Credit: Florian Schmetz via Unsplash
Media buying platform and global advertising technology company The Trade Desk posted better than expected September quarter results with revenue up 18% to $US739 million.
Excluding political spend in last year’s September quarter, revenue grew by 22%.
CTV remains the company’s largest and fastest-growing channel, continuing to grow at a faster rate than the overall business.
Jeff Green, CEO and co-founder, said momentum is fuelled by new product innovations across the company’s Kokai platform.
“As AI transforms the advertising ecosystem, customers globally are relying on The Trade Desk to enable objective, data-rich buying across channels and partners, to drive real-world outcomes for their businesses,” he said.
“The pace of our innovation reinforces our leadership position across CTV, retail media, and the open internet more broadly.
“As we close out 2025 and look to the future, we believe The Trade Desk is uniquely positioned to capture more market share as we help advertisers succeed on the open internet and drive measurable business growth through data and AI.”
He said retail media continues to scale rapidly as well, and we are seeing strong adoption across verticals as more shopper marketing budgets flow into programmatic and more retailers turn to The Trade Desk.
Green said a shift to bidable CTV is accelerating.
“We expect Decision CTV will become the default buying model in the years ahead,” he said.
“The advantages of Decision buying compared to traditional programmatic guaranteed or insertional order models are so significant in terms of flexibility, control, and performance that the choice for advertisers is becoming increasingly obvious.”
He said AI is fast-tracking progress for companies that are eager to put their data to work and can leverage automation intelligently.
“Big brands are increasingly and rightfully leery of walled gardens as the AI-fueled future materialises,” he said.
“Advertiser and agency data is more valuable in this AI world than ever. It is also less defensible in the hands of our big tech competitors who are ridden with conflict of interest and have insatiable appetites to own advertisers’ data.
“AI is accelerating the path to the open internet having vastly superior price discovery and fungibility.
“A world with better price discovery and better open internet supply chains for the quality content will decrease the value of user-generated content destinations and other similar apps and sites that are full of ads and unsafe content.
“Premium content and deliberate data-driven targeted buying is the only way for the biggest brands and advertisers to remain competitive.
“Nearly every big tech player in advertising, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, is primarily focused on expanding and monetising their owned and operated inventory and content.
“Google is clearly focused on search, their AI chatbot Gemini, and YouTube. Amazon’s primary advertising efforts are focused on growing sponsored listings and then secondarily on Prime Video. Both are putting Amazon-owned and operated inventory first.
“Facebook continues to focus on monetising Instagram and Facebook as destinations, and TikTok the same. None of these companies are focused on monetising the open internet.”
The company expects December quarter revenue of at least $840 million.
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