TTD

AppLovin's ad engine handles more spend than Pinterest, Snapchat, and Reddit combined, posting $1.92 billion in Q2 2026 revenue at 84% EBITDA margins. Grieve passed, warning a rival could write a better algorithm and erase AppLovin's moat overnight, with 55% of top mobile games already on the platform. Grieve's valuation model reaches a $480 price target implying just a 9% CAGR, making the risk-reward unattractive despite aggressive buybacks and strong guidance. Just released. Our analysts combed the entire stock market and named the ten best stocks to buy right now. The report is free. Enter your email and see if any of your stocks made the cut. Shares of AppLovin (NASDAQ:APP) closed at $319.05 on September 2, marking a 52.7% year-to-date decline for a stock that spent late 2025 above $656. On the September 3, 2026, episode of The Investor's Podcast Network's We Study Billionaires, hosts Kyle Grieve and Shawn O'Malley devoted a full teardown to the mobile ad platform. Grieve framed the show as "TIP843: AppLovin (APP): The 30-Bagger Down More Than Half." After walking through the model, both hosts passed. The scale is the first thing that lands. Grieve noted that "the advertising spend on AppLovin is more than Pinterest, Snapchat's and Reddit's combined revenue." That comparison puts the AXON 2 engine in context for readers outside ad tech. AppLovin runs a marketplace where mobile game publishers and, increasingly, e-commerce brands bid for user attention through the company's recommendation algorithm. Asset-light in this context means the platform monetizes traffic without owning the audience: no content studio, no consumer app, minimal capex. O'Malley pointed to "over 79% over the last 12 months" adjusted EBITDA margins and $7.6 million in revenue per employee as evidence of that model. Q2 2026 revenue reached $1.92 billion, up 52.82% year over year, with an 84% adjusted EBITDA margin, per AppLovin's Q2 2026 8-K exhibit filed with the SEC. Free Report, Just Released Did Any of Your Stocks Make the Top 10 List? It is an uncomfortable question, and there is now an answer to it. 24/7 Wall St has helped investors make money for over two decades, and our top analysts just finished ranking the definitive Top 10 Stocks To Buy Now. Not the ten biggest companies. Not the ten everyone is arguing about. The ten best stocks to buy right now. Open your account and look at what you own. Some of it you bought for a reason you could still defend today. Some of it you bought years ago for a reason you can no longer remember. The report is free. Put the ten next to what you own and find out which is which. Enter Your Email and See the Ten → Free from 24/7 Wall St. It lands in your inbox. Grieve recounted CEO Adam Foroughi's 2015 decision to turn down an acquisition offer: "He walked away hoping for a valuation closer to a billion dollars. To give you an idea of how big a mistake that would have been, the company is now valued at a little over a hundred billion dollars today." AppLovin's market cap stands near $107.2 billion as of September 3, 2026. The anecdote set up the hosts' capital-allocation debate. Grieve graded the buyback program highly. AppLovin repurchased 1.1 million Class A shares for $551.3 million in Q2 2026 and 6.4 million shares for $2.58 billion across full-year 2025. O'Malley took a more skeptical view of overall capital allocation, citing prior M&A history that included studio acquisitions later divested. The company recorded a $188.9 million goodwill impairment and a $99.4 million loss from discontinued operations in FY 2025. Grieve graded buybacks well; O'Malley graded the full record as average. Both positions stayed on the table. Grieve's core concern was the durability of an algorithmic moat: "There's just something I don't really like about a business whose core advantage is a really good algorithm, because it feels like another business can just write a better algorithm and then poof, there goes your business model." He layered on saturation risk, noting roughly 55% of top mobile games are already on Max. O'Malley framed the same worry through platform economics. With Google and Meta, "it's sort of transcended just the algorithm" because network effects anchor the business regardless of which quarter's ranking model wins. AppLovin looks more like a pure technology bet in his framing. The hosts invoked a circle-of-competence argument, the Warren Buffett idea that investors should only underwrite businesses they can accurately model. Both said ad-tech algorithms sit outside theirs, echoing their earlier caution on Trade Desk (NASDAQ:TTD). Grieve's base case used a 17% revenue CAGR, 77% EBITDA margins, and a 13x EV/EBITDA multiple to reach a $480 price target implying a 9% CAGR. His verdict: "My thoughts on this business are that it's a pass. While it certainly offers upside, I just don't think I could find myself getting comfortable enough with the business to ever have it in the intrinsic value portfolio or my personal account." Foroughi is running the buyback aggressively, and Q3 2026 guidance calls for revenue of $2.055 billion to $2.085 billion at roughly 83% adjusted EBITDA margin. The CEO's conviction is expressed in capital returns. Grieve and O'Malley's restraint is a reminder that two disciplined investors can pass on one of the best businesses either of them has ever modeled without predicting a break. Readers weighing AppLovin after the drawdown should decide whether an algorithm is the kind of moat they are willing to hold through a competitive shock. If you have cash sitting in your account right now, give this two minutes. After more than two decades of helping investors beat the market, our top analysts at 24/7 Wall St. put together a definitive report on the Top 10 Stocks To Buy Today. They combed the entire market. It's not 10 ideas, not 10 stocks everyone is talking about, it's what their research point to as the 10 best stocks to buy right now, and it's free. Read more here and >;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas" data-yga="{"yLinkElement":"context_link","yModuleName":"content-canvas","yLinkText":"see which stocks made the cut -->"}" class="link ">see which stocks made the cut -->> Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Earlier this week, The Trade Desk filed an omnibus shelf registration covering Class A common stock, preferred stock, debt securities, warrants, and units, while also reporting weaker-than-expected Q2 2026 results and cautious guidance that prompted a mixed analyst response. At the same time, the company is pushing into midsize advertisers and rolling out new tools like Audience Unlimited and Zuma to deepen measurement capabilities and broaden its addressable customer base. We’ll now examine how the weaker Q2 results and cautious analyst outlook may reshape The Trade Desk’s broader investment narrative. We've uncovered the 12 dividend fortresses yielding 5%+ that don't just survive market storms, but thrive in them. To own Trade Desk today, you need to believe that independent, data driven advertising on the open Internet can still win meaningful budgets despite pressure from walled gardens and weaker recent fundamentals. The short term catalyst is whether new tools like Audience Unlimited and Zuma can reignite client spend after the soft Q2 2026 and cautious guidance. The mixed analyst reaction and shelf registration raise concern but do not yet appear to fundamentally change that core thesis. The omnibus shelf registration is the announcement that matters most here, because it sits alongside weaker Q2 2026 results, softer guidance, and a Hold consensus rating. While a shelf does not guarantee new securities will be issued, it can increase investor focus on capital intensity and the possibility of equity or debt financing at a time when analysts already highlight rising investment needs and declining sales projections as key concerns. Yet behind the product story, investors should also be aware of the growing risk that rising capital intensity and any future issuance under the new shelf could... Read the full narrative on Trade Desk (it's free!) Trade Desk's narrative projects $3.8 billion revenue and $629.8 million earnings by 2029. This requires 8.9% yearly revenue growth and about a $197 million earnings increase from $432.6 million today. Uncover how Trade Desk's forecasts yield a $24.45 fair value, a 84% upside to its current price. The lowest ranked analysts paint a much darker picture for you, with revenue shrinking about 5.5% a year and earnings falling toward about US$337.0 million, suggesting that data privacy and cookie restrictions could weigh far more heavily than the consensus narrative assumes. Explore 8 other fair value estimates on Trade Desk - why the stock might be worth over 2x more than the current price! Don't just follow the ticker - dig into the data and build a conviction that's truly your own. A great starting point for your Trade Desk research is our analysis highlighting 1 key reward and 2 important warning signs that could impact your investment decision. Our free Trade Desk research report provides a comprehensive fundamental analysis summarized in a single visual - the Snowflake - making it easy to evaluate Trade Desk's overall financial health at a glance. Every day counts. These free picks are already gaining attention. See them before the crowd does: AI is about to change healthcare. These 40 stocks are working on everything from early diagnostics to drug discovery. The best part - they are all under $10b in market cap - there's still time to get in early. Capitalize on the AI infrastructure supercycle with our selection of the 55 best 'picks and shovels' of the AI gold rush converting record-breaking demand into massive cash flow. Outshine the giants: these 18 early-stage AI stocks could fund your retirement. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned. Companies discussed in this article include TTD. Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email [email protected]

Interested in The Trade Desk? Here are five stocks we like better. The Trade Desk's stock fell more than 75% over the past year and hit a seven-year low after missing Q2 earnings expectations on Aug. 6. A structural shift toward AI-driven search is reducing open Internet traffic and digital ad impressions, threatening The Trade Desk's demand-side platform business model. Analysts have grown bearish on the stock, giving it a consensus Reduce rating, with 10 of 39 analysts assigning a Sell and 18.10% short interest. Outside of millennials who came of age in the '90s and investors who endured the dot-com bubble, not many people remember Netscape. Launched in 1994, the pioneering web browser predated Chrome, Firefox and Safari. At its peak, it dominated 90% of the browser market. Netscape lost most of its browser market share to Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Internet Explorer during the browser wars, and AOL ultimately discontinued Netscape browser development and support in 2008. Today, company co-founder Marc Andreessen is perhaps more widely recognized for writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Why Software Is Eating the World.” His argument was that software was beginning to take over major industries around the globe, citing examples like Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPE) “jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software,” and Google’s plans to buy Motorola Mobility. → Datavault AI Locks Down CyberCatch in $94M Security Rollup But in 2017, Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA), popularized the next iteration of that quote by stating that “AI is going to eat software.” And after reporting Q2 earnings in early August, The Trade Desk (NASDAQ: TTD) may have just proven him right. → Tesla's Cybercab Launch Could Reshape Margins for Uber and Lyft For decades, the tech playbook entailed building software and charging monthly per seat subscriptions or self-service fee structures to license workflows behind complex dashboards. And for decades, it worked. The post-dot-com market recovery was dominated by names including Microsoft, Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), and Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), whose respective market caps swelled as they dominated niches within the industry. → Nasdaq’s 23-Hour Trading Push Could Turn Global Liquidity Into a Growth Engine But AI’s evolution has disrupted that model, and now the paradigm has shifted. Companies that evolved—including Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel—continue to find success through cloud services and data center infrastructure. However, firms providing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and self-service demand-side platforms (DSPs), like The Trade Desk, are increasingly illustrating the kind of disruption Huang anticipated. According to industry consultancy firm Grand View Research, the global AI market is forecast to grow to nearly $3.5 trillion by 2033, registering a compound annual growth rate of 30.6%. Meanwhile, legacy platforms with complex user interfaces risk becoming less valuable in a world dominated by AI applications and AI search. Companies continue to turn to AI for agentic applications, allowing autonomous tools to act on behalf of humans rather than software being a tool used by humans. When agentic AI executes tasks in this manner, it can undermine traditional SaaS seat-based licensing by reducing the number of human users needed to perform a task. That’s one problem software firms are facing. Another is AI-dominated search. The Trade Desk isn’t a SaaS company; it is an ad tech provider with a cloud-based DSP platform that helps advertising agencies and brands buy digital ad space. It boasts omnichannel reach, enabling campaigns to span connected TV, streaming audio, websites, and mobile devices. But growth has slowed dramatically at the same time that a structural shift toward AI search—and away from parts of the open Internet—has created a new threat to its business model. Meanwhile, its stock has plummeted more than 75% over the past year. The Trade Desk’s business model benefits from a healthy open Internet with a large supply of advertising impressions outside of the major walled gardens. But with users increasingly turning to AI overviews that combine data from multiple sources and provide quick answers, web-browsing behavior is shifting, while some publishers are seeing declining referral traffic from traditional search. For The Trade Desk, that creates the risk of so-called impression scarcity—a decline in available web traffic and, subsequently, digital ad impressions across parts of the open Internet. At the same time, agentic media buying offered by big tech rivals could allow brands to automate more of the advertising-buying process within platforms like Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), potentially reducing the value of independent DSPs like The Trade Desk. For months, The Trade Desk was being touted as an undervalued bounceback candidate. Proponents pointed to the company’s fundamentals remaining intact, and attributed its poor stock performance to being an unwarranted victim of the SaaSpocalypse. But after it reported Q2 earnings on Aug. 6, shares of The Trade Desk hit a seven-year low. Revised guidance shocked the market, and ongoing pressures from walled-garden ecosystems—like Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META)—resulted in Wall Street downgrades. The Trade Desk announced earnings per share of 34 cents, which missed analyst expectations of 40 cents. Revenue, which rose just 3% year over year (YOY) to $715.06 million, below the consensus forecast of $752.41 million. Operating expenses rose 6% YOY (12% when excluding stock-based compensation), while net income fell to $64 million from a multi-year high of $187 million in Q4 2025, good for a nearly 66% decrease. The stock carries a consensus Reduce rating, with 10 of the 39 analysts covering it assigning TTD a Sell. Current short interest of 18.10% and zero insider buys over the past 12 months indicate that there may be more tough times ahead for shareholders hoping for reversal. The article "The Trade Desk’s Earnings Miss Raises a Bigger Question About Its AI Future" was originally published by MarketBeat. View MarketBeat's top stocks for August 2026.

