Item 1. Business

Overview

The Trade Desk, Inc. (the “Company,” “we,” “our,” or “The Trade Desk”) is a global technology company that empowers buyers of advertising. Through our self-service, cloud-based platform, ad buyers can create, manage and optimize more expressive data-driven digital advertising campaigns across ad formats and channels, including display, video, audio, native and social, on a multitude of devices, such as computers, mobile devices and connected TV (“CTV”). Our platform’s integrations with major inventory, publisher and data partners provide ad buyers reach and decisioning capabilities, and our enterprise application programming interfaces (“APIs”) enable our clients to develop on top of the platform.

We commercially launched our platform in 2011, targeting the display advertising channel, and have continued to add additional advertising channels. In 2021, the gross spend on our platform came from multiple channels including mobile, video (which includes CTV), display, audio, native, digital-out-of-home and social channels.

Our clients are primarily the advertising agencies and other service providers for advertisers, with whom we enter into ongoing master services agreements (“MSAs”). We generate revenue by charging our clients a platform fee based on a percentage of a client’s total spend on advertising. We also generate revenue from providing data and other value-added services and platform features.

The Trade Desk is a Delaware corporation established in 2009 and headquartered in Ventura, California.

Our Industry

We believe that several trends in the advertising industry, happening in parallel, are driving a shift to programmatic advertising – the selling and buying of advertising inventory electronically.

Some of the key industry trends are:

Media is Becoming Digital. Media is increasingly becoming digital as a result of advances in technology and changes in consumer behavior. This shift has enabled unprecedented options for advertisers to target and measure their advertising campaigns across nearly every media channel and device. The digital advertising market is a significant and growing part of the total advertising market. We believe that the market is evolving and that advertisers will shift more spend to digital media. Since media is becoming increasingly digital, decisions based on consumer and behavioral data are more prevalent.

Fragmentation of Audience. As digital media grows, audience fragmentation is accelerating. A growing “long tail” of mobile applications (apps), media players, websites and content presents a challenge for advertisers trying to reach a large audience. Audience fragmentation has substantially impacted TV content distribution, perhaps more than any other channel, which we believe is changing how TV advertising inventory is monetized. Mirroring the fragmentation occurring in content, the number of devices used by individual consumers has increased. Both of these fragmentation trends are opportunities for technology companies that can consolidate and simplify media buying options for advertisers and their agencies.

Convergence of TV and the Internet. We are witnessing a generational shift from linear TV to CTV with the convergence of the Internet and television programming. New technologies allow more video content to be delivered more seamlessly over the Internet, accelerating consumer demand to watch what they want, when they want and where they want. The current worldwide rollout of 5G, the fifth generational standard for wireless networks, is bringing significantly faster data transfer speeds with less latency, and a better user experience, to consumers of mobile video. We believe these technologies will continue to feed consumer demand for CTV (including mobile video) and bring about new opportunities for content owners and advertisers to connect with consumers.

Increased Use of Data. Advances in software and hardware, and the growing use of the Internet, have enabled the generation of user data at an unprecedented scale. Data vendors and other organizations are able to collect this user data across a wide range of Internet properties and connected devices, aggregate it and combine it with other data sources. This data is then made non-identifiable and available within seconds based on specific parameters and attributes. Advertisers can integrate this targeting data with their own or an agency’s proprietary data relating to client attributes, the advertisers’ own store locations and other related characteristics. Through the use of these types of data sources, together with real-time feedback on consumer reactions to the ads, programmatic advertising increases the value of impressions for advertisers and inventory owners, and viewers receive more relevant ads.

Automation of Ad Buying. The growing complexity of digital advertising has increased the need for automation. Technology that enables fast, accurate and cost-effective decision-making through the application of computer algorithms that use extensive data sets has become critical for the success of digital advertising campaigns. Using programmatic inventory buying tools, advertisers are able to automate their campaigns, providing them with better price discovery, on an impression-by-impression basis. As a result, advertisers are able to bid on and purchase the advertising inventory they value the most, pay less for advertising inventory they do not value as much and abstain from buying advertising inventory that does not fit their campaign parameters.

