NASDAQ: TTD

We believe that the convergence of several trends in the advertising industry are driving the rise of programmatic advertising and will result in it becoming the predominant method for advertisers to reach consumers:

Rapid Growth of CTV. We are witnessing a generational shift from linear television to connected television (“CTV”) as Internet and television programming converge. New technologies support seamless delivery of streaming video content, accelerating consumers’ demand to watch what they want, when they want and where they want. We believe that this increased demand for CTV will bring about new opportunities for content owners and advertisers to connect with consumers, including through ad-supported subscription models, and will further drive the shift towards data-driven advertising.

Expansion of Global Advertising TAM and Programmatic Advertising. The total addressable market (“TAM”) for global advertising is reported to have surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in 2024. At the same time, advertisers are shifting more and more of their budgets to programmatic advertising as they more precisely target audiences through high-performance, decisioned advertising campaigns.

AI Driven Personalization and Automation. AI is fundamentally changing the media landscape, from the creative process all the way to the execution of advertising campaigns. As AI capabilities improve and as adoption of these tools increase, more personalized content at scale will be delivered with more predictive targeting and improved campaign automation. AI-driven platforms are poised to benefit from this evolution as the industry moves toward greater automation.

Prioritization of Data and Measurement in a Privacy-First World. In an increasingly digital, deeply interconnected and cross-platform media landscape, advertisers have begun to prioritize the use of high-quality, privacy-compliant data to drive intelligently decisioned campaigns and demand access to advanced measurement tools that demonstrate their technology partners’ performance and value. By integrating this data with measurement features, including real time feedback on customer reactions to ads, programmatic advertising increases the value of impressions for advertisers and inventory owners and serves more relevant ads to viewers.

Fragmentation of an Increasingly Digital Audience. As changes in consumer behavior and advances in technology drive media to become increasingly digital, audience fragmentation is accelerating. A growing “long tail” of mobile applications, social media platforms, streaming services and websites presents a challenge for advertisers trying to reach a large audience. Additionally, the number of devices used by individual consumers has increased. Both of these fragmentation trends are opportunities for technology companies that can consolidate and simplify media buying options for advertisers and agencies.

5

Table of Contents

Advertisers Expect More From Their Technology Partners. As programmatic advertising proliferates and the industry and technology mature, advertisers have an increasingly broad field of technology partners to choose from. As these partners differentiate themselves not just purely on value, but also on their reporting and measurement capabilities, their successful implementation of AI tools that empower advertisers and their access to desirable inventory and retail media, we expect advertisers to become increasingly selective on who they partner with.

Our Philosophy

Our approach is grounded in the following principles:

•We Focus on the Buy Side with Independence and Objectivity. We focus on buyers because they control advertising budgets. The supply of digital advertising inventory continues to exceed demand, and accordingly, we believe it is a buyer’s market. We also believe that by aligning our core offerings with buyers, we are able to avoid the conflicts of interest of our competitors who serve both the buy side and sell side. We provide and are developing offerings and features that work with publishers and supply-side partners to help ensure access to quality advertising inventory and to maximize decisioning capabilities for buyers of advertising. This objectivity allows us to build long-term, trusting relationships with our clients, many of whom leverage their proprietary, first-party data on our platform.

•We Are Data Driven. Our platform was founded on the principle that data-driven decisions will be the future of advertising. We built a data-management platform first, before building our ad-buying technology. We provide rich third-party datasets in our data marketplace to improve campaign performance, and we frequently help our clients drive campaign performance even further by ingesting their proprietary data directly, enabling greater decisioning and campaign optimization. Given our independent, buy-side focused approach and our strict protocols governing the ingestion of client first-party data, our clients trust us with their most granular and expressive data. Our technology platform enables effective use of such data, allowing our clients to run precisely targeted omnichannel advertising campaigns that help optimize campaigns and maximize return on advertising investments. Finally, the breadth and depth of data available on our data marketplace gives our clients a holistic view of their target audience, which enables more effective targeting across channels and the ability to engage in more precise attribution and closed-loop measurement.

•We Focus on AI Capabilities. Because the core of programmatic advertising is algorithmic software that automates ad buying, the development of new AI technologies is inherent to us. For nearly a decade, we have invested in augmenting the capabilities of our platform, including pioneering multiple innovations in this space. Recent technological advancements have driven even greater automation opportunities within new capabilities we are developing, such as Audience Unlimited, which will enable the radical simplification of the data buying process using the agentic co-pilot features available on our platform.

