The open internet 2025, part 1: Framing a year of change

Today I think it is important to engage like old times with the small group of us who focus day to day on the esoteric world of programmatic advertising.

This is a pivotal moment for the open internet

It seems there are at most a few thousand people in the world who talk all the time about the changes in advertising technology, and, understandably, the rest of the world doesn’t care. Perhaps more would care if it weren’t so complicated. Incidentally, of those few thousand, there seem to be a few hundred who are passionate enough to host their own podcasts or publish nearly daily in some corner of the digital ecosystem.

For those few hundred, transaction IDs, buyer signals and the business models of supply-side platforms (SSPs) have been discussed nonstop for the last few weeks.

Outside of this community, most people don’t understand the stark differences between the open internet and walled gardens. The open internet is the place where price discovery and market-driven pricing underpin the market. Self-interest and fragmentation can, at times, create an incentive for buyers or sellers to muddy the waters or (said differently) to obscure real price discovery. This is one of those moments.

In fact, for the last year or two, the open internet has been growing up — quickly. Supply chains are improving. Nevertheless, if we are too myopic, we’ll limit ourselves to the problems of today and not see either the progress we’ve made, or worse, we won’t see where we are heading.

Let’s connect the dots between the problems of today and the golden era of the open internet that is ahead of us. But before we do, let’s step back and spend a few words to frame this op-ed, which is meant to start a conversation and explain some of the reasons we’re innovating and disrupting.

In Britain, the poet laureate is an honorary title given by the monarch to a poet who serves as the country’s official voice in poetry. (Stay with me.) The position started in 1616 and has been occupied ever since, with one exception. There was a period when the seat was unoccupied for four years. Alfred, Lord Tennyson held the position for 42 years, and then upon his passing, they didn’t fill the seat — out of respect — for those four years. He was the Michael Jordan of English poetry. His greatest work was arguably “Ulysses.” T.S. Eliot called it “the perfect poem.” And its last six lines have been used to inspire perseverance ever since it was written nearly 150 years ago.

Before the 2012 London Olympics, a committee of literary experts chose the closing lines of “Ulysses” to be inscribed on the wall of the athletes village, believing them to be the most inspiring words for competitors. A century earlier, those same lines were engraved on a memorial to Robert Falcon Scott in St. Paul’s Cathedral, celebrating his momentous 1912 expedition to the South Pole and his resilience in reaching one of Earth’s final frontiers.

Here they are:

    Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
     We are not now that strength which in old days
     Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
     One equal temper of heroic hearts,
     Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
     To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

If this feels a bit like a halftime speech, perhaps that is what it is to those who’ve been doing this for nearly two decades. Perhaps that is what it is for me, personally, as I near the 10th anniversary of our IPO (something most told me would fail because we were ad tech) and the 16-year mark since I first pitched Steve Katelman and Jonathan Nelson at OMG, David Danziger and Todd Cullen of Axiom, and Brian Lesser of WPP the idea that was The Trade Desk. I still have the first deck I pitched each of them. It’s full of the vision that is a real-time programmatic marketplace that is now the foundation of transacting all advertising. We’ve made so much progress.

Programmatic is no longer the Rebel Alliance of Luke, Han Solo, Leia, Chewbacca and R2-D2. With the biggest video streamers, the biggest retailers, the biggest music streamers and nearly every content publisher on the web using some amount of programmatic monetization (whether they know it or not) — the open internet has become so much, and yet it has even more unrealized potential.

If you’ve been in this space for more than five years — whether you were at Right Media, AppNexus, DoubleClick, FBX, AdECN, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, MediaMath, TubeMogul, Turn, Adconion, AdDot.com, Exchange Lab, BlueKai, DataXu or so many others (like the digital corner of every Hold Co and Indie) — we probably have a lot in common about what we think the end state of this industry can and should look like.

Either way, this is an important moment. To do the right thing for the long-term health of the open internet we have to continue to make tough decisions. I’ve been taught from a young age to do what is right and let the consequences follow.

Every few years something happens in ad tech that changes the landscape. For instance, Google taking away impression-level logs or reports from its publisher ad server. Or, Facebook’s retreat from dabbling in the open internet to the safety of its walled garden. Or, the rise of header bidding nearly 10 years ago. Or, the death and resurrection of cookies. Or, Google being definitively labeled a monopolist in the U.S. Federal Court earlier this year after the Department of Justice emerged victorious, finally. (Even John Jay, the first Supreme Court chief justice, perhaps said from the other side, “Damn, that took forever.”)

