The Trade Desk is ringing the Nasdaq Stock Market’s closing bell to celebrate its September 2016 IPO.
Source: Nasdaq
The share of ad technology company The Trade Desk has fallen 20% since Tuesday’s close, after Google released its latest advice Wednesday on its pledge not to use technologies that people individually track over the Internet.
Shares of the Trade Desk fell 8% Thursday, building on a decline Wednesday to a total of 20.4% lower than Tuesday’s close.
Trade Desk technology helps brands and agencies reach targeted audiences through media formats and devices. The company also led the creation of Unified ID 2.0, which will use email addresses as the basis for unique identifiers to help target advertisements to individuals. (The email addresses themselves are unreadable.) The Trade Desk has portrayed the identifier as a superior alternative to cookies, which Google plans to stop supporting in its Chrome browser by 2022.
But Google’s post on Wednesday warned of fixes “like PII charts based on people’s email addresses.” The post said, “We do not believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they withstand rapidly evolving regulatory constraints, and therefore are not a sustainable long-term investment.”
That is likely to cast some doubt among investors in terms of the future of this identifying data.
Google said its post was about how its own ad products will work, and it won’t be limiting what third parties do within Chrome for now. But Google could theoretically limit that activity on Chrome in the future.
KeyBanc analysts said in a note that restricting alternate IDs from Google products “would clearly favor Google over the open Internet, and pose an interesting dilemma for regulators – how should consumer privacy be balanced against market power?”
In a blog post Thursday afternoon, Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk, said he had made dozens of phone calls about what Google’s post means for his business and the open internet. “Not much has changed,” he wrote. “But what has changed will eventually turn out to be positive.”
“With this announcement, Google is doubling its own properties, such as search and YouTube, and adding bricks to the walls around those properties,” Green wrote. “The downside is that Google doesn’t value ad placement on the rest of the internet as much – certainly not as much as it used to.”
Other ad engineers have also fallen dramatically since Wednesday morning’s announcement. Share is down 27.5%, Magnite down 21.5%, Viant down 17.2%, LiveRamp down 14.7% and Criteo down 7.8% since Tuesday’s close.
The drops also come amid 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 have not changed after Wednesday’s post. BMO downgraded LiveRamp for “being too hot in the kitchen” and also increased its target price on Criteo.