Digital Advertising Ecosystem

The digital advertising eco-system is divided into buyers, sellers and marketplaces, which can be further segmented on the basis of whether participants provide services or technology. We believe that participants on the buy-side or sell-side should be advocates for their buyers or sellers, while those in the marketplace business should act as a referee or have market-driven incentives to protect or enhance the integrity of the marketplace. We believe that there are inherent conflicts of interest when market participants serve both buyers and sellers.

What We Do

We empower ad buyers, by providing a self‑service omnichannel software platform that enables our clients to purchase and manage data‑driven digital advertising campaigns. Our platform allows clients to manage integrated advertising campaigns across various advertising channels and formats, including display, video, audio, native and social, on a multitude of devices, including computers, mobile devices and CTV.

	•	We Are Exclusively Focused on the Buy-Side. We focus on buyers since they control the advertising budgets. Also, the supply of digital advertising inventory exceeds demand, and accordingly, we believe it is a buyer’s market. We also believe that by aligning our business only with buyers, we are able to avoid inherent conflicts of interest that exist when serving both the buy-side and sell-side. This focus allows us to build trust with clients, many of whom leverage their proprietary data on our platform. That trust and ability to use their own data on our platform, without worrying about it being used by other participants, enables our clients and their advertisers to achieve better results. This trust provides us the benefit of long-term and stable relationships with our clients.

	•	We Are an Enabler, Not a Disruptor. With our platform, we enable advertising agencies and other service providers. Advertisers can benefit from a comprehensive solution that combines our platform with the services provided by advertising agencies.

	•	We Are Data-Driven. Our platform was founded on the principle that data-driven decisions will be the future of advertising. We built a data management platform first, before building our ad buying technology. While data from third-party data providers improves campaign performance, our clients’ success often relies largely on our ability to ingest proprietary data directly from brands and their agencies to enable intelligent decisioning that optimizes advertising campaigns. Given our independent, buy-side focused approach, and our strict protocols governing the ingestion of client first-party data into our data management platform, our clients trust us with their most granular and expressive data. Our technology platform enables the effective use of this granular data, which allows our clients to run precisely targeted advertising campaigns that maximize their return on advertising investments. Additionally, we are able to better optimize campaigns by using the data streams that we capture across different devices, so that data from one channel can be used to inform another. The breadth of data that we collect from a multitude of data sources across channels gives our clients a holistic view of their target audiences, enabling more effective targeting across different channels.

	•	We Do Not Arbitrage Advertising Inventory. To further align our interests with those of our clients, we do not buy advertising inventory in order to resell it to our clients for a profit. Instead, we provide our clients with a platform that allows them to manage their omnichannel advertising campaigns, on a self-serve basis with robust reporting. With our platform, our clients control their campaign spend and are able to access and choose from many inventory sources.

	•	We Have Ongoing Relationships with Clients. We derive substantially all of our revenue from ongoing MSAs with our clients, rather than episodic insertion orders. We believe that this approach helps us strengthen our relationships with our clients and grow their use of our platform over the long term, providing us with a highly scalable business model.

	•	We Are a Clear Box, Not a Black Box. Our platform is transparent and shows our clients their costs of advertising inventory and data, our platform fee and detailed performance metrics on their advertising campaigns. Our clients directly access and execute campaigns on our platform, control all facets of inventory purchasing decisions and receive detailed, real-time reporting on all their advertising campaigns. By providing transparent information on our platform, our clients are able to continually compare results and target their budgets to the most effective advertising inventory, data providers and channels.

	•	We Are an Open Platform. Clients can customize and build their own features on top of our platform. Clients may use our APIs to, for example, design their own user interface, bulk manage advertising campaigns and link other systems, including ad servers or reporting tools. By using our APIs or by working with our engineering team, clients can invest their own resources to build their own proprietary tools for reporting, campaign strategy, custom algorithms, proprietary data use or other use cases. Our open platform approach enables our advertising agency and service provider clients to provide differentiated offerings to their clients, which we believe leads to long-term relationships and increased use of our platform.

