The Trade Desk gross spend hits $13.4B as programmatic competition intensifies

The scale of capital flowing through independent platforms indicates that streaming advertisers are increasingly prioritizing supply-path transparency and cross-channel coordination over walled-garden ecosystems. As The Trade Desk scales its open-internet reach, it forces a strategic choice for streaming executives between broad programmatic access and the closed-loop attribution offered by commerce-centric rivals like Criteo. This fragmentation of the ad-tech stack requires buyers to move beyond simple return-on-ad-spend metrics toward rigorous incrementality testing. Watch for whether The Trade Desk’s OpenPath initiative successfully bypasses traditional supply-side intermediaries to lower effective take rates for premium video publishers.

The Trade Desk has continued expanding its footprint in connected TV and streaming advertising, positioning itself as the leading independent DSP for open-internet video buying. In its Q2 2025 earnings call, the company reported that CTV remains its fastest-growing channel and that OpenPath now processes over 30% of total spend, reinforcing its strategy of disintermediating traditional SSPs. Meanwhile, Criteo reported Q2 2025 revenue of $540 million, with its Commerce Max platform driving double-digit growth in retail media activations, underscoring the divergent paths these two companies are taking in the programmatic ecosystem.

On the business and competitive front, The Trade Desk has been aggressively courting streaming publishers through OpenPath, its direct supply-path optimization product. In May 2025, The Trade Desk announced that OpenPath had expanded to include over 200 premium publishers and that the initiative reduced intermediary take rates by an average of 15%, a claim that has drawn scrutiny from SSP vendors who argue the savings are overstated. Criteo, by contrast, has leaned into its Commerce Max retail media network, announcing in June 2025 that it had onboarded 40 new retail partners and expanded its closed-loop attribution capabilities to include streaming inventory. This sets up a structural tension for streaming ad buyers: broad open-internet reach versus commerce-anchored measurement.

From a technical and measurement standpoint, The Trade Desk's Unified ID 2.0 has become a key differentiator in the identity-deprecated streaming environment. A study published by the IAB Tech Lab in April 2025 found that UID2 matched 78% of CTV impressions across participating publishers, outperforming first-party-only solutions by 22 percentage points. Criteo's approach relies less on shared identity frameworks and more on deterministic purchase data from retail partners, which analysts at eMarketer noted in a July 2025 report gives Criteo a measurement advantage for lower-funnel commerce campaigns but limits its utility for upper-funnel streaming awareness buys. For streaming executives evaluating DSP partners, the choice increasingly hinges on whether campaign goals favor broad reach or closed-loop conversion attribution.