The next few weeks and months will go through another seismic shift.

In my view, one of the negative effects of Google’s monopoly was that it left little room for SSPs to have a sustainable business model. For years, many SSPs have been degrading the auction and unnecessarily expanding the number of hops in the supply chain. These hops are unnecessary because they often don’t add value to the advertiser or publisher. But they are absolutely necessary for some ad tech companies (mostly on the sell side) to stay alive. As one SSP exec put it to me a few years ago, “My kid’s gotta eat too.”

To be clear, some SSPs and exchanges are doing well and advancing the open internet. And because Google is likely prepping to exit the open internet, there has never been a better time to scale an SSP business that focuses on real yield management.

That said, one of those most significant landscape-changing events happened very recently during the last week of August — when most of Europe was on holiday, NYC traffic was light, and I was talking to traders in Japan. Outside of a few people in the ad tech echo chamber, it garnered little attention.

Perhaps that was deliberate. Perhaps in a moment they hoped no one would notice, a few zealous Prebid members made an unfortunate change to the terms of transaction ID within Prebid — a change that SSPs, sellers and publishers didn’t even get a chance to weigh in on or opt in to. It just happened to them. These zealous Prebid members muddied the data again. And as a result, a few rogue resellers temporarily set back the open internet again.

For 16 years, I’ve made clear that The Trade Desk represents the buyers of the open internet. Everything we do is in service to them. But because these buyers fund the open internet with their advertising dollars, aligning with them aligns our company with the future of the open internet.

Most advertisers and agencies that are focused on the long term want an ecosystem where publishers and content thrive too. In many places, that content is doing amazingly well — CTV, movies, music and sports for instance. However, many publishers — especially those who monetize in browsers and Google’s and Apple’s app marketplaces — are hurting. That pain is mostly due to a few major forces: Google’s draconian actions of the past; Google’s corruption of the ad server it bought; Facebook’s departure from the open internet with simultaneous changes in measurement; AI scraping; and wounded resellers making the supply chain less efficient and obfuscating to expand their fees.

In service of our commitment to the buy side of advertising, TTD has always obsessed about tightening and cleaning up the supply chain, even if at times it’s not in our short-term business interest. We want our clients to have as clear a view as possible of what they are buying and for what price. In doing so, we build advertiser trust by representing them exclusively. We believe that with this focus, marketers will eventually and inevitably choose the open internet to spend the first dollar of their marketing budget rather than continue to prioritize the opaqueness and grade-your-own-homework limitations of walled gardens. This is how nearly all markets mature over time — they bend toward efficiency, transparency and objectivity. And digital advertising will be no different.

The open internet is thriving in large part because of the efforts of The Trade Desk

Without TTD’s efforts, investments and support, the open internet wouldn’t have seen so many innovations that have improved the viability of a competitive diverse web over the years — including Sellers.json, Global Placement ID (GPID), Ads.txt, Unified ID (UID), Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) and transaction ID (TID). All of these efforts improved the supply chain for the whole open internet.

The Trade Desk led innovation on many of these initiatives. Others we championed and advanced. Regardless, TTD didn’t lead any of these initiatives alone. Without streamers and publishers like Disney, Paramount, Fox, Spotify, Peacock, Dotdash and so many others adopting UID2 for example — it would be nothing. They adopted and the open internet benefited, including other DSPs, SSPs, agencies, advertisers, sellers and publishers.

The open internet will always play second fiddle to walled gardens (as we do now) if we are not working together to advance a healthy and relatively efficient supply chain. I say “relatively” because success doesn’t require perfection. It just requires a net value exchange better than walled gardens, which I don’t think is that hard to do, nor is it very far off.

We are almost there.

That said, we’ve seen a number of setbacks from those trying to exploit what otherwise would be a very vibrant open internet economy. Some are coming from AI scraping and pose a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back problem to many content companies, perhaps none more than journalism.

But the recent TID change typifies a new kind of setback that is at once more nuanced, more immediate and more threatening. And this one originates with ad tech companies that don’t have the luxury of focusing on the long term. They are living the underutilized adage:

The last resort of a desperate man is a dangerous one.

This makes efforts to improve the supply chain urgent and more important than ever.

At The Trade Desk, improving the supply chain of the open internet for the most sophisticated buyers in the world is a major focus. Innovation can accelerate the inevitable long-term movement toward a transparent and efficient marketplace for digital ads.

I will elaborate on our latest innovations — always in service of the buy side — in the second part of this op-ed later this week.

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.