Our Platform

At the core of our platform is our bid-factor based architecture, which we believe has advantages over line-item based architectures that other buy-side systems use. Our bid-factor-based system allows users to define desirable factors and the value associated with those factors. Based on these factors, our platform can compute in real-time the value of impressions and bid only for optimal impressions. Because of the granularity of the bid factors, users of our platform can rapidly create billions of different bid permutations with only a few clicks. This expressiveness enables better targeting, pricing and campaign results.

Our platform is useful and user-friendly based on the following:

	•	Easy to Use, Open and Customizable. Our platform provides multiple, easy-to-use automation tools that help our users focus on managing the key factors affecting their campaigns. Our platform also enables clients to integrate custom features and interfaces for their own use through our APIs.

	•	Expressiveness. Our platform allows clients to easily define and manage advertising campaigns with multiple targeting parameters that could result in quadrillions of permutations, which we refer to as expressiveness. We believe that expressiveness provides clients with the ability to target audiences with an extremely high level of precision and thus obtain higher returns on their advertising spend.

	•	Integrated, Omnichannel and Cross-Device. Our platform provides integrated access to a wide range of omnichannel inventory and data sources, as well as third-party services such as ad servers, ad verification services and survey vendors. Our platform’s integration of these sources and services enables our clients to deploy their budgets through a wide variety of channels, media screens and formats, targeted in their desired manner, through a single platform.

Some of the key features of our platform are:

	•	Auto-Optimization. We provide auto-optimization features that allow buyers to automate their campaigns and support them with computer generated modeling and decision making. In addition, by giving clients full reporting, budgeting, and bidding transparency, clients can take control of targeting variables when desired, and apply algorithmic automation when appropriate.

	•	Advanced Reporting and Analytics Tools. We provide a comprehensive view of consumers’ interactions with the ads purchased through our platform with robust reporting of performance insights across multiple variables, such as audience characteristics, ad format, site category, website, device, creative type and geography. Better reporting results in better learning, often leading to better campaign optimization and outcomes.

	•	Data Management and Measurement Tools. Our platform enables clients to select data from multiple third-party vendors in a seamless and easy manner, allowing them to further optimize their campaigns with the most relevant data. We also offer a broad selection of third-party measurement partners, which provides our clients with increased optionality to assess campaign performance.

	•	Koa Artificial Intelligence. Koa, a predictive engine that helps platform users make data-driven decisions without sacrificing control or transparency, makes recommendations for campaign optimizations based on its sophisticated analysis of rich data sets. Advertisers can then choose which optimizations make the most sense for their campaigns.

	•	Informed Media Planning. Our platform enables clients to use audience insights and strategic goals to help optimize campaign planning, with the ability to generate, analyze and launch data-driven, programmatic media plans. Our tools analyze the actions of existing core audiences with the data we see across the open Internet to deliver fully transparent, performance-focused and ready-to-activate campaigns.

	•	Private Marketplace Support. For clients who wish to transact directly with individual publishers, we offer a comprehensive user interface for discovering and transacting via a wide variety of private contracts. Additionally, we offer a solution for advertisers to access publisher inventory via a direct tag in a publisher’s ad server where there is no other programmatic access to such publisher’s inventory.

Our platform enables a media planner or buyer at an advertising agency to:

	•	purchase digital media programmatically on various media exchanges and sell-side platforms;

	•	acquire and use third-party data to optimize and measure digital advertising campaigns;

	•	integrate and deploy their proprietary first-party data with our platform in order to optimize campaign efficacy;

	•	monitor and manage ongoing digital advertising campaigns on a real-time basis;

	•	link digital campaigns to offline sales results or other business objectives;

	•	access other services such as our data management platform and publisher management platform marketplace; and

	•	use our user interface and APIs to build their own proprietary technology on top of our platform.

Our Technology

The core elements of our technology are:

	•	Scalable Architecture. Our platform infrastructure is hosted in data centers around the world. Our core bidding architecture is easily adaptable to a variety of inventory formats, allowing our platform to communicate with many different inventory sources.

	•	Predictive Models. We use the massive data captured by our platform to build predictive models around user characteristics, such as demographic, purchase intent or interest data. Data from our platform is continually fed back into these models, which enables them to improve over time as the use of our platform increases.