Make better investment decisions with Simply Wall St's easy, visual tools that give you a competitive edge. Trade Desk stock has had a steep reset over the past five years, yet there is a split in what the valuation tools are saying today. The intrinsic value estimate based on a Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) approach points to upside relative to the market price, while earnings based market multiples suggest the shares are pricing in a richer scenario. Trade Desk shares are down about 83.1% over five years, which puts recent valuation debates in the context of a long and painful drawdown for existing holders. Recent concern about slower revenue growth and heavier competitive pressure from large platforms such as Amazon and Google may cap how much investors are willing to pay for the stock, even if cash flow expectations improve. The company scores 4 out of 6 on Simply Wall St's broader valuation checks, which is a mixed picture rather than a clear bargain or clear overvaluation. You can see the detail behind that score here. The issue now is whether the current share price already reflects the slower growth and tougher competitive backdrop for Trade Desk, or whether the DCF based intrinsic value leaves a margin of safety for patient investors. Find out why Trade Desk's -75.6% return over the last year is lagging behind its peers. The Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model estimates what Trade Desk might be worth based on the cash it is expected to generate in the future. For Trade Desk, the model uses the latest twelve month free cash flow of about $896.7 million and assumes that cash flows keep growing rather than shrinking. On that basis, the 2 Stage Free Cash Flow to Equity model arrives at an estimated intrinsic value of about $22.16 per share. Compared with the current share price, this intrinsic value suggests the stock screens around 39.5% undervalued. The weak Q2 2026 earnings and slower growth outlook help explain why the share price is sitting below the DCF estimate, since investors are questioning how durable Trade Desk's revenue and margins will be under heavier competition from Amazon and Google. The DCF workup, however, still indicates that Trade Desk stock appears undervalued based on cash flow assumptions that treat recent pressures as manageable rather than terminal. Our Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis suggests Trade Desk is undervalued by 39.5%. Track this in your watchlist or portfolio, or discover 53 more high quality undervalued stocks. Head to the Valuation section of our Company Report for more details on how we arrive at this Fair Value for Trade Desk. P/E fits Trade Desk because investors often focus on how much they are paying for each dollar of current earnings in ad tech platforms. On this measure, Trade Desk trades on a P/E of about 15.5x, which is below the wider media industry average of 23.5x and well under the peer group average of 69.9x. At first glance that makes the stock look inexpensive compared with other media companies. However, a more tailored fair P/E ratio for Trade Desk that reflects its margins, scale and risk profile is about 14.0x. That fair ratio suggests the stock screens as overvalued on earnings, even though the headline multiple is lower than the broader industry and peers. The gap is not extreme, yet it implies the market is already paying a premium to the earnings level that the model treats as appropriate for Trade Desk today. On the P/E multiple alone, Trade Desk stock currently looks overvalued relative to its fair earnings-based ratio. See what the numbers say about this price — find out in our valuation breakdown. Simply Wall St Narratives pick up where this Trade Desk valuation puzzle leaves off and spell out what growth, margin and earnings paths would need to play out for the stock to be worth meaningfully more or less than its current price on the market. Rather than relying on a single multiple or model outcome, each Narrative sets out the key assumptions behind its view of fair value so you can compare them with Trade Desk's actual results over time. They sit on Simply Wall St's Community page. The Trade Desk community is split between a recovery story built on connected TV partnerships and AI tools, and a more cautious view focused on data rules, competition, and fee pressure. Bull case: 45% undervalued Read the full Bull Case to see why Trade Desk could be undervalued Bear case: 14% overvalued Read the full Bear Case to see why Trade Desk could be overvalued Do you think there's more to the story for Trade Desk? Head over to our Community to see what others are saying! For Trade Desk, the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) work suggests meaningful upside based on its cash generation, while the earnings based P/E view points to the stock as slightly overvalued. That split reflects a market that is more cautious on growth, competitive pressure and where similar stocks are trading, even though longer term cash flow assumptions look more supportive. The broader valuation checks sit in the middle, so the key question is whether revenue growth and margins can hold up against larger platforms. That assumption will likely decide whether today’s discount to intrinsic value is an opportunity or a value trap. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned. Companies discussed in this article include TTD. Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email [email protected]

Make better investment decisions with Simply Wall St's easy, visual tools that give you a competitive edge. The latest earnings report from Trade Desk (TTD), together with softer guidance and analyst downgrades tied to AI driven shifts in digital advertising, has pushed the stock back into focus for investors. See our latest analysis for Trade Desk. Over the past year, Trade Desk has seen its share price reset sharply, with the stock down 64% year to date and the 1 year total shareholder return declining 76%, as weaker guidance, earnings pressure and AI related concerns have weighed on sentiment. If you are reassessing opportunities in AI related software after Trade Desk's move, this could be a useful moment to scan for other focused plays through the 75 profitable AI stocks that aren't just burning cash. After such a steep reset and fresh questions around Trade Desk's AI exposure, some investors see a beaten up opportunity, while others prefer to wait for clearer evidence. How does the current valuation stack up against that choice? Trade Desk's most followed narrative pegs fair value at $29.24 per share, compared with the last close at $13.40. This represents a large valuation gap that investors are now weighing against slowing growth and rising AI related competition. Read the complete narrative. According to matttttt, this narrative leans heavily on Trade Desk remaining profitable while the top line cools, along with a specific forward profit multiple and margin profile that needs earnings to hold up. The analysis examines how those moving parts combine to reach more than double the current share price while still applying a discount rate above 7%. Result: Fair Value of $29.24 (UNDERVALUED) Have a read of the narrative in full and understand what's behind the forecasts. However, if Trade Desk struggles to reaccelerate revenue growth after the recent slowdown or loses more share to larger AI powered rivals, this undervaluation thesis could unravel. Find out about the key risks to this Trade Desk narrative. With mixed sentiment around Trade Desk shaping the discussion, it makes sense to move quickly, look through the full data set yourself and decide whether the balance of potential risks and rewards fits your approach by reviewing the 1 key reward and 2 important warning signs. If Trade Desk has you rethinking your watchlist, this is a good time to widen the lens and line up a few fresh ideas using focused screeners. Target potential value opportunities by scanning 53 high quality undervalued stocks that combine quality fundamentals with prices that may not fully reflect their underlying metrics. Strengthen your downside protection by reviewing 80 resilient stocks with low risk scores that show more resilient risk profiles based on their financial and volatility checks. Get ahead of the crowd by hunting through a screener containing 19 high quality undiscovered gems that highlight companies with solid fundamentals yet limited market attention. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned. Companies discussed in this article include TTD. Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email [email protected]

The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTD) shares plunged 21.9% on Friday, making the company the S&P 500’s worst performer, after a weak second-quarter report turned a long-running agency dispute into a harder question about the durability of its business model. Revenue increased just 3% to $715 million, below Wall Street’s approximately $753 million estimate and the company’s prior outlook of at least $750 million. The third-quarter forecast was more damaging. Management expects revenue of at least $650 million, compared with the roughly $807 million analysts had expected, and adjusted EBITDA of approximately $160 million. At the $650 million guidance floor, third-quarter revenue would decline approximately 12% year over year. The central question is no longer whether The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTD) can repair its relationship with Publicis. The companies have already reconciled. The question is whether weaker spending from existing clients reflects temporary execution problems or a loss of leverage with agencies and advertisers. The bull case begins with the lack of evidence of a widespread client or agency departure. Customer retention remained above 95%; Publicis is again recommending The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTD) to clients, and major agencies continue developing new offerings around the platform. In March, Publicis advised clients against using The Trade Desk following an audit dispute involving fees and the activation of additional features. The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTD) disputed the agency’s account and said some requested information could not be provided without compromising customer and partner confidentiality. The companies reconciled in June, ending the public rupture before the second-quarter results were released. Other agency relationships also continued moving forward. Dentsu selected The Trade Desk as the first demand-side platform for its new retail-data offering. The company had joint business plans with 217 clients as of the second quarter, up 38% year over year, and management said revenue associated with those plans was growing six times faster than companywide revenue. The company’s access to premium inventory and valuable consumer data is also expanding. Netflix joined its scaled publisher marketplace, Samsung Ads opened premium home-screen inventory, and integrations with Booking.com, Marriott, Uber, United Airlines and other travel companies added new commerce signals. Retailers participating on the platform represent more than 80% of U.S. retail sales, according to management. These partnerships reinforce The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTD)'s strategic appeal as an independent buying platform that does not own the media it recommends. Advertisers can use the platform to compare impressions across the open internet without directing spending toward inventory controlled by the same company selling the advertising technology. That independence becomes more valuable as advertisers combine first-party data with streaming, retail-media and travel signals. It gives The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTD) a different proposition from Amazon and Google, which combine advertising technology with proprietary inventory, identity and consumer data. The company also has sufficient financial capacity to improve its platform without depending on outside financing. It generated $136 million of free cash flow during the quarter, ended June with approximately $1.5 billion of cash and short-term investments, and repurchased $78 million of stock. The constructive argument is that the slowdown reflects a combination of cautious advertising budgets and fixable execution problems. The forthcoming Zuma usability upgrade to Kokai, the expansion of Audience Unlimited and new measurement tools are intended to make the platform easier to use and its performance easier to demonstrate. If those improvements restore spending among large clients, the current weakness could prove to be an execution setback rather than a lasting competitive decline. The bear case is that The Trade Desk retained its clients but captured less of their advertising budgets. Gross spend from existing clients declined year over year, partly offset by more campaigns from new clients. Higher value-added-service pricing and changes in the presentation of certain supplier costs also contributed to the 3% revenue increase. Retention therefore remained high while aggregate spending from existing clients moved in the opposite direction. That distinction is damaging because The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTD)'s model depends on expanding the amount of advertising routed through its platform. A client can remain active while shifting more of its budget to Amazon, Google, another demand-side platform, or direct publisher relationships. Agency concentration makes those spending decisions more consequential. The company’s filing says that two agency holding companies would each have represented more than 10% of 2025 gross billings if their individual agency relationships were aggregated. A change in preference at one major holding company can affect spending even when the underlying advertisers remain customers. The Trade Desk must also defend premium pricing while competing with platforms that control their own inventory and consumer data. CEO Jeff Green reiterated that the company wants to offer the best platform rather