•We Invest in Lasting Client Relationships. We derive substantially all of our revenue from ongoing MSAs with our clients, rather than episodic insertion orders. We believe this approach strengthens our relationships with our clients and helps us grow their use of our platform over the long term, providing us with a highly scalable business model and a customer retention rate that has exceeded 95% for over a decade.

•We Offer Transparency and are Channel Agnostic. Our platform provides granular, real-time reporting on our clients’ advertising campaigns. Our clients directly access and execute campaigns on our platform and can control all facets of inventory purchasing decisions. By providing detailed reporting and actionable insights on our platform, we enable our clients to maximize value and target their budgets toward the most effective advertising inventory, data providers and channels.

•We Are an Open Platform with a Rich Ecosystem. Clients can customize and expand platform functionality by building their own features on top of our platform. For example, clients may use our APIs to design their own user interface, bulk manage advertising campaigns and link other systems, including ad servers or reporting tools. By using our APIs or by working with our engineering team, clients can invest their own resources to build their own proprietary tools for reporting, campaign strategy, custom algorithms, proprietary data use or other use cases. Our open platform approach enables third-party partners to integrate their technology into our platform, which in turn allows our advertising agency and service provider clients to provide differentiated offerings to their clients, which we believe leads to long-term relationships and increased use of our platform.

6

Table of Contents

•We Provide Access to Premium Inventory on a Global Scale. We have forged relationships with many of the open internet’s foremost providers of premium omnichannel inventory, allowing our clients to precisely target their ads across the globe and through a broad array of channels.

Our Platform

Our world-class, AI-enabled platform helps buyers of advertising plan, execute and measure highly expressive, data-driven campaigns across premium, omnichannel inventory. Our platform enables advertisers and agencies to:

•purchase digital media programmatically on various media exchanges and sell-side platforms, as well as directly from publishers;

•acquire and use third-party data to optimize and measure digital advertising campaigns;

•integrate and deploy their proprietary first-party data within our platform to optimize campaign efficacy;

•utilize our AI-powered actionable insights to monitor, manage, and optimize ongoing digital advertising campaigns on a real-time basis;

•monitor and manage ongoing digital advertising campaigns on a real-time basis;

•link digital campaigns to offline sales results or other business objectives;

•access other services such as our data management platform and publisher management platform marketplace; and

•use our user interface and APIs to customize and expand platform functionality.

Our platform is powerful and user friendly:

•Easy to Use, Open and Customizable. Our platform offers powerful tools and interfaces that empower our users by simplifying and streamlining the ad buying experience. Our platform also enables clients to integrate custom features and interfaces for their own use through our APIs.

•Koa — Your AI Co-Pilot. Koa is our platform’s AI co-pilot. It processes and analyzes robust data sets to surface insights, optimizations and recommendations that help platform users make data-driven decisions without sacrificing control or transparency. Koa’s artificial intelligence capabilities are used across various aspects of the platform, including predictive clearing, ad impression relevance scoring, measurement and forecasting, budget optimization and key performance indicator scoring.

•Expressiveness. Our platform utilizes bid-factor-based architecture, which allows users to set up campaigns based on specific business objectives and optimize them based on performance. Because of the granularity of bid factors, users of our platform can easily define and manage advertising campaigns with multiple targeting parameters that could result in quadrillions of permutations, which we refer to as expressiveness. We believe that expressiveness provides clients with the ability to target audiences with an extremely high level of precision and thus obtain higher returns on their advertising spend.

•Integrated, Omnichannel and Cross Device. Our platform provides integrated access to a wide range of omnichannel inventory and data sources, as well as third-party services such as ad servers, ad-verification services and survey vendors. Our platform’s integration of these sources and services enables our clients to deploy their budgets through a wide variety of channels, device types and formats, targeted in their desired manner, all through a single platform.

Some of the key features of our platform are:

•Auto Optimization. We provide auto-optimization features that allow buyers the option to largely automate their campaigns. In addition, by giving clients reporting, budgeting and bidding transparency, clients can make informed decisions on whether to lean on our auto-optimization capabilities, including, for example, those within Audience Unlimited, or more actively control a campaign.

•Advanced Reporting and Analytics Tools. We provide a comprehensive view of consumers’ interactions with the ads purchased through our platform with robust reporting of performance insights across multiple variables, such as audience characteristics, ad format, site category, website, device, creative type and geography. Better reporting results in better learning, enabling better campaign optimization and outcomes.