	•	Performance Optimization. During campaign execution, our optimization engine continually scores a variety of attributes of each impression, such as website, industry vertical or geography, for their likelihood to achieve campaign performance goals. Our bidding engine then shifts bids and budgets in real-time to deliver optimal performance. Additionally, our platform enables clients to set multiple, simultaneous optimization goals for their advertising.

	•	Real-time Analytics. Our platform continuously collects data regarding inventory availability. Real-time campaign delivery and spend totals are used to manage campaign budgets and goal caps, as well as campaign reporting. This data is fed back into our optimization engine to improve campaign performance, and into machine-learning models for user demographic predictive modeling.

Our Growth Strategy

The key elements of our long-term growth strategy include:

	•	Increase Our Share of Existing Clients’ Digital Advertising Spend. Many advertisers are moving a greater percentage of their advertising budgets to programmatic channels. We believe that this shift will provide us with the opportunity to capture a larger share of the overall advertising spend by our existing clients. Additionally, we plan to promote additional services and data to our clients, helping us grow our business.

	•	Grow Our Client Base. We have extensive relationships with many advertising agencies and other service providers, and believe that, given the decentralized nature of the advertising industry, we have the opportunity to expand our relationships within these agencies and with additional agencies, advertisers and service providers. We expect to continue making investments in growing our sales and client service team to support this strategy.

	•	Expand Our Omnichannel Capabilities. We believe offering clients capabilities across all media channels and devices enables advertisers to manage omnichannel campaigns and use data from each channel to inform decisions in other channels. We believe these capabilities will continue to further strengthen our relationships with our clients. We intend to continue to invest in innovation across all channels, including the integration of new inventory sources within CTV, digital radio, social, native and digital out of home.

	•	Extend Our Reach in CTV. Television is the largest category of advertising spend, and we believe that the future of television is in streaming media and video on demand through subscription services and connected devices. We plan to invest significant resources in technology, sales and support staff related to our CTV growth initiatives.

	•	Continue to Innovate in Technology, Data, and Measurement. We intend to continue to innovate in technology to improve our platform and enhance its features and functionalities. We view data as one of our key competitive advantages. We will continue to invest resources in growing our data and measurement offerings, both from third-party providers as well as our proprietary data and product capabilities.

	•	Expand Our International Presence. Many of our clients serve advertisers on a global basis and we intend to expand our presence outside of the United States, or U.S., to serve the needs of those advertisers in additional geographies. As we expand relationships with our existing clients, we are investing in select regions in Europe and Asia. In particular, we believe that China, India, and Indonesia may represent substantial growth opportunities, and we are investing in developing our business in those and other markets.

	•	Build Industry-Wide Collaboration and Support for Unified ID 2.0. We intend to build support for Unified ID 2.0, a new open-source identity framework under development that aims to preserve the value of relevant advertising on the open internet without reliance upon third-party cookies, while giving consumers more transparency and control over their data.

Our Clients

Our clients consist of purchasers of programmatic advertising inventory and data. As of December 31, 2021, we had approximately 980 clients, consisting primarily of advertising agencies or groups within advertising agencies that have independent relationships with us, manage budgets independently of one-another, are based in different jurisdictions and are served by unique Trade Desk teams. Many of these agencies are owned by holding companies, where decision-making is decentralized such that

purchasing decisions are made, and relationships with advertisers are located, at the agency, local branch or division level. Our client count includes only those parties which have signed MSAs with us and have spent more than $20,000 on our platform.

Our clients typically enter into MSAs with us that give users constant access to our platform. The MSAs do not contain any material commitments on behalf of clients to use our platform to purchase ad inventory, data or other features. These MSAs typically have one-year terms that renew automatically for additional one-year periods, unless earlier terminated. The MSAs are typically terminable at any time upon 60 days’ notice by either party.

Our clients are loyal, as reflected by our client retention rate of over 95% in 2021, 2020 and 2019. In addition, our clients typically grow their use of our platform over time.

If all of our individual client contractual relationships were aggregated at the holding company level, two holding companies, Publicis Groupe and WPP plc, would each have represented more than 10% of our gross billings in 2021 and 2020. We do not have contractual relationships with these holding companies; rather, we enter into separate contracts and billing relationships with various of their individual agencies and account for those agencies as separate clients.