than the cheapest one. The filing indicates that higher value-added-service pricing supported revenue, while volume and other discounts associated with joint business plans offset part of that benefit. The issue is whether advertisers are receiving enough measurable value to justify that premium. Management acknowledged that measurement and proof of incrementality had lagged in recent years. Improving those capabilities has become central to restoring growth because advertisers facing tighter budgets are likely to demand clearer evidence that The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTD) produces better outcomes than cheaper or more integrated alternatives. Management attributed the slowdown to macroeconomic pressure on several large advertisers and internal execution. Consumer-packaged-goods and automotive advertisers together account for roughly one-quarter of the business, and brands exposed to lower-income consumers have been cautious. However, management did not provide a clear breakdown of the $35 million shortfall against its own second-quarter revenue floor. Investors were left without a firm measure of how much came from economic weakness, product execution, agency relationships or competitive share losses. The third-quarter forecast makes that uncertainty harder to overlook. CFO Nate Olmstead said visibility was more limited than in recent history and that the guidance assumes no meaningful improvement during the quarter. The revenue floor is almost 20% below the previous analyst consensus, while the adjusted EBITDA forecast of approximately $160 million points to another sharp deterioration in profitability. Wall Street responded by reassessing the company’s competitive position. Raymond James, Truist and Susquehanna were among the firms that downgraded the stock. Evercore ISI said the size of the shortfall raised the possibility of meaningful pricing changes or market-share losses. The earnings damage is already visible. The unresolved issue is which part of the business created it. Until The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTD) stabilizes spending among large existing clients, investors have little reason to treat the third-quarter guidance as an isolated reset. Insider Monkey’s first-quarter database already showed a more cautious setup around The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTD). 45 hedge fund portfolios held TTD at the end of March, down from 60 in the previous quarter. These figures reflect holdings as of March 31, 2026, before TTD's second quarter report. Yes. The agency problem has become an earnings problem because concerns about agency trust, pricing power, and platform preference can no longer be separated from declining existing-client spending, slowing revenue growth, and guidance that points to further deterioration. The Trade Desk still has meaningful competitive defenses. Publicis again recommends the platform, Dentsu is expanding its relationship, customer retention remains above 95%, and major media and commerce partners continue opening their inventory and data. However, the weak guidance is too severe to dismiss as one disappointing quarter. The filing confirms that aggregate gross spend from existing clients declined, while management has not identified whether the pressure came mainly from cyclical advertisers, large agency holding companies, product execution, or budget shifts toward competing platforms. The next test is not another partnership announcement. It is whether The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTD) can stabilize large-account spending, translate its rapidly growing joint business plans into companywide growth and rebuild margins without materially weakening its pricing. If spending recovers following the product and measurement upgrades, the Publicis dispute may ultimately look like a noisy negotiation that coincided with an execution slump. If retention remains high while existing clients continue routing less money through the platform, the market will have stronger evidence that The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTD)'s independent-platform advantage is losing economic force. While we acknowledge the potential of TTD as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock. READ NEXT: 33 Stocks That Should Double in 3 Years and 15 Stocks That Will Make You Rich in 10 Years Disclosure: None. Follow Insider Monkey on Google News.

Image source: The Motley Fool. Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026 at 5:00 p.m. ET Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder - Jeffrey Green Chief Financial Officer - Nathan Olmstead Investor Relations - Chris Toth Operator: Greetings. Welcome to The Trade Desk, Inc. Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Chris Toth. You may begin. Chris Toth: Thank you, operator. Hello, and good afternoon to everyone. Welcome to The Trade Desk Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. On the call today are CEO and Co-Founder, Jeff Green; and our new Chief Financial Officer, Nate Olmstead. A copy of our earnings press release is available on our website in the Investor Relations section at thetradedesk.com. Please note that aside from historical information, today's discussion and our responses during the Q&A may include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties and reflect our views and assumptions as of the date such statements are made. Actual results may vary significantly, and we expressly disclaim any obligations to update the forward-looking statements made today. If any of our beliefs or assumptions prove incorrect, actual financial results could differ materially from our projections or those implied by these forward-looking statements. For a detailed discussion of risks, please refer to the risk factors mentioned in our press release and our most recent SEC filings. In addition to our GAAP financial results, we present supplemental non-GAAP financial data. A reconciliation of the GAAP to non-GAAP measures is available in our earnings press release and investor presentation. We believe that presenting these non-GAAP measures alongside our GAAP results offers a more comprehensive view of the company's operational performance. With that, I will now turn the call over to CEO and Co-Founder, Jeff Green. Jeff? Jeffrey Green: Thanks, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I want to start by sharing some of the same perspectives that I've shared with our team over the past several weeks. Next month, we will celebrate 10 years as a public company. Over that time, we have grown revenue at roughly a 34% CAGR. Our annual net income has increased 20x, and our team has grown from just over 400 people at the time of our IPO to thousands. Over the last 16 years, The Trade Desk has made a number of industry-changing accomplishments. Yet throughout that entire time, we have always tried to learn as much from our mistakes as we do from our successes. We spend a lot of time at Trade Desk reviewing the pivotal decisions that we've made over the years, understanding what worked and what didn't and how we can become a better company. As we continue to map out plans to grow our position and improve our revenue growth, we reflect on what we have learned from past quarters and especially from this last one. Our revenue growth is below our expectations and below the standard we hold ourselves to. These numbers are not a reflection of our company or the long-term opportunity in front of us. We underperformed our own expectations for two main reasons. First, the macro conditions have made it more difficult for some of the world's largest brands to grow. Of course, this is bigger than advertising and it's bigger than our company. In this economic environment, there are pressures on lower income consumers. As a result, some affected advertisers have become more focused on buying cheap media rather than the best media. Secondly, we didn't execute as well as we could have, which I'll elaborate on in just a minute. But first, let's start with the macro. We continue to see a unique blend of macro pressures on several categories of advertising. Of course, our business is very unique among the large advertising-focused platforms. Our business is largely a sophisticated buying platform for the biggest brands and advertisers. Almost all of the spend on our platform comes from large Fortune 500 companies and their brands. Over the long term, our focus on large advertisers is both a strength and a moat. We have partnered with the biggest, most resilient and most loved brands in the world. Nevertheless, some of them are experiencing difficult times right now. All of our customers are operating in a fundamentally different environment than they were even a year ago. CPGs and FMCGs are experiencing unique pressures. These categories were once the biggest in advertising, and they are still one of the biggest. P&G has described the environment as volatile and challenging and recently stated on their earnings call, "We anticipate continued pressure from commodity and related costs to the crisis in the Middle East. If the conflict eases and oil comes down, trade lanes open up, that will help. If it goes the other way, it will hurt." CPGs and autos are 2 of the sectors of the economy that are most overrepresented on our platform. Around 25% of our business is generated by those 2 categories alone. Autos and CPG have both been set back by tariffs and oil prices. General Motors described a multibillion-dollar impact from tariffs in addition to plans to onshore production to avoid future tariff risk. Both of these categories of advertisers almost unanimously have described a change in the macro where the consumer wealth bifurcation is creating a squeeze on their customers that is highly uneven consumer behavior, where the high-income consumers are doing well and the lower income consumers are not. For CPGs, this is causing change across everything from packaging to advertising allocation, promotion strategy and, of course, go-to-market. This uneven consumer pressure is impacting autos remarkably. Both Ford and General Motors highlighted in recent earnings report the growing dependence of auto sales on affluent consumers and industry research from Oxford Economics shows earners in the top 20% of households currently represent more than 50% of new vehicle sales. Both categories are having to create new approaches to advertising. In some cases, budgets have been temporarily reduced as they formulate new plans to go to market. In other cases, some brands are falling prey to low-cost, low decisioning methods like programmatic guaranteed and fixed price. Doing so essentially means buyers will give away their decisioning in a great buyer's market to the sellers in exchange for lower cost of transactions. This approach is often deliberately shortsighted. Still, we continue to see the growing market leaders in every category optimized for business outcomes, not simply the lowest cost buying platform or the lowest cost media. It is important not to overstate the impact of these dynamics on our business. While these are affecting some of our largest categories and clients, most of our clients are performing well and growing. In fact, many categories are experiencing secular tailwinds. Financial services, some parts of technology and pharma are growing well and thriving. And we are seeing most of the leading brands in those categories deepen their partnerships with us. One of the leading indicators we watch most closely is our joint business plans or JBPs. We had JBPs with 217 clients as of Q2, representing 38% growth year-over-year. Most importantly, revenue under JBPs grew at a rate of 6x higher than overall revenue. JBPs are much more than commercial agreements. They create a structured framework for brands, their agencies and The Trade Desk to plan, innovate and measure success together. These partnerships grow faster than the rest of our business because they're built on long-term alignment rather than just individual campaigns. Additionally, the majority of our top 100 accounts are growing double digits year-over-year. Outside of our top 500 advertisers, the remainder are growing over 50% year-over-year, year-to-date, which represents green shoots from smaller up-and-coming and challenger brands. Our EMEA and APAC regions both have grown almost 30% year-to-date. China is growing over 100% year-to-date. Some of our clients are experiencing headwinds, but the majority are growing. Even in CPGs and autos, about half of them are growing very well with us, even if they are all experiencing cyclical pressures. While there are unique macro pressures, we are very focused on the things that we can control, and we continue to grow our customer base, including high growth among midsized businesses and agencies. Starting with our product, I'm extremely excited about our road map and the innovations we are building to make media buying better. We say all the time that every product we ship has to be better for our clients, has to be better for us and our shareholders, and it has to be better for the ecosystem. Through that lens, let me share a few of our plans, starting with the products that we are pointing at what might be the biggest problem in our industry, measurement. Real brand building, which is required for categories like autos and CPGs cannot thrive while measurement standards are broken. As long as last click and last view are the standard of measurement, brands will struggle to understand what drives their growth and the most premium parts of the open Internet will always look expensive and ineffective. Our new measurement framework, which is currently in alpha is designed to more fairly assign value across the entire customer journey, giving marketers greater confidence in where the advertising is creating incremental business results, whether that's in the top of the funnel or at the bottom. This is not a problem we can tackle alone, which is why we're working in close partnership with some of the largest media companies, the largest measurement companies and the largest data companies to bring it to