The Trade Desk falls as much as 30% following earnings miss

The Trade Desk is taking a haircut.

The ad tech company’s stock was down more than 30% Thursday after it missed on revenue expectations for the first time since going public in 2016.

The Trade Desk brought in $741 million in revenue in Q4, up 22% year over year but about $15 million less than its revenue forecast from the prior quarter. For the year, the company posted revenue of $2.4 billion, a YoY jump of 26%.

What happened? “The reality is that we stumbled due to a series of small execution missteps while simultaneously preparing for the future,” founder and CEO Jeff Green told investors.

When asked for clarity, Green said the missteps involve “mistakes that aren’t appropriate to discuss publicly, especially when people are already learning from these mistakes,” before referencing a slower-than expected rollout of its media buying platform Kokai. Green said the company had implemented a reorg to provide a “much clearer view of roles and responsibilities.”

Green also said the company would go on a hiring spree to “double the number of senior leaders in the company at the VP level and above.”

“We want to scale The Trade Desk significantly in the years ahead, and that means ensuring we have the right kind of leadership rigor across the company while preserving the best elements of what we’ve done so well so far,” he said.

Zoom out: The Trade Desk is one of the largest ad tech companies not named Google, and in 2024, it captured about $12 billion of industry ad spend. Last month, the company announced its first acquisition since 2017 with the purchase of the ad tech intelligence platform Sincera.

“Joining Sincera’s work with ours will accelerate a cleaner supply chain for the open Internet and accelerate the work of [TTD’s direct-to-publisher offering] OpenPath, which is one of our biggest efficiency efforts, both internally and externally,” Green said on the call.