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The numbers
$616 million: Revenue for Q1 2025, a 25% increase year-over-year, exceeding its earlier guidance of “at least $575 million.”
$682 million: Revenue guidance for Q2 2025, (at least).
$59.99: The firm’s closing stock price after earnings yesterday, down from a high point of $70.40.
12.64%: Increase in stock price in after-hours trading.
-32.34%: How much stock has fallen in the last 12 months.
95%: TTD’s current customer retention rate.
Two-thirds: The number of clients using its core platform Kokai, with the bulk of spend running through it.
Watercooler talk
Investors eagerly anticipated The Trade Desk’s earnings, and the strong results indicate its previous quarter’s revenue miss was more like a blip (partly blamed on clients sluggishly transitioning to its new user interface Kokai). Chief executive (CEO) Jeff Green called Q4’s performance a “setback” from which TTD undertook the “most significant company upgrade in our sixteen-year history”.
That translates to simplifying some of its structure, platform updates, new hires, and enhancing Kokai with more AI tools, ultimately improving campaign performance and lowering advertisers’ cost per acquisition.
High points include growth in CTV and retail media, as well as TTD’s product OpenPath, which more directly connects advertisers with publishers without the supply-side platform. The latter is being more widely adopted. The demand-side platform claimed publisher, the Arena Group, is increasing fill rates by 4x and programmatic revenue by 79%, and The New York Post saw fill rates increase more than 8x and revenue increase 97% thanks to OpenPath.
The firm is confident about the future—regulatory pressure on rivals like Google will do that—but it also recognizes the challenges of the uncertain economic environment, the unclear future of the open web, inefficient programmatic supply chains, as well as its own platform upgrades.
How TTD will find more growth in the fragmented CTV landscape is another challenge, especially since it lost its hardware partner when Sonos canceled its streaming video player in March.
Key quote:
“Our model is designed to compete,” said Green. “As we’ve said before, if we can win share in an unfair market against the biggest tech players in the world, as we have over the last fifteen years, imagine what we can do in a fair market.”
