Amazon Outpaces Trade Desk in CTV as Fee Opacity Drives Agency Exits
The Development
Amazon's advertising business grew 23% year-over-year in Q4 2025, outpacing CTV market growth by 10 percentage points. The Trade Desk, by contrast, delivered just 14% growth in Q4 2025 and guided Q1 2026 at approximately 10%—a sharp deceleration from its 26% average through the first three quarters of 2024. The divergence follows TTD's decision to introduce a 4.5% publisher fee on OpenPath inventory in late 2024, layering it on top of existing buy-side platform fees in the mid-teens and an embedded Predictive Clearing bid-shading charge. TTD's Q4 EBITDA margin hit 47%, with an effective take rate of approximately 21%. Amazon, operating with zero fees on first-party programmatic guaranteed deals and leveraging authenticated audiences across Prime Video, Fire TV and live sports, has attracted agencies seeking cleaner economics. WPP and Dentsu have formally exited OpenPath over concerns about fee structure and opacity.
Our Take
The Trade Desk built its business on information asymmetry—obscured fee structures that worked when buyers lacked the tools or inclination to audit them. That era is ending. AI-assisted invoice reconciliation is commoditizing the transparency layer, and TTD's 21% effective take rate is now legible to any analyst with a laptop. The deeper problem is structural: TTD's Performance Mode defaults algorithmically favor OpenPath, where TTD collects fees on both sides of the transaction. That's not a pricing quirk—it's a conflict of interest baked into the product. Amazon's advantage isn't just first-party data scale; it's that its incentive structure is simpler and more defensible to procurement teams. TTD still holds real assets—95%+ customer retention, deep supply-chain relationships—but those only hold if buyers believe they're getting fair value. Right now, the industry's best clients are running the math, and the math is not flattering.
The Exploit
Action Item
If your agency still runs significant CTV spend through TTD's Performance Mode, pull a full fee audit against your last two quarters of invoices before Q2 2026 upfront commitments lock in—specifically reconciling Predictive Clearing charges against contracted CPMs to quantify your real take rate.