7

Table of Contents

•Data Management and Measurement Tools. Our platform enables clients to optimize campaigns with numerous highly relevant data sets, including from an extensive selection of third-party vendors, in a seamless and easy manner. We also empower our clients with an extensive set of measurement capabilities, both through a number of proprietary benchmarking tools and indices, and through integrations with a broad selection of third-party measurement partners.

•Informed Media Planning. Our platform enables clients to use audience insights and strategic goals to help optimize campaign planning, with the ability to generate, analyze and launch data-driven, programmatic media plans. Our tools analyze the actions of existing core audiences with the data we see across the open Internet to deliver fully transparent, performance-focused and ready-to-activate campaigns.

•Private Marketplace Support. For clients who wish to transact directly with individual publishers, we offer a comprehensive user interface for discovering and transacting via a wide variety of private contracts. Additionally, we offer a solution for advertisers to access publisher inventory via a direct tag in a publisher’s ad server where there is no other programmatic access to such publisher’s inventory.

Our Technology

The core elements of our technology are:

•Scalable Architecture. Our platform infrastructure is hosted in data centers around the world. Our core bidding architecture is easily adaptable to a variety of inventory formats, allowing our platform to communicate with many different inventory sources. This results in highly optimized performance with minimized latency, given the millions of data points that are analyzed in real time.

•Predictive Models. We use campaign data captured by our platform to build predictive models around user characteristics, such as demographic, purchase intent or interest data. Data from our platform is continually fed back into these models, which enables them to improve over time as the use of our platform increases.

•Performance Optimization. During campaign execution, our optimization engine continually scores a variety of attributes of each impression, such as website, industry vertical or geography, for their likelihood to achieve campaign performance goals. Our bidding engine then shifts bids and budgets in real time to deliver optimal performance. Additionally, our platform enables clients to set multiple, simultaneous optimization goals for their advertising.

•Real-time Analytics. Our platform continuously collects data regarding inventory availability. Real-time campaign delivery and spend totals are used to manage campaign budgets and goal caps, as well as campaign reporting. This data is fed back into our optimization engine to improve campaign performance and into machine-learning models for user demographic predictive modeling.

Our Growth Strategy

The key elements of our long-term growth strategy include:

•Increase Our Share of Existing Clients’ Digital Advertising Spend. Many advertisers are moving a greater percentage of their advertising budgets to programmatic channels. We believe that this shift will provide us with the opportunity to capture a larger share of the overall advertising spend by our existing clients. Additionally, we plan to promote and further develop value-added services, data, and client incentive plans, helping us grow our business.

•Grow Our Client Base. We have extensive relationships with many advertising agencies, advertisers and other service providers, and we believe that, given the decentralized nature of the advertising industry, we have the opportunity to expand our relationships with new and existing clients. We expect to continue making investments to grow our sales and client service team to support this strategy, and we see particular opportunities to expand the aperture of clients we support across the mid-market.

•Continue to Innovate in Technology, Data and Measurement. While we believe that our release of Kokai, our most recent and major upgrade to our platform and its offerings, implemented significant enhancements, we intend to continue innovating and improving the technology underlying our platform and enhancing its features and functionalities, including the development of new or improved value-added services or the inclusion of additional data. We view data and measurement as key competitive

8

Table of Contents

advantages, and we will continue to invest resources in growing and enhancing our data and measurement offerings. For example, we are developing new methods of media buying our platform that increasingly leverage data and AI features, meant to make it easier for our clients to utilize data and AI to enhance the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns.

•Expand Our Omnichannel Capabilities. We believe offering clients capabilities across all media channels and devices enables advertisers to manage highly effective omnichannel campaigns, where data from each channel can inform decisions in other channels. We believe these capabilities will continue to further strengthen our relationships with our clients. We intend to continue investing in innovation across all channels, including the integration of new inventory sources within CTV and other video, display, audio and native, as well as new potential inventory sources that could arise with the advent of AI.

•Extend Our Reach in CTV. Television is the largest category of advertising spend, and we believe that the future of television is CTV, the streaming of media and video on demand through subscription and ad-supported streaming services. We plan to continue investing significant resources in technology, sales and support staff related to our CTV growth initiatives.

•Ensure Access to Quality Inventory. Our continued success depends on our ability to secure increasing amounts of attractive, high-quality inventory on reasonable terms for our clients. As part of such efforts, we have developed and plan to continue to enhance OpenPath, our offering intended to give clients access to quality inventory through a simplified, direct connection to publishers. We have also launched PubDesk, a dashboard specifically designed for publishers to help them better understand what our clients want by providing detailed information on how buyers view their inventory and what drives bid pricing. This data gives publishers valuable transparency into their programmatic traffic, which helps them surface higher quality inventory that our clients can confidently bid on.

