The headline: The Trade Desk’s third-quarter revenue came in about $86 million above its own forecast on Monday.
The number under it: its guidance of at least $755 million for the fourth quarter is about 11% below the $847 million it booked a year ago.
On September 3, Jeff Green sent his staff an email that started with the news and skipped the cushioning. “Tomorrow, The Trade Desk will be smaller by about 15% of employee count globally,” the founder and chief executive wrote, in a message PPC Land later laid out in full. Against the 3,843 people on the payroll at the end of 2025, that is roughly 575 jobs, gone the next morning. Green told employees layoffs at that scale “has not been a common practice at TTD” and that he did not expect it to become one. Two months later, on November 9, the company reported third-quarter revenue of $736 million, down 0.5% from $739 million a year earlier and its first year-over-year decline since its 2016 IPO. Net income fell 67% to $38 million after a $44 million restructuring charge, most of it severance.
Much of Monday’s coverage led with the beat, a company clearing a low bar. We lined up its own reported revenue for the last five quarters instead, and the trend is the story:
- Q4 2025: $847 million, up 14%
- Q1 2026: $689 million, up 12%
- Q2 2026: $715 million, up 3%
- Q3 2026: $736 million, down 0.5%
- Q4 2026 guidance: at least $755 million, down about 11%
That third quarter also had help the fourth will not. This is a midterm year, and Adweek reported that record political spending kept the decline from being steeper. The ballots are counted. The political money is spent.
Where the Ad Money Went
The Trade Desk sells software that lets advertisers buy ads across the open web and streaming TV, everywhere outside the walled gardens run by Google, Meta and Amazon. Its pitch for a decade was that it sat on the buyer’s side, with no inventory of its own to push. That pitch is losing to scale. In the same quarter The Trade Desk shrank, Amazon’s advertising revenue grew 11% to $19.64 billion. Amazon’s ad business took in about 27 times as much money in three months as The Trade Desk did. Guideline data cited in May put Amazon’s share of tracked programmatic spending at just under 20%, up from under 10% about 15 months earlier, and agencies have described Amazon’s offer as lower fees with its retail purchase data attached.
The job cuts are not confined to one company. Across the agencies that place this money, the payroll is shrinking too. WPP’s headcount fell from 108,044 at the end of 2024 to 97,388 at the end of June 2026, a 9.9% drop, while it automates creative and media work through its own platform. Omnicom, now carrying IPG after the merger, is working toward about 105,000 people by the end of this year from roughly 120,000. Dentsu planned about 3,400 cuts outside Japan. Publicis is the outlier, up 3,932 people year over year.
“Still operating below the level of growth we expect from ourselves.”
That was Green in Monday’s release, and it is the most honest sentence in it. The question is whether more growth is available to him at all.
Washington Had a Chance to Change This and Passed
On September 2, two days before the layoffs, Judge Leonie Brinkema declined to order Google to sell its AdX ad exchange, choosing behavioral remedies and a monitor over a breakup, even though she had already found Google illegally monopolized the market. We covered the Justice Department’s push to split that business when it was still on the table. It is off the table now, and the open-web companies that hoped a broken-up Google would loosen the market are left competing with the same Google, plus an Amazon that keeps growing.
Our view: The Trade Desk’s trouble is partly its own. Its fees made agencies look for alternatives, and it spent years telling investors the open web would win on principle. But the bigger force is structural, and it was a choice. Regulators proved Google broke the law and then left its ad stack whole, and nobody in Washington is seriously asking what Amazon’s retail data does to competition in ad buying. The 575 people who lost their jobs at The Trade Desk, and the thousands more across the holding companies, are paying for a market that is consolidating with official permission.
The fourth-quarter report lands in February. If the 11% drop holds, it will be the steepest in the company’s public history, and the decline will no longer have a midterm election to soften it.