The Numbers
$847 million: Revenue for Q4 2025, up 14% year-over-year. Growth slowed compared to 22% YoY in Q4 2024.
$2.9B: Revenue for 2025, up 18% YoY, down from 26% in 2024.
$2.9B: Revenue for 2025, up 18% YoY
$678 million: Revenue guidance for Q1 2026.
Almost 100%: The number of clients using its core platform Kokai. The Trade Desk has previously stated it plans to move all clients to Kokai by end of 2025.
Watercooler Talk
CEO Jeff Green pointed to weakness among consumer packaged goods and automotive advertisers—two sectors that together account for more than a quarter of The Trade Desk’s business—as a key factor weighing down growth. He said some brands in those categories have pulled back on advertising and shifted toward cost-cutting amid macroeconomic pressures, including inflation and tariff uncertainty, trends that began in the second half of 2025 and have continued into this year.
On the AI front, Green said every engineer at The Trade Desk is using AI tools to write or test code and drive productivity. The company plans to launch an agentic AI framework for partners in 2026, though he stopped short of sharing specifics.
When an analyst pressed Green if The Trade Desk has the scale when it comes to deploying AI to compete with Amazon or Google’s DV360, Green responded saying “this is a game of winning trust. It’s over a trillion-dollar TAM—there’s plenty to focus on, and you don’t make it a part-time job. All of those companies—their DSPs are part-time jobs. Their AI efforts and cloud products are at odds with them owning the DSP.”
The Trade Desk reorganized its go-to-market approach around a “brand-first” model, Green said, with “unified teams” now responsible for both business development and spend activation. Green added that the move increases the number of advertisers it works with directly while eliminating overlapping coverage between agency and advertiser teams.
These changes come as agency giants including Dentsu and WPP pulled the plug on OpenPath–The Trade Desk’s most closely watched technology initiatives–over control and transparency concerns, ADWEEK previously reported.
The technology was a key topic on today’s investor call, with an analyst asking about its future. Green defended OpenPath, saying: “When there is a supply chain that is inefficient and opaque, having a more efficient one next to it proves in an A/B test that B is less efficient. OpenPath is meant to be competitive. At a moment where many agencies are focused on principle-based buying—not doing as good of a job representing their clients—and SSPs are convoluting the ecosystem, spending much of their time trying to exploit it.”
Meanwhile, CTV remains central to The Trade Desk’s strategy, with the company highlighting premium inventory, live-event opportunities such as NBCUniversal’s 2026 Winter Olympics.
