The Trade Desk, one of Ventura County's biggest companies, has lost 90% of its stock value in the past 21 months, which equates to a decline of about $60 billion.
Profits are down and revenue growth has slowed, and the Ventura-based online advertising firm has replaced four of its top executives.
Despite those struggles the company has continued to grow, adding hundreds of employees every year.
Until now. On Sept. 4, The Trade Desk filed a report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission disclosing plans for an "organizational realignment" that will cut its workforce by about 15%.
The Trade Desk had about 4,000 employees worldwide early this year, according to a LinkedIn post by the company's founder and CEO, Jeff Green, so that means it
plans to lay off about 600 people.
The company does not disclose how many employees work in its Ventura offices and its announcement of the layoffs did not say where the layoffs would occur.
The Trade Desk occupies three separate offices in downtown Ventura and is planning a fourth. The fourth office, located in a former bank building at the corner of Main and California streets, will be the official headquarters and executive offices. The company bought the building in 2019 for $4.5 million.
The Trade Desk appears committed to the new headquarters. The company has all the permits it needs for its planned renovation and has begun some demolition work on the site, said Ventura City Manager Bill Ayub.
The renovation should be finished sometime in the first half of 2028, Sarah Gavin, The Trade Desk's chief marketing officer, said in an email interview.
"I love that the business started in Ventura," said Gavin, whojoined The Trade Desk in June and is based in Bellevue, Washington. "In my time here so far, I’ve come to see how much of an outside perspective it provides that our peers lack. After all, the company started out of Jeff’s children's bedroom in Ventura, and I can’t imagine any other place for the company to call home."
The downsizing, she said, will allow the company "to move with greater agility, focus, ownership and speed."
Recent earnings haven't met expectations
The layoffs will be the biggest cutback in the history of The Trade Desk, which was founded in 2009 in Ventura.
For most of its existence, the company has been in growth mode, and the past few years were no exception; from the end of 2021 to the end of 2025, the number of employees roughly doubled, according to The Trade Desk's annual reports.
In the early years of this decade, when its stock often traded at over $100, The Trade Desk was the second biggest publicly traded company in Ventura County by market capitalization, or overall stock value, behind only Amgen.
But a series of disappointing earnings reports in 2025 and 2026 sparked steep declines in the share price, and for the past month the price has hovered around $14. That puts The Trade Desk fifth in market cap among publicly traded companies based in Ventura County.
During its most recent fiscal quarter, which ended June 30, The Trade Desk reported $64 million in net income, or profit, down 29% from a year earlier. Total revenue was $715 million, just 3% more than the same quarter of 2025, and the company predicted a decline in full-year revenue for 2026 compared to 2025.
"Our revenue growth is below our expectations and below the standard we hold ourselves to," Green said in a statement accompanying the earnings report.
The next day, on Aug. 7, The Trade Desk's stock plummeted by 31%.
In light of that recent history, the layoffs were not a surprise to Mark Giarelli, a stock analyst with Morningstar who covers The Trade Desk and other tech companies.
In an interview shortly before the layoffs were announced, Giarelli called it "strange" that The Trade Desk hadn't slowed down its hiring in recent years.
"You would like to see a little more flexibility in their expense structure, given their retracement in revenue growth," he said. "You would like to see them keeping margins steady by cutting headcount or expenses."
The turnover among top executives and board members – The Trade Desk has announced four new hires in its executives offices and three new board members this year – is also concerning, Giarelli said.
"Usually, you don’t see that level of executive turnover," he said. "It's hard to speculate beyond that but it's usually not a good sign when there's a revolving door."
Trade Desk takes on the Big Three
The Trade Desk has still been profitable every fiscal quarter for the last four years and for every full year going back to 2017. Revenue has grown every year in recent years, but not nearly as fast as it used to, and not as fast as Wall Street analysts and investors would like.
With the company projecting a revenue decline for 2026, analyst after analyst has lowered their recommendations for the stock. Giarelli's latest report on The Trade Desk, issued after its Aug. 6 earnings report, gave a "fair value estimate" of $16 per share. That was down from $21 in his previous quarterly report, but still a few dollars above where the stock has been trading recently.
"This is a name that has burned pretty much every analyst on the street," Giarelli said. "Analysts have really thrown in the towel on the name. I think everyone bought the narrative from Jeff Green for a very long time that things would be a lot better a lot quicker and it hasn't happened yet."
The Trade Desk is what's known in advertising as a "demand-side platform." It buys advertising on behalf of its clients on websites, streaming television programs, podcasts and other digital products, using its proprietary software to place ads across different platforms.
The industry is dominated by Google, Amazon and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. These companies are all "walled gardens," meaning they are closed platforms that control their own content and sell advertising to go with that content. They each have millions or even billions of users, and they know a lot about each one of them, which lets them place the right ads in front of the right people at the right time.
The Trade Desk is much smaller, and it's only an advertising company. That brings some advantages – in a walled garden, "you inherently have conflicts of interest and you might not always do what's best for the advertiser," Giarelli said, while The Trade Desk can boast that it is independent and objective, concerned only with the interests of its clients.
But the wealth of user data the big three possess is incredibly valuable, and it's getting more valuable as artificial intelligence plays a bigger role in ad purchasing and placement.
"The overall portion of the pie that independent ad tech firms can compete for is shrinking," Giarelli said. "These three firms keep grabbing more and more market share because they have the best technology, and that means they have the best information about you."
Gavin, The Trade Desk's chief marketing officer, said AI "cuts two ways" for the company. It can expand the market for digital advertising, but it is also a source of costs and competitive pressure.
"We are in the middle of a multi-year transition of our infrastructure to support AI and machine-learning workloads and building more agentic tools into our platform, which has weighed on near-term margins," she said.
'No pressure to relocate'
In addition to industry-wide pressures, there are some aspects of The Trade Desk's governance that may be costing it money, Giarelli said. For example, it has been generous when it comes to stock-based executive compensation. Green made $27 million in total compensation last year, most of it stock-based, and the other top executives made between $9 million and $13 million, according to the company's SEC filings.
In his Morningstar report, Giarelli wrote, "we struggle to endorse a company with large, persistent transfers of wealth from shareholders to employees via massive stock-based compensation."
Keeping its main offices in Ventura and buying downtown property there is another potentially costly decision, Giarelli said.
"It's an expensive place to do business," he said. "It wouldn't shock me if they joined the brigade of other companies that go to Tennessee or Texas or Florida."
But Gavin said the company is staying in Ventura.
"There's no pressure to relocate, and I'm confident we will continue to call Ventura home," she said.
In the end, that will be up to Green. He owns about 10% of The Trade Desk stock, and about 50% of its voting shares. Even with the steep decline in the company's value, he remains a billionaire. According to Forbes magazine, he is worth $1.6 billion, down from $4.5 billion in 2024.
In March, Green made his biggest purchase ever of The Trade Desk stock, investing another $150 million in the company. He wrote a column about that decision in The Current, a news site owned by the Trade Desk that covers the ad tech industry, in which he predicted that his company would defy Wall Street's expectations.
"In short, I'm putting my money where my mouth is," he wrote.
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation's Fund to Support Local Journalism.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: The Trade Desk has lost 90% of its value since 2024. Here's why.