life. Secondly, we are ramping up Audience Unlimited. Audience Unlimited dramatically simplifies how marketers discover and activate third-party data. Instead of navigating millions of segments and manually analyzing potential impact, marketers leverage AI models with their own proprietary data to select data. Our new pricing approach with this product makes it so that price becomes a nonissue. We are essentially doing to data what Spotify has done to music. We are creating an all-you-can-eat system that makes it easier to apply more data for a simple subscription percentage. As Audience Unlimited moves to open beta, we are seeing very encouraging results. In a recent campaign, a global advertiser used Audience Unlimited to reach incremental households more efficiently. Compared with a prior campaign, the advertiser reduced its cost per unique household and also reduced its data CPM. Both reductions were more than 25%, demonstrating the potential of AU to improve efficiency as we roll this out to new customers. Lastly, on the product front, later this month, we will launch a significant upgrade focused on platform usability. We're calling this version [ Zuma ]. We are enhancing navigation, streamlining workflows and troubleshooting and delivering a more intuitive user experience from end to end. This upgrade improves workflow efficiency, leverages even more AI, enhances design and improves the dialogue between human and machine. We are listening to our clients and responding with innovative upgrades at a faster pace than we have been in years. Ultimately, with success in measurement and Audience Unlimited and [ Zuma's ] upgrades, it will be easier to demonstrate the value of decision buying, which directly drives revenue growth. Furthermore, we will win more hearts and minds among CMOs in the upper ranks of the largest advertisers and agencies. This is how we help create universal understanding at every level of our clients' company about the difference between buying based on price and buying based on value. Some of our competitors, big and small, have been focused on producing products for programmatic guaranteed, fixed price transactions and simple deals with approaches that do not leverage buyer decision. Some are even wrapping these in agentic technologies. They argue that their cheap fee will compensate for their lack of objectivity and their decisions that favor publishers rather than the buyer who is footing the bill. These approaches look more like ad networks of 2006 than reflect the progress that our industry has made in the last 20 years. Decision buying and programmatic guaranteed are fundamentally different products. Programmatic guaranteed can solve for certainty, simplicity and upfront price, but decision buying optimizes for the highest business outcomes utilizing data, measurement and real-time optimization. We are focused on the latter. The encouraging part is that periods like these create opportunities for change. The world's most sophisticated marketers don't simply look for lower prices. They become more deliberate and they ask better questions. They demand better measurement. They focus on outcomes rather than inputs. And when marketers become more data-driven, The Trade Desk creates even more value for our customers, which are the biggest brands and the biggest agencies in the world. The success of our platform is in our control, and we are in the lead. We have the most premium and sophisticated buying platform in the space. Our goal isn't simply to support media execution. It's to continue being a strategic business partner to the world's leading marketers. Lastly, we brought in a number of new leaders to help take this company to the next level. leaders like Vivek Kundra, our COO; Nate Olmstead, our CFO; Kristi Argyilan, our Chief Commercial Officer; Ron Lamprecht, our Chief Business Development Officer; Sarah Gavin, our CMO; or Vinny Rinaldi, our VP of Client Strategy and Growth. We've also added some amazing industry leaders to our Board. We have enhanced dramatically our company's leadership in the last few quarters, especially this last one. These leaders have built and scaled organizations much larger than ours. They bring operational discipline, fresh perspectives and deep experience partnering with senior business leaders around the world. Just as importantly, they bring a willingness to challenge assumptions, including my own. But building a better company doesn't stop with our executive team. Over the past year, we have also invested heavily in strengthening the leaders throughout our commercial organization. We've recruited hundreds of experienced general managers, vice presidents and customer-facing leaders who know how to build strategic relationships with the world's largest brands and agencies. That reflects an important evolution in how we go to market as marketing decisions increasingly move higher up in the organizations, at times even into the C-suite and executive ranks of global advertisers. And of course, we have to meet our customers where those decisions are being made. Before I conclude, I want to spend a minute talking about why I remain so excited about the opportunity in front of us. Today, we estimate the global advertising market approaches $1 trillion annually. Even after everything we've accomplished, we believe we participate in only about 1% of that opportunity. What makes me most excited isn't simply the size of the market or the TAM that remains. It's how the market itself is changing. For years, search has largely been defined by a single dominant platform. That is beginning to change as LLMs reshape how consumers discover information, we expect a much more competitive landscape to emerge. Just as connected TV expanded opportunity by creating more premium inventory and more choice, AI has the potential to expand the addressable market for digital advertising by creating entirely new surfaces for marketers to engage consumers and give more competition to market share that was once lost in traditional search marketing. AI is creating exponentially more data, more choices and of course, more complexity. In the new AI world, our decisioning capabilities are better than ever. They're fueled by AI and objective decisioning is even more valuable. Brands don't need another platform trying to sell them media. They need a platform that can evaluate the millions of opportunities available every second on the Internet and objectively help them make better decisions. That's exactly what we've been building since the day we founded The Trade Desk. Our objectivity also makes us a better partner. As more of our competitors prioritize their own owned and operated inventory, our independence becomes even more valuable to advertisers, publishers, retailers and technology partners alike in the long term. That's one of the reasons why our partnerships continue to deepen. Today, we work with many of the world's leading media companies, including Disney, Netflix, NBCUniversal, FOX, Paramount, Spotify and News Corp. We also partner with the infrastructure of the open Internet through companies like Snowflake, Databricks, LiveRamp and Hightouch, helping brands activate their data wherever it creates the most value. For most of them, we are among, if not the largest, programmatic partner. We got to this place by minimizing the conflict of interest and creating clear, mutually beneficial partnerships. The same is true in retail media. Participating retailers on our platform now represent more than 80% of U.S. retail sales. This includes our recently renewed partnership with Walmart, the largest retailer in the world. We believe our objectivity uniquely positions us to help retailers collaborate with brands in ways that vertically integrated competitors simply cannot. We are also seeing this modernization play out globally. Our investments across Europe and APAC and other major international markets are creating new opportunities as global brands increasingly adopt data-driven decisioned advertising. Most importantly, our customers are telling us that this strategy is working. General Mills is a great example. They recently ran a campaign for its Nature Valley brand in the U.K. They were interested in pairing retail data and real-time optimizations to measure the impact on sales and return on ad spend. The campaign used retail data from Tesco, Sainsbury's and Ocado as well as in-flight Koa AI optimizations, predictive clearing and cross-device targeting. Over 4 months, the campaign drove a 5x uplift in sales, a 92% lower CPM compared with the benchmark and a 2x ROAS improvement versus without using retail data. This is a great example of a leading global brand embracing AI and decisioning to drive more outcomes for their business. When I think about everything that we've discussed today, that's ultimately what gives me confidence. The market opportunity is expanding. Our competitive advantages are becoming more relevant. Our partnerships are becoming deeper and our customers are increasingly choose to build their brands for the long term using our platform. In a market with more pressures, objectivity matters more. Let me conclude by saying this. While we have some near-term challenges, my conviction about The Trade Desk has never been stronger. Our team, our business model and our partners keep getting better for the opportunity ahead. Digital advertising continues to gain share globally. Connected TV continues to shape the largest media market in the world. Retail media continues to mature and expand. AI will create entirely new ways for marketers to use data and drive growth. And as advertising becomes more measurable, more open and more data-driven, the value we deliver becomes even greater. None of that changes today's results, but it enforces my confidence that we're focusing on the right opportunities and making the right long-term investments. Over the rest of the year and into 2027, we're going to be more disciplined than ever about where we invest. We'll focus our resources on a small number of high-priority growth initiatives where we believe we can create the greatest long-term value for our clients and our shareholders. That means some teams will continue to grow while others will not. Every investment we make will be measured against a simple question, does it strengthen our ability to serve our customers and drive long-term growth? If the answer is yes, we'll invest aggressively. If not, we'll reduce those resources to higher impact opportunities. Over the coming quarters, you'll see these priorities reflected in how we execute. You'll see us continue to make our platform easier to use while expanding its capability through agentic workflows. You'll see Audience Unlimited and our measurement framework help advertisers connect more of their spending to business outcomes. And you will see our commercial strategy mature as deeper relationships and joint business plans with the world's largest brands and agencies translate into stronger, more durable growth. With that, I'm very pleased to introduce our new CFO, Nate Olmstead. Nate joined us last month and brings with him extensive experience as a finance leader from his career at Penguin Solutions, Logitech and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I could not be more excited to have him on our team and for you all to get to know him. With that, over to Nate. Nathan Olmstead: Thank you, Jeff, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm excited to be joining The Trade Desk. While I'm still early in the process of learning the business, part of what attracted me to The Trade Desk was its large market opportunity, its reputation for innovation and its long track record of helping advertisers achieve better business outcomes. As CFO, my focus is straightforward, ensuring we invest behind our highest priority opportunities, allocate capital with discipline and build the operational rigor needed to scale effectively. With that, on to our results. In Q2, we delivered revenue of $715 million, up 3% year-over-year. We generated $241 million of adjusted EBITDA during the quarter, representing a 34% margin. CTV and audio exhibited double-digit growth once again in Q2. Video, which includes CTV, represented a low 50s percent share of our business in Q2. Mobile represented a high 20s percent share of the business during the quarter, while display represented a low double-digit share. Audio represented around 7% of the business and grew year-over-year at a higher rate than any other channel as it has for the past 4 quarters. Geographically, the United States represented approximately 83% of our revenue in Q2 and international represented approximately 17%. Our strong momentum in both EMEA and APAC reflects the investments made in these regions over the last several years, and we delivered over 50% CTV growth year-over-year in each region during Q2. Among verticals that represent at least 1% of our business, we saw strong growth in medical, health, automotive and travel. We continue to see pressure in the food and drink and home and garden sectors as CPG brands navigate geopolitical uncertainty, consumer softness and input cost inflation. Automotive remains an area of strength overall, though we believe this business could be growing faster absent the impact of increased tariffs on the industry. We also benefited from political spending related to the U.S. midterm elections during Q2. Q2 operating expenses were $613 million, up 6% from a year ago. Excluding stock-based compensation, Q2 operating expenses were $504 million, up 12% from a year ago. The increase in Q2 was driven primarily by platform operations as we optimize platform infrastructure, implement more AI-powered tools on our platform and continue to evolve our various decisioning and data offerings. Over the past 2 years, we've transitioned critical workloads from third-party public cloud environments to owned data centers. This has strengthened our platform infrastructure, reduced our reliance on external cloud providers and provides us with greater flexibility to support AI and machine learning workloads. While this transition creates