Our Advertising and Data Inventory Suppliers

For suppliers of programmatic advertising inventory and data, we believe that we are an important business partner, as we represent one of the largest sources of buy-side demand within the digital advertising industry.

We obtain digital advertising inventory from 105 directly integrated ad exchanges and supply-side platforms, providing us with access to a breadth of programmatic advertising inventory across computers, mobile devices and CTV.

For third-party data vendors, we believe that we represent an important distribution channel. As of December 31, 2021, we have integrated our platform with more than 200 third-party data vendors whose products we make available for purchase through our platform.

Sales and Marketing

Given our self-serve business model, we focus on supporting, advising and training our clients to use our platform independently as soon as they are ready to transact.

Once a new client has access to our platform, they work closely with our client service teams, which onboard the new client and provide continuous support throughout the early campaigns. Typically, once a client has gained some initial experience, it will move to a fully self-serve model and request support as needed.

To help train our clients, suppliers and other digital media participants, we have created an e-learning program called The Trade Desk Edge Academy. We believe that this initiative is an important component in our strategy of enabling rapid onboarding to our platform.

Our marketing efforts are focused on increasing awareness for our brand, executing thought-leadership initiatives, supporting our sales team and generating new leads. We seek to accomplish these objectives by presenting at industry conferences, hosting client conferences, publishing white papers and research, engaging in public relations activities, expanding our social media presence and launching advertising campaigns.

Technology and Development

Rapid innovation is a core driver of our business success and our corporate culture. We prioritize and align our product roadmap with our clients’ needs, and we aim to refresh our platform weekly. Our development teams are intentionally lean and nimble in nature, providing for transparency and accountability.

We expect technology and development expense to increase as we continue to invest in the development of our platform to support additional features and functions, increase the number of advertising and data inventory suppliers and ramp up the volume of advertising spending on our platform. We also intend to invest in technology to further automate our business processes.

Seasonality

In the advertising industry, companies commonly experience seasonal fluctuations in revenue. For example, many advertisers allocate the largest portion of their budgets to the fourth quarter of the calendar year in order to coincide with increased holiday purchasing. Historically, the fourth quarter of the year reflects our highest level of advertising activity and the first quarter reflects the

lowest level of such activity. We expect our revenue to continue to fluctuate based on seasonal factors that affect the advertising industry as a whole.

Our Competition

Our industry is highly competitive and fragmented. We compete with other demand-side platform providers, some of which are smaller, privately-held companies and others are divisions of large, well-established companies such as Google and Adobe. We believe that we compete primarily based on the performance, capabilities and transparency of our platform and our focus on the buy-side. We believe that we are differentiated from our competitors in the following areas:

	•	we are an independent technology company focused on serving advertising agencies and others on the buy-side of our industry;

	•	our client relationships are based on MSAs as opposed to campaign-specific insertion orders;

	•	our platform provides comprehensive access to a wide range of inventory types and third-party data vendors;

	•	our platform allows clients to build proprietary advantages by integrating custom features and interfaces for their own use through our APIs; and

	•	our technology provides highly expressive targeting.

In addition, we believe that new entrants would find it difficult to gain direct access to inventory providers, given their limited scale and the costs that additional integrations impose on inventory providers.

Our Human Capital

We believe that our values of vision, agility, grit, openness, generosity and being full-hearted have been an important component of our success. Behind all our innovations are the talented people around the world who bring them to life. To continue to produce such innovations, we believe that it is crucial that we continue to attract and retain top talent. We strive to make The Trade Desk a diverse and inclusive workplace, where our people feel they belong, with opportunities for our employees to grow and develop their careers, supported by strong compensation, benefits and health and wellness programs, and by programs that build connections between our employees and their communities. To ensure we live our values, and our culture stays unique and strong, our board of directors and executive team has put significant focus on our human capital resources.

As of December 31, 2021, we had 1,967 full-time employees in 19 countries. Regionally, North America, APAC (Asia Pacific) and EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) make up approximately 65%, 17% and 18% of our workforce, respectively.

