Programmatic advertising platforms capture 90% of US digital display spending

The dominance of automated buying signifies that manual negotiation is no longer viable for reaching audiences at scale. For streaming providers, this shift necessitates deep integration with major programmatic advertising platforms to capture shifting budgets that now prioritize CTV and first-party data over traditional display. As privacy regulations weaken third-party cookies, the ecosystem is moving toward 'walled garden' data like Amazon’s or device-level access via OEM partnerships to maintain targeting accuracy. This consolidation reduces fragmentation but increases reliance on a few dominant tech stacks. Watch for whether independent DSPs can maintain their transparency advantage as retail media networks and hardware manufacturers tighten control over their proprietary audience signals.

The Trade Desk has positioned itself as the leading independent demand-side platform competing against walled gardens like Google's DV360 and Amazon DSP. In its Q2 2025 earnings call, The Trade Desk reported revenue growth of 17% year-over-year, driven primarily by CTV and retail media verticals, signaling that independent DSPs can still capture budget even as consolidation accelerates. StackAdapt, another independent player, raised $250 million in a Series E round at a $3.3 billion valuation in early 2025, explicitly to expand its CTV and retail media capabilities and challenge the scale of larger platforms.

On the regulatory and business front, Google's Privacy Sandbox timeline and the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome have forced programmatic advertising platforms to accelerate first-party data strategies. Google confirmed in July 2024 that it would not deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome, instead introducing a new user-choice approach, which temporarily eased pressure on the ecosystem but did not reverse the strategic pivot toward identity solutions. Meanwhile, Amazon has expanded its ad business aggressively. Amazon's advertising segment generated $14.3 billion in revenue in Q2 2025, up 22% year-over-year, reinforcing its position as a dominant retail media network that competes directly with open programmatic channels for CTV and display budgets.

Technical benchmarks and measurement standards are becoming a differentiator among programmatic advertising platforms as CTV inventory grows. The Interactive Advertising Bureau published updated CTV measurement guidelines in March 2025 that require platforms to report viewability, completion rates, and attention metrics using standardized definitions, creating a compliance floor that smaller platforms must meet to compete for premium inventory. Criteo, which has repositioned itself as a commerce media platform, reported that its retail media revenue grew 30% in the first half of 2025, now representing over 40% of total company revenue, demonstrating how programmatic platforms are diversifying beyond traditional display into shoppable and commerce-driven ad formats.