatic, as an ecosystem, was built for the open web—and the future of the open web is very much in flux.
The Trade Desk has been vocal about shifting some of that effort to CTV, but O’Kelley said that streaming isn’t the escape hatch either. “CTV is not open and is a bad bet. It’s consolidating, and streaming surfaces are buying each other and closing up,” he said.
That leaves The Trade Desk without much to hold onto. The company is downstream of the agencies, O’Kelley said: If agencies decide they like Magnite’s terms better, the money moves. “There isn’t a lot of moat there,” he said. “Jeff [Green] either has to make a big bet to stay independent, or get acquired.”
