The Trade Desk reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $715 million, up 3% year over year, well below the 19% growth rate it posted a year earlier. GAAP diluted EPS came in at $0.14 versus $0.18 in the prior-year quarter, and adjusted EBITDA fell to $241 million from $271 million. Third-quarter guidance calls for revenue of at least $650 million and adjusted EBITDA of about $160 million, both down from Q2. Co-Founder and CEO Jeff Green did not soften it: “Marketers are navigating a complex environment, but complexity increases the value of decisioning, measurement and AI.” He added that the company is “taking decisive action to strengthen our execution, upgrade our platform, and sharpen our focus on the areas where we can create the greatest value.”
For a marketing leader benchmarking programmatic spend, the growth slowdown matters less than what the company chose to highlight alongside it. Customer retention stayed above 95% for the quarter, a rate The Trade Desk says it has held for more than a decade, even as topline growth cooled sharply. That combination points to advertisers tightening overall budgets without leaving their core programmatic buying relationships.
The original insight sits in the partnership list attached to the results, not the revenue table. The Trade Desk named Databricks a launch partner for CustomerLake, a tool explicitly built to connect first-party data and agentic AI directly to media execution, and separately announced a new integration with Adobe linking paid media exposure data straight into Adobe Real-Time CDP profiles. A DSP under growth pressure is not cutting research and development on data infrastructure. It is racing to wire itself directly into the CDPs where marketers already keep their first-party data, which is a more durable growth bet than any single quarter’s revenue number.
Related: Nielsen’s move to fold DoubleVerify into audience measurement is reshaping the vendor landscape DSPs like The Trade Desk buy signal from, and ad decisioning migrating to the supply side tracks the same pressure on where buying intelligence actually lives.
Source: The Trade Desk (SEC Form 8-K)