•Enhancing Supply Chain Transparency and Efficiency. We have launched and will continue to develop OpenSincera, an open-source tool that provides visibility into the ad experience by providing detailed metadata on ad experiences across 400,000 publishers. OpenSincera provides advertisers with more clarity around the media supply chain to make informed, intentional decisions across large-scale digital campaigns and provides publishers with more insight into the inventory and ad experiences offered. We have also developed additional features and offerings to facilitate better transparency and integrity of ad auctions, such as our OpenAds solution, and to further help our clients evaluate the quality and cost of inventory.

•Further Enhance Identity Solutions, Including Unified ID 2.0. We continue to develop and enhance Unified ID 2.0, an open-source identity framework that operates by transforming email addresses or phone numbers into an advertising identifier (a “UID2”) that is designed to not directly identify the individual. Subject to appropriate guardrails, participants in Unified ID 2.0 can then use this UID2 in connection with our platform and other services, including ad buying and reporting. We have worked to cultivate industry-wide support and collaboration for the Unified ID 2.0 approach, and we intend to continue these efforts. EUID, a European-focused version of Unified ID 2.0, was released in a limited beta in 2023.

•Expand Our International Presence. Many of our clients serve advertisers on a global basis, and we have been expanding our presence in markets outside of the United States to serve the needs of those advertisers in additional geographies. We believe that the global opportunity for programmatic advertising is significant and will continue to expand as publishers and advertisers outside the United States seek to adopt the benefits that programmatic advertising provides. As we expand relationships with our existing clients, we are investing in select regions in Europe and Asia. In particular, we believe that the United Kingdom (“U.K.”), Germany, France, China, Japan, India and Australia may represent substantial growth opportunities, and we are investing in developing our business in those and other markets.

•Expand and Support Our Third-Party Ecosystem. We have hundreds of independent companies who partner with us and who make their data and services available to our clients through our platform. We view these relationships and the access they provide our clients as a key competitive advantage and plan to continue developing these relationships.

9

Table of Contents

Our Clients

Our clients consist of purchasers of programmatic advertising inventory, value-added services and data. Our clients are advertising agencies, advertisers or groups within advertising agencies that have independent relationships with us, manage budgets independently of one another, are based in different jurisdictions and are served by unique Trade Desk teams.

Our clients typically enter into MSAs with us that give users constant access to our platform. Our MSAs, some of which may include joint business plans and other incentive programs, do not contain any material commitments on behalf of clients to use our platform to purchase ad inventory, value-added services or data. Generally, these MSAs have one-year terms that renew automatically for additional one-year periods, unless earlier terminated, and are terminable at any time upon 60 days’ notice by either party.

If all of our individual client contractual relationships were aggregated at the holding company level, two holding companies would have each represented more than 10% of our gross billings in 2025 and one holding company would have represented more than 10% of our gross billings in 2024.

Our Advertising Inventory and Data Suppliers

We believe that we are an important business partner for suppliers of programmatic advertising inventory and data as we represent one of the largest sources of buy-side demand within the digital advertising industry. We believe our ecosystem provides a competitive advantage, which leads to better results for clients and in turn attracts more inventory and data suppliers.

We obtain digital advertising inventory from over 430 directly integrated ad exchanges, publishers and supply-side platforms, providing us with access to a breadth of programmatic advertising inventory across televisions, streaming devices, mobile devices, computers and digital-out-of-home devices.

We believe that our data marketplace represents an important distribution channel for third-party data vendors. As of December 31, 2025, we have integrated our platform with more than 370 third-party data vendors whose products are available for purchase through our platform.

Sales and Marketing

Given our self-service business model, we focus on supporting, advising and training our clients to use our platform independently as soon as they are ready to transact.

Once a new client has access to our platform, they work closely with our client service teams, which onboard new clients and provide continuous support throughout the early campaigns. Typically, once a client has gained some initial experience, they will move to a fully self-service model and request support as needed. Our client service teams promote adoption of relevant features and provide support to optimize usage of the platform.

To help train our clients, suppliers and other digital media participants, we have created an e-learning program called The Trade Desk Edge Academy. We believe that this initiative is an important component in our strategy of enabling rapid onboarding to our platform.

