The Trade Desk’s CEO just gave his sharpest take yet on why publishers have become a central focus for the company.
Speaking at the Prebid Summit yesterday (Oct. 14), Jeff Green boiled it down to one thing: the auction. It’s the common ground where buyers and sellers meet — and the key to keeping the open internet competitive with the walled gardens. That’s why, he said, The Trade Desk is taking a more active role in its health. It hasn’t always been that way; the company’s priorities once leaned more toward the buy side. But that balance is shifting — and not without some friction.
That friction has been on full display since the start of this month. That’s when The Trade Desk launched OpenAds, a new version of the online ad auction built from Prebid’s open-source software. Think of it as a parallel system that runs alongside the existing one, but with a key difference. It still uses universal Transaction IDs, the identifiers that let advertisers trace where and how their ads are being bought across multiple platforms. Prebid recently removed those IDs, arguing they gave buyers too much control over publisher inventory and pricing.
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