an increase in platform operations expense in 2026, it positions us to benefit from greater efficiency and operating leverage over time. Income tax expense was $49 million in the second quarter, driven primarily by our pretax profitability and the impact of stock-based awards. Net income for the quarter was $64 million or $0.14 per diluted share or about 9% of revenue. Adjusted net income for the quarter was $158 million or $0.34 per diluted share. Net cash provided by operating activities was $154 million and free cash flow was $136 million in Q2. We ended the quarter with a strong cash and liquidity position. Our balance sheet had about $1.5 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments at the end of the quarter. In Q2, we used $78 million of cash to repurchase our Class A common stock via our share repurchase program. At the end of Q2, we had $269 million remaining on our program authorization. Turning to our outlook for the third quarter. For Q3, we expect revenue to be at least $650 million. We estimate adjusted EBITDA for Q3 to be approximately $160 million. Before I wrap up, I'd like to provide additional context on how we are thinking about our investment priorities for the remainder of 2026. Looking ahead, we'll continue investing with conviction in our highest priority opportunities while building a more disciplined and scalable operating model. By improving how we operate, we can move faster and create additional financial capacity to reinvest in those opportunities. We believe that combination of focused investment and improved execution will position The Trade Desk to deliver stronger, more durable growth and improved profitability. We look forward to updating you on our progress. That concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, please open up the call for questions. Operator: [Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Shyam Patil with SIG. Shyam Patil: Jeff, you described well the factors that you're seeing put pressure on the business from macro, pricing pressure, your own execution. If we shift to thinking about the remainder of this year, what are the top 2 or 3 priorities that you guys have to stabilize the business? Jeffrey Green: Thanks for the question, Shyam. So let me just first acknowledge that what we've shared in terms of our performance as well as our guide is below our expectations, and we don't think a reflection of the long-term potential. And I do worry that I -- that we don't want to overstate that while there are a couple of pockets that are under some amount of pressure, overall, the business is growing and overall, the -- every division or every sector that we represent of the economy, most of them are doing very well. And of course, we can't control the macro, but we're overall very positive. So in terms of the things that we can control and the things that I'm most excited about and that we have to get right in order to do well going forward. First, we have to upgrade Kokai. And we'll -- as I mentioned, we'll launch [ Zuma ] later this month. And this represents substantial platform usability upgrades and helps us get the best out of AI, which we've already added. Second, we just want to continue to innovate in some of our key products, and this is definitely not all of them, but some of them that we're most excited about and most focused on are our product and measurement, which just helps the biggest brands in the world see where incremental business outcomes are truly coming from. This will help us ascribe much better credit for what we're actually producing, which are, in most cases, dramatically understated today. We'll also ramp up Audience Unlimited. This has been in just early phases, but the early results have been remarkable. And to get that in the hands of a lot more customers, we think we'll just spin their flywheels even faster. Measurement will spin everyone's flywheel faster on the platform. Audience Unlimited will do the same, and both of them are just in the hands of very few customers today, and the results are extremely positive. We're also -- we've also been introducing the concept of enterprise Kokai, where we have some massive growth rates with companies who negotiate the features upfront and then use every one of our products. We sometimes do this through JBPs, where, as you might recall from our prepared remarks, we have signed over 200 JBPs through Q2, which represents 38% year-over-year growth. But JBPs grow at least this year at a rate 6x higher than overall revenue growth, which I just think might be the most bullish number that we can share and have shared today is that as we continue to double down on JBPs and getting closer to our partners and developing plans to grow well into the future that we see just a tremendous opportunity. To that end, we have a team that's just dedicated to growth, which, in some cases, is actually winning back customers that we've lost at some point. That team has grown their book of business over 250% year-over-year and is the fastest-growing individual team in our business development team. And of course, of the top 100 accounts, the majority of them are actually growing in double digits, again, just underscoring that most parts of our business are in a very healthy place. And then the last thing, and I can't overstate the importance of this. We have added an amazing number of industry leaders to our leadership team. And most of them have been here a very short period of time. And so we, of course, are giving them the room to get things up to speed and to continue to help accelerate our growth. But in order for us to get back to growth, we, of course, need to help them get back up to speed. And I look at that as important of any -- it is as important as any of the initiatives that I've talked about today. So we believe that all of these together, regardless of the macro environment, will position us to be even stronger and get back to more durable growth when the conditions change. Thanks for the question, Shyam. Operator: The next question comes from Matt Swanson with RBC. Matthew Swanson: Jeff, I wanted to get your thoughts on something maybe a little more high level, kind of an existential question that I think is top of mind for a lot of investors right now in the age of AI. So I mean, as AI is kind of reshaping the digital advertising landscape, can you just give us some insight on kind of what gives you confidence in the DSP business model as we know it, remaining relevant over the next several years? Or what needs to happen to stay relevant? Jeffrey Green: Yes. I really appreciate this question. I think this is actually a very important theme for us to be talking about. So in order to talk about AI, let me just remind you of the backdrop. So first of all, supply outpaces demand by more than ever. So it is the ultimate buyer's market. And -- but in order to take advantage of that buyer's market, you have to compare every ad opportunity to all the others and of course, that is an amazing job for AI because we're looking at 20 million ad opportunities every single second. This decisioning, and it is very important to understand that the job of a DSP, like what actually is a DSP in order to -- to answer your question, we, of course, have to be super clear on what we're even talking about. But a DSP is a platform built to decide which of those impressions you buy and which you don't. And of course, that is enhanced by AI. And that's why we've been investing in AI for years. So I wouldn't say that the DSP model, if you will, is going to be disrupted by AI. It is AI. And what's really important is as we enter into the new phase, and this is part of the reason why we spend so much time talking about objectivity is that you have to get the biggest brands in the world to trust you with their data and then reassure them that you are going to preserve their data so that their insights from buying are put to use for them and exclusively for them. And most of the biggest platforms in the world are not doing that. They are asking the biggest brands in the world to give them their data and then they use that for all of their clients and especially their competitors. So we view this -- the injection of AI is not a question or not a disruption, but in fact, the very essence of what it means to be a DSP. That said, I just want to also add that I think Agentic, is one of the biggest opportunities that advertising will ever see. It is a huge opportunity for us. We are already seeing massive advantage from it. Some are using Agentic to just build yesterday's business model all over again, if you will. They're building ad networks out of agentic like technologies. That's not going to work because it doesn't leverage the very best of decisioning, which is what a DSP does. So not only do I not think AI will disrupt the DSP model, if you will, or will there be DSPs, the only winners left will be people that leverage or platforms that leverage AI to lead them into the next chapter of this race. Thanks for the question. Operator: The next question comes from Vasily Karasyov with Cannonball Research. Vasily Karasyov: My question is for Nate. Given the outlook for Q3, which I think also means that weakness will persist into Q4, at least as well, how should we now think about your long-term profitability framework, how you approach that side of the business given the revenue trajectory? And what's your philosophy in terms of investment internally? Would appreciate your thoughts on this. Nathan Olmstead: Yes, sure. Thank you for the question. Listen, I think we have a very long-term focus and continue to see great opportunity to drive long-term growth and profitability. I think in terms of the investment philosophy, as mentioned in the prepared remarks, we're going to invest with conviction in areas where we see attractive returns. I think importantly, we will be equally disciplined everywhere else. So we'll apply a lot of rigor to how we evaluate investments and then allocate resources. And I think if we do that well, we believe that we can drive stronger long-term growth and profitability. So stay tuned as this work progresses, we'll keep you updated on our long-term profitability framework and overall operating objectives. Operator: Next question comes from Justin Patterson with KeyBanc. Justin Patterson: Great. Jeff, I know you don't disclose take rate, but I'm curious how your pricing philosophy is changing in response to brand advertiser needs in the environment. As we look at stabilizing the business, how are you thinking about the right level of pricing and take rate from here? Jeffrey Green: You bet. Thanks for the question, Justin. So first, in order to answer this, I just need to give you a little bit of history. And I'll just start with the very first time we brought all of our employees together when we had them spread across continents for the first time. I remember one of the primary presentations that we gave to our own employees was it is not our goal to be the cheapest platform. It is our goal to be the best. That has definitely been our mantra for more than the last decade. If you look at us as a publicly traded company and you just scrutinize the take rate more or less over the last decade, the take rate has gone up 5 of the 10 years and it's gone down 5 of the 10 years. And the reason why it stayed within a few points of that middle line, if you will, is because we started by saying everything about our product has to earn its keep. It has to earn its keep on both a relative basis and absolute basis, meaning -- and the absolute being the starting point, meaning that we need to make certain that if our product costs 10% it better add at least 10% more value than if it wasn't in the middle. And in fact, the more obvious you can make that mathematically, obviously, the better it is for us to go win customers. We've done extremely well over the last 16 years with that approach. That said, we've always looked at this as if we can grow faster or win more business by changing that price or changing the approach, we'll always look at it and always consider it. But we tried to do it in a way that it didn't make it too volatile because we always knew that we could lean on the fact that we were adding more value than we ever cost or extract. So we remain really confident in our business model and in our pricing philosophy. We have, of course, the opportunity to continue to improve on our platform. But I will say that over the years, even though the take rate has stayed mostly the same, we've introduced new products all along the way like Next Wave, Solimar, Kokai. We've added tons of AI capabilities over recent years. The price has not changed much since we introduced things like UID2 and OpenPath. All of those have created efficiencies and enhancements for our customers that we think ultimately add to the consumer surplus that we provide to our customers all the time. So we'll always be looking at it, always be looking for opportunities for us to grow and look for ways for us to simplify, where I do think is the biggest opportunity is for us to simplify the way that we price. But I don't think that the net number has to change dramatically because we're extremely confident that we're adding more value than we cost. Thanks for the question, Justin. Operator: The next question comes from Youssef Squali with Truist. Youssef Squali: Jeff, there seems to be somewhat of a disconnect between the opportunity as you presented in terms of growth across the various modalities and at least the short-term guide, which I think implies about 12% decline year-on-year for Q3. And I'm assuming that will probably sustain itself into Q4. Is there a way to kind of parse out the impact of what you control versus what you cannot? I think in your prepared remarks, you talked about 2 areas. One is macro, the other is execution. So any way to kind of help us maybe quantify both to kind of see what you can turn around even if the macro continues? And just very quickly, maybe just provide us an update on the status of your relationship with some of the big agencies, maybe the Publicis in particular. Jeffrey