By The press release version goes like this: Google and Amazon are lowering DSP fees to help agencies buy media more efficiently. The Trade Desk, meanwhile, says its objectivity is more valuable than ever. Everybody wins.
Here's what actually happened: Amazon started a price war, Google followed, and The Trade Desk spent the last 12 months insisting it didn't need to compete on price while quietly doing exactly that.
The fee war nobody wants to call a fee war
The opening salvo came from Amazon. Starting in early 2025, Amazon's DSP team began courting agencies with a combination of reduced tech fees, free media credits, and CTV inventory bundles. According to Digiday, one agency reported Amazon had cut its tech fees to 10%. For video investments from new advertisers, Amazon offered an additional 10% of the client's buy, up to $250,000. Classic loss-leader economics: cut the price on the thing that gets them in the door, then make it back on the rest of the stack.
Google moved next. According to Ad Age and Seeking Alpha, Google began lowering DV360 fees, especially on programmatic guaranteed deals, to match Amazon's near-zero rates and stay competitive for agency budgets. Google already had the advantage of YouTube inventory locked behind its own DSP. Cutting fees on top of that captive inventory made DV360 suddenly harder to ignore.
The Trade Desk's official position was that none of this mattered. CEO Jeff Green told investors on the company's February 2026 earnings call that the "complexity of the global advertising market is not a weakness for The Trade Desk. It is a moat." He pointed to a bake-off where TTD reached 70% more unique households than Amazon's DSP at 30% lower total cost for an unnamed consumer electronics brand.
But behind the earnings call talking points, something else was happening.
The quiet concession
By December 2025, agencies started telling Digiday that The Trade Desk was, for the first time in years, willing to negotiate on fees. One programmatic lead said bluntly: "It's the first time I've seen The Trade Desk actually be willing to negotiate rates. We've had the same rates for several years."
The concessions came in various forms. One buyer at a large independent agency secured 1-2% tech fee reductions in exchange for hitting a $500,000 incremental spend threshold in Q4. Another negotiated post-auction discounts tied to $750,000 in incremental Q4 spending. A holding company exec reported receiving "development credits," meaning free engineering time from TTD's internal team to build tailored programmatic solutions.
These arrangements were structured through joint business plans, or JBPs, bespoke agreements tied to individual client spending targets. A Trade Desk spokesperson told Digiday that JBPs now account for an "increasingly large proportion" of spend flowing through the platform, though the company declined to comment on the fee negotiations themselves.
For a company that built its reputation on never discounting, the shift was telling. As one buyer put it to Digiday: "They are coming to the table and being receptive to things that they've never before been receptive to."
Why advertisers haven't left (yet)
Despite all the pressure, The Trade Desk still posted $2.9 billion in 2025 revenue, up 18% year over year. Margins held at 47%. There is $1.3 billion in cash on the balance sheet.
Tom Wigley, director of digital at VCCP Media U.K., told Digiday his agency's Trade Desk spending had kept pace with the CTV wave. The problem is that Amazon and Google captured more of that same growth. "Amazon DSP is front and center," he said, "because of the combination with retail media and Prime Video."
Tucker Matheson, co-founder at Markacy, has already started moving spend toward direct buys, retail media networks, and other DSPs. "We can prove better results given the nature of more tailored buys versus always-on programmatic," he told Digiday. The Trade Desk hadn't done anything catastrophically wrong, he added. The competition had simply grown up.
Nobody's ripping out their TTD seat. But they're hedging. And in programmatic, hedging is how departures start.
The Publicis problem
Then came the Publicis Groupe dispute. In March 2026, Ad Age reported that Publicis had stopped recommending The Trade Desk to clients following an audit that alleged discrepancies in fees, consent, and cost transparency. TTD's stock dropped approximately 7%, sliding toward $22 a share. Evercore ISI cut its price target from $35 to $32. Jefferies went further, trimming from $27 to $22.
On its face, the Publicis dispute is about audit compliance. But as Digiday's deeper reporting revealed, the real fight is about who captures the margin on every programmatic dollar. The Trade Desk's push toward direct advertiser relationships through JBPs and its OpenPath supply initiative had been eroding the holding company's traditional margin structure. A former TTD insider described the company's formalized relationship with Publicis as "a kind of deal with the devil," given its public championing of transparency.
Jeff Green fired back on LinkedIn, defending TTD's processes. The Trade Desk's CMO Ian Colley added in a statement to Digiday that "in recent head-to-head tests against the Amazon DSP, The Trade Desk achieved greater reach, at a lower cost, with higher performance."
The rebuttals landed. But they also confirmed something: The Trade Desk now has to make its case in a way it never did three years ago.
Who actually benefits from this
Follow the money and the incentive structure becomes clear.
Amazon can afford to run its DSP at near-zero margin because advertising is a high-margin overlay on a commerce and cloud empire. According to The Information, Amazon has even offered AWS discounts to lure clients into spending more on ads. The DSP is a customer acquisition funnel for Amazon's broader ecosystem, not a standalone profit center.
Google can afford similar moves because DV360 exists to route spend into YouTube and Google's owned inventory. The DSP fee is a rounding error against ad revenue from the properties it's designed to feed.
The Trade Desk can't play that game. Its DSP fee, which multiple sources told Digiday can run from the mid-teens to roughly 20% when data, identity, and measurement layers are fully loaded, is the business model. Every basis point it gives up comes directly off the margin.
This looks a lot like what happened in the ride-sharing wars of the mid-2010s: venture-backed companies with subsidized economics burned through cash to gain market share, then raised prices once competitors thinned out. Amazon and Google aren't burning venture money, but the structural dynamic is the same. They can sustain losses on DSP fees that would be existential for The Trade Desk.
What comes next
The next 12 months will determine whether the DSP fee war remains a competitive nuisance for The Trade Desk or becomes something more structural.
David Dweck, president at Go Fish Digital, told Digiday he's seen "far more desperation from their leadership" at TTD. Features that once required significant spend thresholds are showing up in standard agreements. Measurement credits arrive with fewer strings. John Davis, founder at ad tech vendor CrowdLouder, said The Trade Desk has started courting clients it would have previously turned away as too small.
Meanwhile, 42% of advertisers anticipate lower budgets for 2026, according to WARC/IAB. Agencies are committing spend quarterly instead of annually. That shorter planning horizon favors the platforms willing to cut the best deal today over the one asking you to trust the long-term value of their identity graph.
The Trade Desk still has real advantages: global scale, mature bidding algorithms, and reach beyond commerce media. It doesn't own inventory, which means it genuinely can buy across the open internet without the conflicts that plague Amazon and Google. That pitch matters to a certain kind of sophisticated buyer.
But here's the thing about moats: they only work if nobody builds a bridge. Amazon and Google are spending serious money on the construction.
Zach El-Amin covers ad tech and the business of advertising for The Daily Vibe.
