• by Wayne Friedman , February 16, 2024

Demand-side advertising platform The Trade Desk was up another 23% in revenue to $606 million in the fourth quarter -- continuing its 20%-plus gains over the past eight quarters.

In after-market Thursday trading, The Trade Desk stock soared nearly 20% to $90.48.

The company attributes its continued growth from increasing shifting media budgets to connected TV as well as the increased use of retail media platforms and retail-media data usage for its strong performance.

Video ad spending -- including CTV -- represents around mid-40 percent of total revenue, similar to its third-quarter 2023 results. Mobile ad spending is around a 30% share of overall revenue.

U.S. gross billings on its platform grew 23% year-over-year, with international billings 30% higher.

Net income grew 37% to $97 million. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) climbed 16% to $284 million.

“The company maintained its view that it stands to benefit from cookie deprecation as it presents one less competing identifier and enables a less complex tracking framework,” writes Michael Morris, media analyst for Guggenheim Securities. 

He adds: “We expect the topics of cookie changes and expanded Amazon Prime CTV inventory will be debated well into 2024.”

With the expected slow disappearance of digital cookies, the company expects more growth for its Unified ID 2.0 -- an open-source identity graph, derived from email and phone-number data and which are turned into hashed, salted identifiers. 

The identity graph has now been integrated into Dish Network, Philo (a streaming platform), Warner Bros. Discovery, and NBC Universal.

Company executives say cookie deprecation has now occurred around one-third all display impressions to date industrywide.

Trade Desk executives also expect higher growth for its Kokai platform in 2024, which launched in June 2023. 

The platform serves as a “co-pilot” for clients' media campaigns -- incorporating artificial intelligence, measurement, advertising/partner integrations, delivering a wide range of clients digital media-buying data points. It has access to more than 15 million advertising impressions every second.

First-quarter 2024 revenue guidance is for at least $478 million in revenue and about $130 million in cash flow (EBITDA).  On Thursday before the release of its quarterly results, the Trade Desk’s stock closed up 2% to $75.71.