TTD Is a Bad Investment: Everyone Has an Incentive to Cut Out the Middleman

I used to be a TTD investor myself, so this isn't coming from someone who has always hated the company. But at some point, **rationality has to come first**. Being emotionally attached to an investment thesis after the underlying business environment changes is how you lose money. I genuinely don’t understand the bull case for The Trade Desk anymore. TTD keeps talking about the **“open internet”** as if that phrase itself is a competitive moat. But what does TTD actually own? No major consumer platform. No search engine. No social graph. No meaningful proprietary content. No massive first-party dataset. No dominant publisher inventory. No indispensable infrastructure. Compare that with Google, Meta, Amazon, Reddit, Microsoft, Netflix, etc. These companies may support parts of the open internet, but they also possess **actual leverage**—users, data, inventory, distribution, identity, content, or infrastructure. TTD mostly sits in the middle. And that is exactly why I think its long-term business model is structurally flawed. Look at the advertising pipeline from both directions: **Advertisers want to cut TTD out** because every intermediary adds cost. If AI makes campaign planning, bidding, attribution, targeting and optimization increasingly automated, why should advertisers continue paying a substantial middleman fee? **Publishers want to cut TTD out** because direct relationships with advertisers give them more control over their inventory, data and economics. So both the buyer and seller have an incentive to reduce the importance of the broker sitting between them. Advertising is already an extremely competitive market. This isn't some fragmented industry desperately requiring a broker to connect buyers and sellers. Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and other large platforms already have enormous advertiser relationships and increasingly sophisticated automated advertising technology. AI makes this problem worse, not better. A lot of what historically justified an independent DSP—optimization, audience selection, campaign management, measurement and bidding intelligence—looks increasingly like software that can be automated and commoditized. TTD's response seems to be endlessly talking about the “open internet.” But that's like complaining about the weather when you have no ability to control it. A company can advocate for openness because it **chooses** openness despite possessing leverage. TTD needs the open internet because without it, there is very little underneath the business. That is a very different situation. I don't think TTD necessarily collapses overnight. It can continue generating revenue for years. But structurally, I see it as a **slowly dying middleman business** whose position becomes harder to defend as AI reduces transaction friction and both sides of the advertising market become more capable of dealing directly with each other. I was willing to own TTD before. I'm not anymore, because **changing your mind when the facts change is investing; refusing to change your mind is just loyalty.** The fundamental question for TTD bulls is simple: **What does The Trade Desk control that the rest of the advertising ecosystem cannot eventually replace?** I still haven't seen a convincing answer.