Diversity and Inclusion

We are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion and belonging in which all employees are empowered to bring their whole, authentic selves to work every day. At The Trade Desk, we believe in the people who work for us, and as part of our investment in our people, we prioritize diversity and inclusion. Our goal is to create a culture where we value, respect, and provide fair treatment and opportunities for all employees. We conduct an employee annual survey to give employees the opportunity to provide feedback on our culture. This survey is managed by a third-party vendor to encourage candor and solicit feedback on many aspects of engagement, including company leadership, culture, inclusion, and career development. Our leaders review the survey feedback and work with their teams to take action based on survey results.

We demonstrate this commitment through a strategy of education, celebration, donations to the community, diversifying our talent, and creating forums for internal dialogue and listening. Our global leadership team is 62% male and 38% female.

Talent Development

Despite our rapid growth, we still cherish our roots as a startup and our company culture of ownership. We empower employees to develop their skills and abilities by acting on great ideas regardless of their role or function, which translates into personal investment in building our organization. We work to provide an environment where talented individuals and teams can thrive in fulfilling careers.

To set our global team up for success, we define key competencies for roles that are aligned to our values and extend to all levels of leadership regardless of experience and role. We encourage everyone to create individual development plans leveraging competency frameworks tied into their chosen career path, outlining a specific plan and actions to increase proficiency or learn new skills. We seek to provide a wide range of learning and development opportunities in both individual and group settings with formal, social and experiential learning.

Compensation and Benefits

We provide compensation and benefits programs to help meet the needs of our employees and reward their efforts and contributions. We seek fairness in total compensation with reference to external comparisons, internal comparisons and the relationship between management and non-management compensation.

In addition to salaries, we provide competitive compensation programs commensurate with our peers and industry. Such compensation and benefit programs may include bonuses, equity awards, 401(k) plans, healthcare and insurance benefits, health savings and flexible spending accounts, paid time off, family leave, family care resources, employee assistance programs and tuition assistance, among many others. Such programs and our overall compensation packages seek to facilitate retention of key personnel.

Health, Safety and Wellness

The success of our business is fundamentally connected to the well-being of our people. Accordingly, we are committed to the health, safety and wellness of our employees. We provide our employees and their families with access to a variety of innovative, flexible and convenient health and wellness programs. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we implemented significant changes, such as implementing and facilitating teleworking, that we determined were in the best interests of our employees, as well as the communities in which we operate, and which comply with applicable government regulations. We continue to evolve our programs to meet our employees’ health and wellness needs.

Development of International Markets

We have been increasing our focus on markets outside the United States to serve the global needs of our clients. We believe that the global opportunity for programmatic advertising is significant and should continue to expand as publishers and advertisers outside the United States seek to adopt the benefits that programmatic advertising provides. To capitalize on this opportunity, we intend to continue investing in our presence internationally. Our growth and the success of our initiatives in newer markets will depend on the continued adoption of our platform by our existing clients, as well as new clients, in these markets. Information about our geographic gross billings is set forth in Note 12—Segment and Geographic Information of “Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Intellectual Property

The protection of our technology and intellectual property is an important component of our success. We rely on intellectual property laws, including trade secret, copyright, patent and trademark laws in the United States and abroad, and use contracts, confidentiality procedures, non-disclosure agreements, employee disclosure and invention assignment agreements and other contractual rights to protect our intellectual property. We have a small number of patents, however, historically, we have not patented our proprietary technology in order to keep our technology architecture, trade secrets and engineering roadmap private. Our patent applications may not result in the issuance of any patents, and our issued patents may not actually provide adequate defensive protection or competitive advantages to us.

Collection and Use of Data; Privacy and Data Protection Legislation and Regulation

We and our clients currently use pseudonymous data about Internet and mobile app users on our platform to manage and execute digital advertising campaigns in a variety of ways, including delivering advertisements to end users based on their geographic locations, the type of device they are using, their interests as inferred from their web browsing or app usage activity or their relationships with our clients. Such data is passed to us from third parties, including original equipment manufacturers, application providers and publishers. We do not use this data to discover the identity of individuals, and we currently prohibit clients, data providers and inventory suppliers from importing data that directly identifies individuals onto our ad buying platform, though we do allow clients to share some directly identifying information, such as phone number and email address, with us for purposes of transforming that information into pseudonymous identifiers to use on our platform.

