The Trade Desk is ringing the closing bell of the Nasdaq Stock Market to celebrate its IPO in September 2016.
Source: Nasdaq
Ad Tech Firms Trade Desk stock has fallen 20% since Tuesday’s close of trading after Google released its latest guidance on Wednesday on its promise not to use technology that can be used to individually track people on the internet.
Trade desk shares fell 8% on Thursday, building on Wednesday’s decline to a total of 20.4% from Tuesday’s close.
Trade Desk technology helps brands and agencies reach audiences across media formats and devices. The company also advanced the creation of Unified ID 2.0, which relies on email addresses as the basis for unique identifiers to target advertisements to individuals. (The email addresses themselves are hidden.) The Trade Desk has presented the identifier as a superior alternative to cookies, which Google will no longer support in its Chrome browser until 2022.
However, Google’s post on Wednesday warned of solutions “like PII graphics based on users’ email addresses”. The post stated: “We do not believe these solutions will meet increasing consumer expectations for data protection, nor will they withstand rapidly evolving regulatory constraints and are therefore not a sustainable long-term investment.”
This is likely to put investors in doubt about the future of these identifiers.
Google said its post is about how its own ad products work and that it does not currently restrict third party activity on Chrome. But Google could theoretically limit this activity in Chrome in the future.
KeyBanc analysts said in a note that restricting alternative identifiers on Google products “would clearly favor Google over the open internet and present an interesting dilemma for regulators – how should consumer privacy be balanced against market power?”
In a blog post on Thursday afternoon, Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk, said he made dozens of calls about what Google’s contribution means to his business and the open internet. “Not much has changed,” he wrote. “But what has changed will ultimately turn out to be positive.”
“With this announcement, Google is doubling its own properties like Search and YouTube and adding building blocks to the walls around those properties,” Green wrote. “The downside is that Google doesn’t value the rest of the Internet as much as it used to display ads on the rest of the Internet.”
Other ad tech peers have also fallen dramatically since the Wednesday morning announcement. PubMatic stock is down 27.5%, Magnite is down 21.5%, Viant is down 17.2%, LiveRamp is down 14.7% and Criteo is down 7.8% since the close of trading on Tuesday like.
The decline was also due to a slump in the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite, which fell more than 2% on Thursday afternoon.
Some analysts said their views on stocks in the sector hadn’t changed after Wednesday’s post. BMO downgraded LiveRamp, finding it “too hot in the kitchen,” and also raised the price target for Criteo.