Green: Yes. So a lot to unpack in all those. So let me just parse between first, the things that we can control and the things that we can't. Obviously, we can control the things that we ship and the product that we put in market, and we, of course, can control the team. We spent a lot of time already on this call talking about how we've enhanced both. We've enhanced both our product and our team. And then, of course, we can look at all the ways that we're executing all the operations, all the things that we do internally, how we allocate resources and just scrutinize all of it and make sure it's all pointed in the right direction and pointed towards growth. That we're doing every single day with a higher degree of rigor than we ever have before. On the macro, of course, there are some places where there are just amazing secular tailwinds. There are parts of technology that have amazing tailwinds. Some of our pharma clients who have GLPs, they're all doing really well. There are a whole bunch of parts of the economy that are doing really well. And in fact, I would say most of them are. We made references to things that are affected by whatever amount of bifurcation is happening inside of the economy where lower income consumers are under some amount of pressure. And we definitely see in some of the brands that are targeted at products that are more toward that part of the market, where they're also seeing some pressures, not just in the CPGs, where, of course, that shows up, but -- and not just in the autos where some of that shows up as well. But in some of the other categories, that also shows up a little bit. But overall, those are doing very well. Of course, the macro isn't in our control. But because we're growing in so many other areas, we're extremely confident that we're focused on the right things. As it relates to your question about the agencies, I was actually hoping that this would come up because I think it's really important to note. We built this business on our relationship with the agencies. They've been a phenomenal partner to us over the years. All of them have been critical to our success. They're all in periods of transition right now. But overall, our partnership has been phenomenal with each of them, and that includes Publicis. They've been an important partner for us for over a decade. Of course, there were some public disputes about what was essentially a negotiation but that's behind us. And we have -- we've spent a lot of time on this call already talking about our Joint Business Plans. It's really important to me that I explain or express that Joint Business Plans with brands and strong agency partnership are not mutually exclusive. In fact, many of our brand JBPs are developed in collaboration with their agencies. So when we talk about that being one of the most bullish things that we're doing, that's in part because of better integration inside of the agencies and better partnerships. And then lastly, as it relates to the agencies, one of the things that we're doing together in many cases is working on white label products of both Audience Unlimited as well as agentic AI products. So when I put those in the road map as well, things that we can do with them to leverage their data assets as well as improve decisioning for them using agentic AI where they find efficiencies. And of course, we do too, and enhanced decisioning along the way. We didn't really have time in the prepared remarks to talk extensively about some of those investments and some of the advancements that we're making in agentic with our agency partnerships, but it's yet another reason to be really bullish about the future. It's going to take some time for those to pay off in meaningful ways, but that's part of the reason why we're being so deliberate about our own discipline as well as where we make investments. Thanks for the question. Operator: The next question comes from Tim Nollen with SSR. Timothy Nollen: Jeff, you've had a lot of announcements about some management additions over the last year really, but especially even in the last month or so. And you mentioned this a bit in the prepared remarks. I wonder if you could give us a bit more color into what some of these people can bring to The Trade Desk. Some of these are high-profile names from some high-profile companies. Just wondering kind of what skills do they bring, what capabilities and how might they be able to affect some change at The Trade Desk. Jeffrey Green: You bet. So it's actually hard to answer this question partly because there are so many people, and they all have such different backgrounds and different expertise. And I also -- I feel like I'm trying to recognize so many people that we've added that we don't have enough time to actually talk about all of them and why I'm excited I'm nervous about leaving somebody out. But let me just talk about a couple of them that we've added of late that are directly impacting our go-to-market approach. So the first is Kristi, who joined us as Chief Commercial Officer. She really is leading, among other things, our data partnerships. She has a long history of having worked in building some of the very first retail media networks. She most recently was running all of advertising at Uber, managing a go-to-market team that's almost the same size as ours overall. Our org size here is much smaller, focused on the data partnerships because of how that will enhance Audience Unlimited, how that will enhance our measurement product. And those 2 things together, we look at as game changers. So does she. That's part of the reason why she's here. I talked about Ron in the prepared remarks, who also joins as a C-level in business development. Many of the conversations that we're having today are at much senior levels. And I talked about a minute ago, enterprise Kokai and selling that in at higher levels of the organization so that we get much longer adoption as well as much deeper integration into some of the biggest brands and biggest companies in the world. We need a greater ability to talk at the most senior levels of the org as well as to think about new deal structures. Ron had a role that was bigger than advertising at Amazon, where he did that very thing, looking at all the assets across Amazon, how can we create a more holistic partnership framework that are often custom I think Ron is one of the best in the world at this, and I'm super excited to have him on board. And then I'll just highlight one other, Vinny Rinaldi, who was the VP of Customer Experience at Hershey's and now joins us to do something very similar with Ron, which is Vinny might be one of the best advocates in the world for why people should buy the premium Internet. He was an advocate both at the agency that he worked at before as well as at Hershey's about not pursuing cheap reach. And he did a lot of analysis while he was leading media buying at Hershey's to show that cheap reach wasn't worth it, that user-generated content, while it appears to be on sale, actually doesn't even move the needle for brands like Hershey's. And because he's understood that and has been promoting the pursuit of premium and better measurement as an alternative to simple measurement and cheap reach, we are -- we've positioned him with a role to help us talk to the biggest brands in the world and do the very same things that he's done inside of brands himself. So those are a couple of the examples. Again, I feel bad for the number of people that I've left off of that, but those are the sorts of people that we're adding with the task at hand that we are extremely confident will change the game. It's quite important to recognize that, of course, in the numbers, especially in the forecast, we're trying to create room for them to get up to speed and make a meaningful contribution, and we're extremely confident that they will. Thank you. Operator: Next question comes from Dan Salmon with New Street Research. Daniel Salmon: Okay. I have one for Jeff and then one for Nate. Jeff, can you just talk a little bit more about why you're confident that as you laid out an independent premium platform focused on objective decisioning that's really at the heart of your business, why that can continue to win market share when you've got walled gardens combining exclusive live sports inventory like what Amazon has with their DSP or bring really simple programmatic guaranteed style transaction with low pricing like what, say, Google's new Buyer Direct program looks like. Why does that independent premium platform continue to win share? And then just for Nate, can you maybe just provide a little bit more context around the assumptions in your Q3 outlook and just a little bit more on your overall guidance philosophy? Jeffrey Green: You bet. I appreciate the direct question. Let me just give, as always, just a little bit of context before I just get very direct. There will be many winners. There have to be. Otherwise, this whole ecosystem that we've created that is actually not that dissimilar from the stock market in structure. There's some massive differences in fungibility and probability of winning. But in terms of structure, it's fairly similar. And an auction with only one bidder isn't an auction. So it's quite important that we have a number of players and the fact that there are only a few of us that have reached meaningful scale is part of why we're so excited because there's a ton of TAM ahead and there's not that many players in the ecosystem. That said, we have, by far, the highest market share in the programmatic space, especially as we're looking at the open Internet. So it's just really important to remember that we're way ahead of our other competitors, especially when it comes to buying the open Internet. Because if you want to say, well, yes, but Google buys a lot of YouTube, I would say, well, I would hope so. And Amazon buys a lot of Amazon Prime and sponsored listings, well, I would hope so. They're the only place where you can buy them. So of course, they do. But at the end of the day, the reason why I believe why this model works is because, number one, in an AI-fueled world, you have to fuel those AI models with first-party data and you have to have the trust of the biggest advertisers in the world. You will not get that if you are not objective and not representing their interest and protecting their data for the long haul. I also think that this comes down to an issue of math, and there's 2 parts of this that are really important to understand. A lot of times in the press, and this is trade press as well as even in Wall Street, there's, I think, a misunderstanding about the effect of platform rates, especially given that where most of our competitors make all their money is by bundling it with the media. So it's not platform rate versus platform rate. So it becomes really important to aggregate that and say, because you can wrongly conclude if Trade Desk charges, let's say, 8% and our competitor charges 4%, then The Trade Desk has to be twice as good. But if you look at it as no, when you add that to the media, Trade Desk buys an impression for $1.08 and they buy a piece of media for $1.04, where the underlying media in both cases cost $1, did we buy a piece of media that was better for that brand? And that comparison at $1.08 versus $1.04 is meaningfully different. And then there's also the math that comes down to how they decide how to make money when you have something like YouTube, where their cost of goods sold is almost 0, and if they get $1, they can spend it on YouTube and keep the whole dollar or they can spend it on Disney+ and they keep $0.10. Well, of course, it would be better for Google or Amazon to buy their owned and operated inventory. That's what they do because they make more money that way. None of these companies are in the community service business, if you will. They're not giving things away. So when things come out as free, they are not really free. They're just moving the cost somewhere else. So we're extremely confident that objectivity matters more today than it did yesterday, and it will matter more tomorrow. In an AI world, the premium on trust is going up, not down. People are looking for partners that they can trust. And I think you're going to see over time, more and more of a separation between those that align their interest with their clients and those that don't. It doesn't mean that those companies can't have great products. It doesn't mean that they won't have an ancillary business. But at the core, they are selling owned and operated inventory. Both of them make most of their money from their owned and operated inventory. I don't think any of us foresee that changing in any dramatic way in the future. We do believe that decisioning, especially when, unlike the stock market where if you buy stocks at random, you can still often do pretty well. If you buy media at random, you will get your a kicked every single time. So it becomes quite important that the decisioning engine that we have to help our customers, the biggest brands and biggest agencies in the world make decisions, that we give them the tools that leverage the objectivity that protect their data, that leverage AI to make the very best decisions possible and then also give them measurement and audience insights that make it so that they are truly proving the incrementality. It's that last piece where I think we've missed a little bit in the last few years. And that's part of the reason why we're so excited about the products ahead. So we're quite bullish on our future despite the fact that we need a little bit of time to get some of our leaders and some of our products up to speed. But the future is very bright for us and the opportunity ahead. Thank you. Nathan Olmstead: Dan, it's Nate. Just quickly on the guidance and the philosophy. So really no change in the approach to guidance. It's very data-driven. And I would say it just reflects the trends that we see in the business today. I would probably add that visibility is somewhat more limited than it has been in recent history. And given that, we're not assuming any meaningful improvement in the