Our ability, like those of other advertising technology companies, to collect, augment, analyze, use and share data relies upon the ability to uniquely identify devices across websites and applications, and to collect data about user interactions with those devices for purposes such as serving relevant ads and measuring the effectiveness of ads. The processes used to identify devices and similar and associated technologies are governed by U.S. and foreign laws and regulations and dependent upon their implementation within the industry ecosystem. Such laws, regulations and industry standards may change from time to time, including those relating to the level of consumer notice, consent and/or choice required when a company employs cookies or other electronic tools to collect data about interactions with users online.

In the United States, both federal and state legislation govern activities such as the collection and use of data, and privacy in the advertising technology industry has frequently been subject to review by the Federal Trade Commission (the “FTC”), U.S. Congress, and individual states. Much of the federal oversight on digital advertising in the United States currently comes from the FTC, which

has primarily relied upon Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits companies from engaging in “unfair” or “deceptive” trade practices, including alleged violations of representations concerning privacy protections and acts that allegedly violate individuals’ privacy interests. However, there is increasing consumer concern over data privacy in recent years, which has led to a myriad of new and proposed legislation both at the federal and state levels, some of which has affected and will continue to affect our operations and those of our industry partners. For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (the “CCPA”), which went into effect January 1, 2020, defines “personal information” broadly enough to include online identifiers provided by individuals’ devices, applications and protocols (such as IP addresses, mobile application identifiers and unique cookie identifiers) and individuals’ location data, if there is potential that individuals can be identified by such data.

The CCPA created individual data privacy rights for consumers in the State of California (including rights to deletion of and access to personal information), special rules on the collection of consumer data from minors, new notice obligations and new limits on and rules regarding the “sale” of personal information (interpreted by many observers to include common advertising practices), and a new and potentially severe statutory damages framework for violations of the CCPA and for businesses that fail to implement reasonable security procedures and practices to prevent data breaches. The CCPA also offers the possibility to a consumer to recover statutory damages for certain violations and could open the door more broadly to additional risks of individual and class-action lawsuits even though the statute’s private right of action is limited in scope. There have been many class action lawsuits filed invoking the CCPA outside of the private right of action provided for by the law. It is unclear at this point whether any of these claims will be accepted by the courts. In addition, the recently-passed California Privacy Rights Act, or CPRA, as well as similar laws adopted in Virginia and Colorado, will impose additional notice and opt out obligations on the digital advertising space, including an obligation to provide a prominent opt out for behavioral advertising. When the CPRA, Virginia, and Colorado laws go into full effect in 2023, they will impose additional restrictions on us and on our industry partners; it is difficult to predict with certainty the full effect of these laws and their implementing regulations on the industry.

As our business is global, our activities are also subject to foreign legislation and regulation. In the United Kingdom and the European Union (including the European Economic Area (the “EEA”) and the countries of Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway), or EU, separate laws and regulations (and member states’ implementations thereof) govern the processing of personal data, and these laws and regulations continue to impact us. The General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”), which applies to us, came into effect on May 25, 2018. Like the CCPA, the GDPR defines “personal data” broadly, and it enhances data protection obligations for controllers of such data and for service providers processing the data. It also provides certain rights, such as access and deletion, to the individuals about whom the personal data relates. IAB Europe previously collaborated with the digital advertising industry to create a user-facing framework (the Transparency and Control Framework, or “TCF”) for establishing and managing legal bases under the GDPR and other U.K. and EU privacy laws including the ePrivacy Directive (discussed below). Although the TCF is actively in use, its viability as a compliance mechanism is under attack by the Belgian Data Protection Authority and others and we cannot predict its effectiveness over the long term. In February 2022, the Belgium Data Protection Authority issued an order against IAB Europe that imposes specific remedies on IAB Europe and its operation of TCF. Further, other European regulators have questioned the framework’s viability and activists have filed complaints with regulators of alleged non-compliance by specific companies that employ the framework. Continuing to maintain compliance with the GDPR’s requirements, including monitoring and adjusting to rulings and interpretations that affect our approach to compliance, requires significant time, resources and expense, and may lead to significant changes in our business operations, as will the effort to monitor whether additional changes to our business practices and our backend configuration are needed, all of which may increase operating costs, or limit our ability to operate or expand our business.

