The Trade Desk's Q3 Revenue Slipped to $736M — Profit Fell 67%

The Trade Desk posted $736 million in Q3 revenue, down from $739 million a year ago, while profit plunged from $116 million to $38 million. The company beat the pessimistic revenue forecast it had set for itself earlier this year. But growth has stalled, and CEO Jeff Green knows it.

"Our growth is still below the level we expect from ourselves and what we think we are capable of," Green told investors on the Q3 earnings call Monday evening, "and, honestly, what the ecosystem needs from us."

Who's actually making the media buys now?

The ground is shifting under the largest independent demand-side platform (DSP, software advertisers use to buy ads programmatically). Green said decisions once made by hands-on-keyboard traders are increasingly made by "senior agency leaders, procurement groups at large brands and senior executives."

The knowledge gap has narrowed, too. CMOs who once didn't know their own programmatic setup — or what a log file is — are being replaced by CFOs and CEOs who know, or are quickly learning, "the esoteric details of programmatic advertising," Green said.

Where the money goes is also moving:

• Video, including CTV (connected TV), online video and mobile video, now holds a low-50% share of total spend
• Mobile sits in the high-20% range
• Display is only a low double-digit percentage
• Audio, TTD's fastest-growing channel by percentage, hit 7% of the business in Q3

Notably, CTV and retail media — which usually dominate investor calls — barely came up. Instead, executives and investors focused on smaller channels and business lines.

Political, healthcare and international bright spots

Political spend didn't top the last presidential race, but given growth since the last midterm and prospects for the presidential election in two years, "you can argue this was our best political cycle yet," Green said.

Newly appointed CFO Nate Olmstead told investors The Trade Desk "saw particular demand strength in medical health and the political election business." The company touted healthcare measurement partnerships with Veeva Crossix and IQVIA Digital, plus an integration with OptimizeRx for medical ad inventory and targeting.

Internationally, TTD — historically indexed toward North America and US Fortune 1,000 marketers — saw its APAC business grow 30% in the first nine months of the year versus last year, led by 45% growth in China. EMEA is up more than 20%.

What does agentic AI change for buyers?

"AI has produced a tremendous opportunity for us," Green said. "AI is helping us operate, AI is helping us build product and AI is in the product to help our clients manage their advertising."

The tangible metrics: clients are setting up workflows faster, with campaign creation time down 9% on average, a 15% reduction for ad group creation and another 9% for uploading creatives. The agentic platform is in beta, but "early adopters highlight meaningful time savings," Green said.

He described the platform as an advertiser API (the interface connecting buying software to ad inventory) offering "quadrillions of permutations for every single campaign" — which can be "overwhelming for you to figure out what dial to turn and what to do." The value prop: a data feed, a few easy controls, and AI managing thousands of tunable dials.

Buyers should get familiar with it. The new agentic UI "is a good example of where the platform is heading," Green said, and programmatic is one of the best business use cases for agentic chatbots and AI optimization.

M&A appetite grows

Even TTD's reserved M&A posture may change. The company has two known acquisitions — Adbrain in 2017 and Sincera last year, both essentially acqui-hires — plus a third, undisclosed deal between them.

"I will just transparently say we're looking more now than we historically have," Green said, "partly because I just think there's a bunch of opportunity in the market that there hasn't been in the past."

Investors seemed pleased the company surpassed its low forecast, though they remain wary of the programmatic open web. With agentic tooling in beta, international growth accelerating and the M&A door opening wider, The Trade Desk's next few quarters will show whether Green's evolution thesis can restart growth.