TTD's Customer Count Broadens: 3 Drivers Winning Businesses & Agencies

The Trade Desk is targeting midsize advertisers with measurement, data and AI upgrades as it seeks to expand beyond its traditional base.

Shreya Majumder

3 min read

The Trade Desk TTD is expanding beyond its traditional base of large advertisers and agencies to capture a broader pool of midsize businesses and agencies. Per management, advertisers outside its top 500 have grown more than 50% year over year on a year-to-date basis, pointing to momentum among smaller and emerging brands. TTD highlighted three major forces working in its favor as it executes its mid-market strategy while navigating the competitive and macro pressures facing digital advertising.

First, the company is advancing its product roadmap to improve media buying, with a major focus on measurement. Its new measurement framework, currently in alpha, aims to value the full customer journey better rather than relying on last-click or last-view metrics. By giving marketers greater visibility into incremental business results, TTD seeks to make premium open-Internet advertising more measurable and effective.

Second, TTD is ramping up Audience Unlimited, which simplifies how marketers discover and activate third-party data using AI and proprietary data. Its new subscription-based pricing makes data access easier and more cost-effective. As the product moves into Open Beta, early results are encouraging, with a global advertiser cutting both cost per unique household and data CPM by more than 25%, underscoring its potential to improve campaign efficiency.

Lastly, TTD is set to launch Zuma, a major platform upgrade focused on usability. It will streamline navigation, workflows and troubleshooting while leveraging more AI to create a more intuitive user experience. The upgrade reflects TTD’s efforts to respond to client needs and accelerate product innovation. Collectively, these upgrades can make decision-making more measurable and valuable, creating a stronger path to revenue growth.

How Rivals Stack Up Against TTD

Magnite MGNI growth is driven by strong CTV and DV+ demand. Key industry trends include rising programmatic adoption, international expansion and the shift toward CTV, while AI and agentic advertising are emerging as major opportunities. Magnite is developing AI-powered tools and agentic infrastructure to streamline demand-supply orchestration, create customized inventory and audience packages, and eventually support one-to-many RTB auctions. It also sees growing opportunities in live sports, particularly as streaming expands programmatic monetization. Despite some near-term moderation from tough comparisons and macro factors, Magnite expects continued CTV growth and margin expansion, with long-term margins potentially exceeding 40%.

Taboola.com Inc. TBLA continues to execute despite industry headwinds, including Google policy changes and publisher network cleanup, while raising its full-year ex-TAC growth outlook to 9%. The company is expanding relationships with major publishers like FOX News and winning broader ad-suite opportunities. AI is also becoming a key growth driver, with its Realize+ optimization platform adopted by more than 300 advertisers and new MCP and Claude integrations enabling natural-language campaign management. Taboola also raised its full-year financial outlook and remains focused on disciplined capital allocation, including share repurchases, though persistent FX headwinds could weigh on margins through 2026.

TTD’s Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates

Shares of TTD have declined 74.8% in the past year against the Zacks Internet Services industry and S&P 500 composites’ rise of 57.6% and 21.3%, respectively.

Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

From a valuation standpoint, TTD trades at a forward price-to-earnings of 26.29X, higher than the industry’s average of 20.41X.

Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for TTD’s earnings has been revised downward over the past 60 days.

Zacks Investment Research

Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

TTD currently carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell).

You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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