The news: The Trade Desk laid off 15% of its staff on Friday, approximately 576 employees, CEO and founder Jeff Green told workers late Thursday, the largest headcount reduction in the company’s history.

In an internal email published on TTD’s news site, The Current, Green said the layoffs would organize teams “into smaller pods and smaller scrums, but with greater focus.”

In the letter, Green restated the company’s investment in the “open internet” and took a shot at larger competitors. “While this is a common practice in big tech, this has not been a common practice at TTD. We don’t expect it to become one.”

Why the open web is shrinking: The Trade Desk’s bread and butter is surfacing ad inventory from a network of independent web publishers, but demand for open-web ad space has diminished as Big Tech pushed into the market. We forecast US walled-garden programmatic digital display ad spend will surpass $226 billion by 2030, compared with $52 billion for open-web spending

• The three largest ad companies—Google, Meta, and Amazon—wield enormous revenues, diversified businesses, and major digital platforms to sell ad inventory below what open-web intermediaries like The Trade Desk can offer.
• With their enormous user bases across social media, retail ecommerce, video, and search, the ad triopoly also commands an enormous well of first-party data on consumer behavior, guaranteeing marketers a stronger return-on-investment at a time of great economic uncertainty.

AI is compounding those effects: Since launching in May 2024, Google’s AI Overviews have reduced traffic to publishers by as much as 58% on top-ranking search results, per Ahrefs, and clickthrough rates are down even on queries that don’t surface an Overview. The result is more traffic in Google’s own ecosystem and devalued ad space for independent publishers.

Implications for marketers: The Trade Desk has positioned itself as an unbiased alternative to walled-garden platforms that prioritize their own inventory, but its turmoil shows advertisers are prioritizing first-party data and lower costs regardless.

As Big Tech cuts into the value of open internet ad inventory, The Trade Desk and other independent intermediaries will continue to struggle.

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