environment during the quarter. In general, we don't think that guidance should really be considered conservative or aggressive. The goal really is to be credible and I think grounded in the data. So we'll call it like we see it, and then we'll go execute with a lot of rigor and a lot of discipline. Operator: Our final question comes from Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Jason Helfstein: I'll try to ask 2. I mean, is there -- when you think about the business change from 1Q to 2Q now to the 3Q guide, is there a way to unpack it and kind of be like this is what we think kind of like the macro/auto/CPG impact. This might be the, let's say, impact from maybe some risks with certain agencies or something like that was like we call like temporary. And then is there a third bucket of, I don't know, what we -- like other related issues and maybe it's some of the things you alluded to with clients kind of making poor buying decisions, but ultimately could be convinced to see a lot of your way. So I don't know, just maybe help folks kind of break it down. And then I guess, the other question is when you think, I don't know, 2 or 3 years from now, could we be thinking about this is a -- I don't know, a smaller organization that relies a lot more on automation tools to kind of accomplish the goals? Jeffrey Green: Thanks for the question, Jason. So I'm actually really glad that you've asked this question because it can help paint the picture of sort of where we're seeing opportunity and where we're seeing some pressures. What we've tried to really highlight is that most of our customers and most of our business is doing very well. I do think you can say we have some customer concentration. And by the nature of the fact that we service the top 500 advertisers in the world, it already has some concentration, if you will. And the fact that we're adding so much to the growth team, which includes some middle market as well as some of the brands that we've been winning back, it just underlines that we're winning in almost everywhere, in almost every category. But there are a handful of businesses, often large, that are under pressure. And sometimes, when you're under pressure, you try to pursue something that is cheaper, you try to cut costs. You try to do things that can get you through that. In some of those cases, they recognize that they're making decisions that don't help them in the long term. So that's part of the reason why we tried to highlight and give so many numbers about the different categories of business and then highlight some of the categories is to just make sure that we were isolating those that were struggling from those that are doing really well. And we highlight that just because, obviously, our results are lower than we wanted them to be, and our guide is lower than we wanted to be. So we just spend a little bit more time talking about the problem, but we don't want anyone to walk away from this thinking there is a systemic problem. This is more a cyclical issue with a handful of customers, and it's not hard to look at their earnings and see that they've had some challenges. So we tried to highlight that. But it's really important that the bigger takeaways are that we signed over 200 JBPs through Q2, and that represents 38% growth year-over-year. That -- the JBP growth rate is 6x higher than overall revenue. The majority of our top 100 accounts are growing double digits. CTV and audio grew double digits once again in Q2. Audio actually became our fastest-growing channel and now represents over 7% of our business. And we just continue to expand our partnership with Spotify, which we're extremely excited about. I don't think we gave enough word count to the fact that EMEA and APAC have both grown at almost 30% year-to-date. So both of them have done really phenomenal, where in recent years, that hasn't been the case. So the fact that those are now paying off is amazing. And the fact that the second largest market in China is now growing over 100% year-to-date for us is fantastic. And then, of course, we had over 50% CTV growth year-over-year in both EMEA and APAC, where historically, those were mostly mobile-first markets and to see CTV doing so well in each of those markets, it's just underscoring that we've made the right investments. So there are green shoots all over the place, but there are a few large customers that are under pressure. We've tried to highlight that, but please don't walk away from this thinking that's affecting everyone. It's actually just a couple of them. And then overall, we have most of our departments, most of our business, most of our customers and most of our geographies doing really well with the brightest future being in things like CTV, inside of audio, in our retail partnerships, in our data partnerships. And when you fuel that or when you funnel that into our measurement product and our Audience Unlimited product, we think that there's a way to really accelerate that flywheel. And if you get rid of just a little bit of some of those macro pressures, a lot of things change. The last thing that I just think is really important to underline and answer to your question is we have an unbelievable leadership team. Most of them are new. And so we're just trying to give them enough runway to get up to speed and really make a substantial contribution. And we're convinced that they can and they will. So I'm really excited to see what we can all do together and excited for the next chapter. And while days like today hurt, they're going to make the comeback story even more exciting and more impressive. Thank you. Operator: Thank you. This concludes the question-and-answer session. This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation. Before you buy stock in The Trade Desk, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and The Trade Desk wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut are built for long-term growth and could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $400,209!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,375,393!* That performance is why people listen. 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Trade Desk (TTD) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript was originally published by The Motley Fool

Morgan Stanley lowered its price target on the stock to $13 from $26 and keeps an ‘Equal Weight’ rating on the shares. The company announced revenue guidance of at least $650 million for the third quarter, which fell short of the consensus estimate of $670.88 million. The firm highlighted that customer retention remained over 95% during the quarter, as it has for over a decade. Shares of Trade Desk (TTD) were in the spotlight on Monday after analysts expressed skepticism following the company’s second-quarter (Q2) results. Trade Desk announced revenue of $715.06 million in Q2 compared to an estimated $751.35 million, according to Fiscal.ai. Adjusted earnings per share (EPS) came in at $0.34 versus an estimated $0.4. See what 10M+ investors are talking about. Get the Stocktwits Daily Rip for what retail is watching right now, free to your inbox For the third quarter, the company announced revenue guidance of at least $650 million, which fell short of the consensus estimate of $670.88 million. It guided for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of approximately $160 million. This too fell short of the consensus estimate of $174.40 million. However, the firm highlighted that customer retention remained over 95% during the quarter, as it has for over a decade. According to TheFly, HSBC analyst Mohammed Khallouf downgraded Trade Desk to ‘Reduce’ from ‘Hold' and lowered the price target by 50% to $10. HSBC noted that the company reported a "dismal" Q2 result, with a "sizable miss and guidance shock.” The firm noted that Trade Desk is staring at an increasingly competitive operating environment across the advertising technology supply chain in the middle of AI-accelerated structural shifts away from the open web. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley lowered its price target on Trade Desk to $13 from $26, while keeping an ‘Equal Weight’ rating on the shares. The firm noted that pressure from counterparties, customers, and competitors seems to intensify as Trade Desk results rapidly descend into year-over-year declines. Earlier, CEO Jeff Green had highlighted that Q2 “did not meet the standard we set for ourselves, but it has reinforced our belief that we are focused on the right opportunities for the future.” “Marketers are navigating a complex environment, but complexity increases the value of decisioning, measurement, and AI. We have a clear understanding of the factors that impacted our performance, and we are taking decisive action to strengthen our execution, upgrade our platform, and sharpen our focus on the areas where we can create the greatest value,” he said. On Stocktwits, retail sentiment continued to trend in the ‘extremely bullish’ territory over the past 24 hours amid high retail chatter. Stocktwits users opined that the stock could be a value buy at these levels. TTD shares are down over 60% this year. Also See: MNDY Stock Falls After Missing Q3 Expectations — Co-CEOs Say Early Results From Restructuring ‘Reinforce Our Conviction’ For updates and corrections, email newsroom[at]stocktwits[dot]com. Bhavik Nair has no position in any of the stocks mentioned in this article. StockTwits' news team content is for informational purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. For more, see our editorial policy. This article was originally published on StockTwits. Related: Why Is KEEL Stock Rising Overnight Despite Missing Q2 Estimates? RIOT Stock Jumps Overnight After Report Names Anthropic As ‘Mystery’ Cloud Customer RUM Q2 Revenue Jumps 60% — CEO Targets Quake AI’s $3B Opportunity

Our analysts just identified a stock with the potential to be the next Nvidia. Tell us how you invest and we'll show you why it's our #1 pick. Tap here. Revenue growth underperformed internal expectations due to macro pressures on large Fortune 500 brands, particularly in the CPG and automotive sectors which represent 25% of platform spend. Management identified a 'consumer wealth bifurcation' where high-income consumers remain resilient while lower-income consumer softness forces some advertisers to prioritize low-cost media over high-value decisioned buying. Underperformance was partially attributed to internal execution gaps, prompting a significant overhaul of the leadership team with new C-suite hires from Amazon, Uber, and Logitech to drive operational discipline. Joint Business Plans (JBPs) emerged as a critical growth engine, with revenue from these structured partnerships growing at 6x the rate of overall revenue. The platform is seeing strong secular tailwinds in international markets, with EMEA and APAC growing nearly 30% year-to-date and China revenue increasing over 100%. Management maintains that their independent, objective DSP model is a strategic moat against walled gardens that prioritize owned-and-operated inventory over buyer outcomes. A shift in advertiser behavior toward 'programmatic guaranteed' and fixed-price deals is viewed by management as a shortsighted reaction to economic volatility that sacrifices long-term business outcomes. Q3 guidance assumes no meaningful improvement in the macro environment, reflecting limited visibility and a cautious stance on consumer-facing verticals. The company is transitioning critical workloads from public cloud to owned data centers to support AI workloads and drive long-term operating leverage, despite near-term expense increases. Product roadmap priorities are centered on the 'Zuma' platform upgrade, the 'Audience Unlimited' data subscription model, and a new measurement framework currently in alpha. Management plans to implement stricter investment discipline, aggressively funding high-priority growth initiatives while reducing resources in lower-impact areas through 2027. The emergence of LLMs and AI-driven search is expected to expand the addressable market by creating new advertising surfaces and increasing competition for traditional search budgets. Significant leadership transition completed with the appointment of a new CFO, COO, and Chief Commercial Officer to scale the organization for a $1 trillion TAM. Platform operations expenses increased 12% (excluding stock-based compensation) due to infrastructure optimization and AI tool implementation. Management acknowledged a temporary 'public dispute' regarding agency negotiations but confirmed that partnerships, specifically with Publicis, have stabilized. Tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty in the Middle East were explicitly cited as external risks impacting the CPG and automotive advertising budgets. One stock. Nvidia-level potential. 30M+ investors trust Moby to find it first. Get the pick. Tap here. Focus is on upgrading the Kokai platform via the 'Zuma' launch to improve AI usability and platform efficiency. Scaling 'Audience Unlimited' to more customers to lower data CPMs and improve household reach efficiency. Aggressively pursuing 'enterprise Kokai' deals and winning back lost customers through a dedicated growth team that has grown its book 250% year-over-year. Management argues AI is the 'essence' of a DSP rather than a disruptor, as it enables the processing of 20 million ad opportunities per second. Objectivity is positioned as the primary differentiator against walled gardens (Amazon/Google) that have inherent conflicts of interest when selling their own inventory. Agentic AI is viewed as a massive opportunity to automate complex workflows rather than a threat to the decisioning model. Management reiterated that they do not aim to be the cheapest platform but the most effective, with take rates remaining stable over the last decade. New products like Audience Unlimited use a subscription-based percentage to simplify pricing and remove data cost as a barrier to entry. The value proposition relies on 'consumer surplus,' where the platform adds more mathematical value to a campaign than the fee it extracts.

