The Trade Desk rings the closing bell of the Nasdaq Stock Market in celebration of its September 2016 IPO.
Source: Nasdaq
Advertising technology company The Trade Desk has fallen 20% since Tuesday’s close, after Google released its latest guide on Wednesday on its promise not to use technologies that track people individually over the Internet .
Shares of Trade Desk fell 8% on Thursday, raising the fall on Wednesday to a total of 20.4% below Tuesday’s close.
Trade Desk technology helps brands and agencies reach targeted audiences through multimedia formats and devices. The company has also led the formation of Unified ID 2.0, which will rely on email addresses as a basis for unique identifiers to help target ads to individuals. (The email addresses themselves are hidden.) Trade Desk has painted the ID as a superior alternative to cookies, which Google plans to stop admitting to its Chrome browser in 2022.
But Google’s publication warned Wednesday against solutions “such as PII graphics based on people’s email addresses.” The message said: “We do not believe that these solutions will meet the growing expectations of consumer privacy, nor will they withstand the rapidly evolving regulatory constraints and are therefore not a long-term sustainable investment.”
This is likely to call investors into question about the future of these identifiers.
Google said its post was about running its own ad products and will now not restrict what third parties do to Chrome. But in theory, Google could restrict this activity to Chrome in the future.
KeyBanc analysts said in a note that restricting the alternative identifiers of Google products “would clearly favor Google on the open Internet and poses an interesting dilemma for regulators: how consumer privacy should be balanced against market power ? ”
In a blog post Thursday afternoon, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green said he had sent dozens of calls about what Google’s post means for his business and open Internet. “It hasn’t changed much,” he wrote. “But what has changed will ultimately turn out to be positive.”
“With this ad, Google is duplicating its own properties, such as search and YouTube, and adding bricks to the walls around those properties,” Green wrote. “The commitment is that Google no longer values placing ads on the rest of the Internet as much, certainly not as much as they did before.”
Other advertising tech mates have also fallen sharply since the announcement on Wednesday morning. Shares of PubMatic have fallen 27.5%, Magnite 21.5%, Viant 17.2%, LiveRamp 14.7% and Criteo 7.8% since Tuesday’s close.
The crashes also come amid a high-tech Nasdaq Composite crash, which fell more than 2% on Thursday afternoon.
Some analysts said their views on the sector’s actions have not changed since Wednesday’s post. BMO downgraded LiveRamp and noted that it was “too hot in the kitchen” and also increased its target price on Criteo.