The trading desk is ringing the closing bell of the Nasdaq Stock Market in celebration of the September 2016 Stock Exchange.
Source: Nasdaq
Advertising technology company The Trade Desk’s share has fallen by 20% since Tuesday’s closing, after Google released its latest guidance on Wednesday on its promise not to use technologies that track people online.
The Trade Desk’s shares fell 8% on Thursday, downing a drop from Wednesday to a total of 20.4% lower than Tuesday’s close.
The Trade Desk technology helps brands and agencies to reach targeted audiences in media formats and devices. The company also led the formation of Unified ID 2.0, which relies on email addresses as a basis for unique identifiers to help target individuals. (The email addresses themselves have been obscured.) The Trade Desk has painted the identifier as an excellent alternative to cookies, which Google plans to stop supporting in its Chrome browser by 2022.
But Google’s message on Wednesday warned against solutions “such as PII graphs based on people’s email addresses.” The report said: “We do not believe that these solutions will meet the rising expectations of the consumer for privacy, nor will they be able to meet rapidly changing regulatory constraints, and therefore are not a sustainable investment in long term. “
This may make investors doubt the future of these identifiers.
Google has said that its message is about how its own advertising products will work, and that it does not limit what third parties are currently doing in Chrome. But Google could theoretically limit activity in Chrome in the future.
KeyBanc analysts said in a comment that restricting alternative identifiers of Google products would clearly benefit Google over the open Internet and is an interesting dilemma for regulators.
In a blog post Thursday afternoon, Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk, said he had brought dozens of calls about what Google’s message means to his company and the open Internet. “Not much has changed,” he wrote. “But what has changed will ultimately be positive.”
“With this announcement, Google is doubling its own properties, such as search and YouTube, and adding bricks to the walls around the properties,” Green wrote. “The compromise is that Google no longer values advertising on the rest of the Internet as much – certainly not as much as it used to.”
Other ad-tech counterparts have also fallen dramatically since the announcement Wednesday morning. PubMatic shares fell 27.5%, Magnite fell 21.5%, Viant lost 17.2%, LiveRamp fell 14.7%, and Criteo fell 7.8% since closing Tuesday.
The declines also come amid a slump in the tech Nasdaq Composite, which fell more than 2% on Thursday afternoon.
Some analysts said their views on equities in the sector did not change after Wednesday’s post. BMO downgraded LiveRamp and noted that it is ‘too hot in the kitchen’, also raising its target price on Criteo.