Trade Desk stock crashed 28% after Q2 revenue of $715M missed estimates and Q3 guidance of at least $650M fell $155M short of the $805M consensus. MoffettNathanson slashed its Trade Desk stock price target to $6 from $23, leading a wave of downgrades as Truist and Wells Fargo warn a turnaround could take several quarters. AppLovin's steady trading and Magnite's raised full-year outlook confirm that Trade Desk stock's collapse today is company-specific, not a signal of a broken ad-tech market. It sounds nuts, but SoFi1 is giving new Active Invest users up to $3,000 in stock for a limited time, and all it takes is a $50 deposit to get started.2 See for yourself (Sponsor) The Trade Desk (NASDAQ:TTD) stock is plunging 28% to $12.76 in Friday morning trading after the advertising-technology company delivered a disappointing second-quarter report and offered a sharply weaker outlook for the third quarter. The collapse comes one day after The Trade Desk stock fell 6.8% to $17.67 without any obvious company-specific news, making Friday's selloff a much clearer signal about the company's own business. The contrast with other ad-tech stocks is striking. AppLovin (NASDAQ:APP) stock is up 1% to $340.55, while Magnite (NASDAQ:MGNI) stock is down just 1% to $24.15, and the Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) is up 0.82% to $720.61 as investors digest a weaker-than-expected July jobs report. The Trade Desk reported second-quarter revenue of $715 million, below expectations of $751 million, while adjusted earnings per share came in at $0.34 versus the $0.40 consensus estimate. The Trade Desk's third-quarter outlook was even more concerning, with revenue expected to reach at least $650 million compared with expectations of roughly $805 million. Management pointed to macroeconomic pressure affecting consumer packaged goods and automotive advertisers, along with execution problems and a shift toward lower-cost programmatic fixed-price media. The Trade Desk also faces competition from cheaper alternatives, creating a difficult combination of weaker demand, pricing pressure and potential market-share losses. SoFi Active Invest is offering a limited-time promotion. Open an account, fund it with $50 or more, and you could receive up to $3,000 in complimentary stock for Active Invest accounts. See for yourself by clicking here now. (Sponsor) Wall Street responded with an unusually broad wave of downgrades and price-target cuts. BMO Capital downgraded The Trade Desk stock to Market Perform with a $15 target from $38, while Citi moved to Sell with an $11 target from $21 and Evercore ISI cut its target to $13 from $27. Guggenheim downgraded The Trade Desk to Neutral and reduced its target to $12 from $25, while RBC Capital moved to Sector Perform with a $15 target from $33. MoffettNathanson went further by cutting its target to $6 from $23, underscoring how dramatically expectations have changed. AppLovin stock is holding up despite the broader market uncertainty, while Magnite stock is also showing relative strength after Magnite delivered a better-than-expected second quarter and raised its full-year outlook. Yesterday's ad-tech split therefore appears even more significant today, with investors increasingly distinguishing between companies facing company-specific problems and those showing stronger operating momentum. AppLovin and Magnite also provide an important counterpoint to the argument that Friday's Trade Desk collapse simply reflects a weak advertising market. Trade Desk's pricing pressure, execution issues and advertiser losses appear to be more specific problems, although softer economic conditions could still create headwinds across the broader industry. The bullish case for Trade Desk stock is that the 28% plunge could eventually price in a significant portion of the company's near-term deterioration. UBS remains constructive with a $16 price target and believes improved sales execution, product updates and growing joint-business-plan momentum could provide early signs of a recovery. However, the bearish case currently has more immediate evidence behind it. Raymond James downgraded Trade Desk to Underperform, while Truist argued that fixing the company's problems could take several quarters, and Wells Fargo warned that trends could continue deteriorating unless Trade Desk aligns pricing with the broader industry. Investors can watch for whether Trade Desk can stabilize advertiser relationships, reverse share losses and turn product improvements into renewed spending growth. Given the magnitude of the earnings-driven reset and the wide range of reduced price targets, investors choosing to own Trade Desk stock may want to keep their position sizes moderate, even if the sharp decline makes the shares appear increasingly tempting to contrarian buyers. Looking to grow your money but unsure where to begin? SoFi Active Invest is offering a limited-time promotion—open a new Active Invest account, fund it with $50 or more, and you could receive up to $3,000 in complimentary stock. From $0 commission trading3 to fractional shares4 and automated investing, this app is designed to simplify investing for everyone, whether you’re just starting or already experienced. Its easy to sign up and secure your bonus.(Sponsor) Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Revenue and adjusted EPS both came in below Wall Street expectations for the second quarter. Third-quarter guidance missed analyst forecasts by a wide margin. Stocktwits retail sentiment was ‘extremely bullish’ despite the selloff, even as traders debated whether weak guidance or slowing growth was the bigger concern. The Trade Desk Inc. (TTD) reported second-quarter results after Thursday’s closing bell that missed analyst expectations on both revenue and earnings, while issuing weaker-than-expected third-quarter guidance. The disappointing results sent TTD stock down more than 26% in after-hours trading after it had already fallen 6.8% during the regular session. See what 10M+ investors are talking about. Get the Stocktwits Daily Rip for what retail is watching right now, free to your inbox The Trade Desk reported adjusted earnings of $0.34 per diluted share for the second quarter, down from $0.41 a year earlier. It was also below analysts’ consensus estimate of $0.40, according to fiscal.ai. Revenue for the quarter ended June 30 rose to $715.06 million from $694 million in the same period a year ago, but missed analysts’ consensus estimate of $751.35 million, according to fiscal.ai. Customer retention remained above 95% during the quarter, the company said in a release. For the third quarter, The Trade Desk expects revenue of at least $650 million, well below analysts’ consensus estimate of 805 million, according to fiscal.ai. It also forecast adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of around $160 million, compared with analysts’ consensus estimate of $340 million. Jeff Green, co-founder and CEO of The Trade Desk, acknowledged the quarter fell short of expectations but said the company is taking steps to improve execution while continuing to focus on AI, measurement and decision-making tools. “This quarter did not meet the standard we set for ourselves, but it has reinforced our belief that we are focused on the right opportunities for the future,” Green said. He added that the company has identified the factors that affected performance and is taking action to strengthen execution, upgrade its platform and sharpen its focus on areas where it believes it can create the greatest value. On Stocktwits, retail sentiment for TTD improved to ‘extremely bullish’ from ‘bullish’ over the past 24 hours, while message volume jumped to ‘extremely high’ from ‘normal’ during the same period. Retail traders largely viewed the weak guidance as the primary reason behind the sharp selloff, while some said that slowing growth, and not the underlying business, remains the key concern. One retail trader said the “earnings numbers are not the issue” and that “guidance being so weak” was the real disappointment. The trader added that investors had hoped the outlook would be “the silver lining” after earlier operational issues were resolved. Another trader said “growth rate matters as much as growth itself,” and added that “the problem wasn’t the business” but rather the premium investors had assigned to future growth as revenue growth decelerated. One bullish investor, however, pointed to TTD’s customer retention as a sign of long-term strength. The trader highlighted that customer retention was above 95%, and called it a level of “stickiness” rare in ad tech, saying it shows the company’s core platform continues to deliver value for advertisers and agencies. TTD stock has lost nearly 54% year-to-date. Also See: NVDA Reportedly Weighs Lower-Memory Rubin Ultra GPU Designs To Ease HBM Bottleneck — Why Retail Is Watching Micron For updates and corrections, email newsroom[at]stocktwits[dot]com. Aveek Bhowmik has no position in any of the stocks mentioned in this article. StockTwits' news team content is for informational purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. For more, see our editorial policy. This article was originally published on StockTwits. Related: Why S&P 500, Dow Futures Are Slipping Overnight After Wall Street’s Second Straight Day In The Red TTD Stock Crashes Overnight: CEO Says Trade Desk's Customers ‘Operating In Different Environment' DKNG Stock Slips After-Hours As Q2 Earnings Disappoint — CEO Says Predictions Growing Faster Than Expected, Ready To Win NFL Season

The Trade Desk (TTD) came out with quarterly earnings of $0.34 per share, missing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $0.41 per share. This compares to earnings of $0.41 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items. This quarterly report represents an earnings surprise of -17.07%. A quarter ago, it was expected that this digital-advertising platform operator would post earnings of $0.32 per share when it actually produced earnings of $0.28, delivering a surprise of -12.5%. Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates just once. The Trade Desk, which belongs to the Zacks Internet - Services industry, posted revenues of $715.06 million for the quarter ended June 2026, missing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 4.86%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $694.04 million. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates three times over the last four quarters. The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call. The Trade Desk shares have lost about 50.1% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 12.8%. While The Trade Desk has underperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock? There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately. Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions. Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for The Trade Desk was mixed. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to perform in line with the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. It will be interesting to see how estimates for the coming quarters and the current fiscal year change in the days ahead. The current consensus EPS estimate is $0.51 on $803.89 million in revenues for the coming quarter and $1.88 on $3.18 billion in revenues for the current fiscal year. Investors should be mindful of the fact that the outlook for the industry can have a material impact on the performance of the stock as well. In terms of the Zacks Industry Rank, Internet - Services is currently in the bottom 38% of the 250 plus Zacks industries. Our research shows that the top 50% of the Zacks-ranked industries outperform the bottom 50% by a factor of more than 2 to 1. LivePerson (LPSN), another stock in the same industry, has yet to report results for the quarter ended June 2026. This customer-service technology company is expected to post quarterly loss of $1.00 per share in its upcoming report, which represents a year-over-year change of +39.4%. The consensus EPS estimate for the quarter has remained unchanged over the last 30 days. LivePerson's revenues are expected to be $48.61 million, down 18.4% from the year-ago quarter. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report The Trade Desk (TTD) : Free Stock Analysis Report LivePerson, Inc. (LPSN) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com). Zacks Investment Research