Additionally, in the EU, EU Directive 2002/58/EC (as amended by Directive 2009/136/EC), commonly referred to as the ePrivacy or Cookie Directive, directs EU member states to ensure that accessing information on an Internet user’s computer, such as through a cookie and other similar technologies, is allowed only if the Internet user has been informed about such access, and provided consent. A recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union clarified that such consent must be reflected by an affirmative act of the user, and European regulators are increasingly agitating for more robust forms of consent and bringing enforcement actions against large platforms, including Amazon, Facebook and Google, concerning their cookie consent mechanisms. These developments may result in decreased reliance on implied consent mechanisms that have been used to meet requirements of the ePrivacy Directive in some markets. A replacement for the ePrivacy Directive is currently under discussion by EU member states to complement and bring electronic communication services in line with the GDPR and force a harmonized approach across EU member states. Although it remains under debate, the proposed ePrivacy Regulation may further raise the bar for the use of cookies, and the fines and penalties for breach may be significant. We cannot yet determine the impact such future laws, regulations and standards may have on our business.

For the transfer of personal data from the EU to the United States, like many U.S. and European companies, we have relied upon, and are currently certified under, the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield Frameworks. The Privacy Shield Framework, however, was struck down in July 2020 by the Court of Justice of the European Union as an adequate mechanism by which EU companies may pass personal data to the US. Other EU mechanisms for adequate data transfer, such as the standard contractual clauses, were also questioned by the Court of Justice and whether and how standard contractual clauses can be used to transfer personal data to the United States is in question. If there is no interim agreement and standard clauses also cannot be used, we could be left with no reasonable option for the lawful cross-border transfer of personal data. If successful challenges leave us with no reasonable option for the lawful cross-border transfer of personal data, and if we nonetheless continue to transfer personal data from

the EU to the United States, that could lead to governmental enforcement actions, litigation, fines and penalties or adverse publicity which could have an adverse effect on our reputation and business or cause us to need to establish systems to maintain certain data in the EU, which may involve substantial expense and cause us to need to divert resources from other aspects of our operations. Other jurisdictions have adopted or are considering cross-border or data residency restrictions, which could reduce the amount of data we can collect or process and, as a result, significantly impact our business.

As the collection and use of data for digital advertising has received media attention over the past several years, some government regulators, such as the FTC, and privacy advocates have suggested creating a “Do Not Track” standard that would allow Internet users to express a preference, independent of cookie settings in their browser, not to have their online browsing activities tracked. The CPRA and new Colorado consumer privacy law similarly contemplate the use of technical opt outs for the sale and sharing of personal information for advertising purposes, and allow for rulemaking to develop these technical signals. If a “Do Not Track,” “Do Not Sell,” or similar control is adopted by many Internet users or if a “Do Not Track” or similar standard is imposed by additional states or by federal or foreign legislation, or is agreed upon by standard setting groups, we may have to change our business practices, our clients may reduce their use of our platform, and our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.

We participate in several industry self-regulatory programs, mainly initiated by the Network Advertising Initiative, or NAI, the Digital Advertising Alliance, or DAA, and their international counterparts. Our efforts to comply with the self-regulatory principles of these programs include offering end users notice and choice when advertising is served to them based, in part, on their interests. We believe that this user-centric approach to addressing consumer privacy empowers consumers to make informed decisions on the use of their data.

Available Information

We file Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, proxy statements and related amendments, exhibits and other information with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”). You may access and read our filings without charge through the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov or through our website at http://investors.thetradedesk.com, as soon as reasonably practicable after such materials are electronically filed with or furnished to the SEC pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Exchange Act.

Website addresses referred to in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are not intended to function as hyperlinks, and the information contained on our website is not incorporated into, and does not form a part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K or any other report or documents we file with or furnish to the SEC.