Our marketing efforts are focused on increasing awareness for our brand, executing thought-leadership initiatives, supporting our sales team and generating new leads. We seek to accomplish these objectives by presenting at industry conferences, hosting client conferences, publishing white papers and research, engaging in public relations activities, expanding our social media presence and launching advertising campaigns.

Technology and Development

Rapid innovation is a core driver of our business success and our corporate culture. We prioritize and align our product roadmap with our clients’ needs, and we aim to refresh our platform weekly. Our development teams are intentionally lean and nimble in nature, providing for transparency and accountability.

We expect technology and development expense to increase as we continue to invest in the development of our platform, related offerings and hosting infrastructure to support additional platform features and functionality, increase the

10

Table of Contents

number of advertising inventory and data suppliers and support anticipated increases in volume of advertising spend by our clients on our platform. Additionally, we intend to continue strategically investing in hosting infrastructure to support our growing artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.

Seasonality

In the advertising industry, companies commonly experience seasonal fluctuations in revenue. For example, many advertisers allocate the largest portion of their budgets to the fourth quarter of the calendar year in order to coincide with increased holiday purchasing. Historically, the fourth quarter of the year reflects our highest level of advertising activity while the first quarter reflects the lowest level of such activity. Additionally, advertising activity is typically heightened in the periods leading up to major United States political elections. We expect our revenue to continue to fluctuate based on seasonal factors that affect the advertising industry as a whole.

Our Competition

Our industry is highly competitive and fragmented. We compete with other demand-side platform providers, some of which are smaller, privately held companies and others are divisions of large, well-established companies such as Google and Amazon. We believe that we compete primarily based on the performance, capabilities and transparency of our platform as well as our focus on the buy side. We believe we are differentiated from our competitors in the following areas:

•we are an independent technology company focused on serving advertising agencies, advertisers and others on the buy side of our industry so we are free from the conflicts of interest inherent in our competitors that also own and operate media;

•our platform uses proprietary, highly advanced technologies, including our AI functionalities;

•our platform provides comprehensive access to a wide range of premium, omnichannel inventory and third-party data vendors; and

•our platform allows clients to build proprietary advantages by integrating custom features and interfaces for their own use through our APIs, while also offering access to our rich ecosystem of third-party providers in our platform.

Our Human Capital

We believe our values of vision, agility, grit, openness, generosity and being full hearted are an important component of our success. Behind all our innovations are the talented people around the world who bring them to life. To continue to produce such innovations, we believe it is crucial that we continue to attract and retain top talent. We strive to make The Trade Desk a diverse and inclusive workplace, where our people feel they belong, with opportunities for our employees to grow and develop their careers, supported by strong compensation, benefits and health and wellness programs, and by programs that build connections between our employees and their communities.

As of December 31, 2025, we had 3,843 full-time employees in 21 countries. Regionally, North America, Europe, Middle East and Africa (“EMEA”) and Asia Pacific (“APAC”) make up approximately 63%, 20% and 17% of our workforce, respectively.

Diversity and Inclusion

We are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion and belonging in which all employees are empowered to bring their whole, authentic selves to work every day. At The Trade Desk, we believe in the people who work for us, and we prioritize diversity and inclusion as part of our investment in our people. Our goal is to create a culture where we value, respect and provide fair treatment and opportunities for all employees. To ensure we live our values and our culture stays unique and strong, our board of directors and executive team has put significant focus on our human capital resources. Team members are encouraged to come to their managers with questions, feedback or concerns, and we conduct various internal surveys that gauge employee sentiment in areas like career development, culture, manager performance and inclusivity. Our leaders review the survey feedback, if applicable, and other concerns raised by team members and work with their teams to take action.

11

Table of Contents

We demonstrate this commitment through a strategy of education, celebration, donations to the community, diversification of our talent and the creation of forums for internal dialogue and listening. As of December 31, 2025, our global leadership team is 68% male and 32% female.

Talent Development

Despite our rapid growth, we still cherish our roots as a startup and our company culture of ownership. We empower employees to develop their skills and abilities by acting on great ideas regardless of their role or function, which translates into personal investment in building our organization.

To set our global team up for success, we define key competencies for roles that are aligned with our values and extend to all levels of leadership regardless of experience and role. We seek to provide a wide range of learning and development opportunities in both individual and group settings with formal, social and experiential learning.

Compensation and Benefits

We provide compensation and benefits programs to help meet the needs of our employees and reward their efforts and contributions. We seek fairness in total compensation with reference to external comparisons, internal comparisons and the relationship between management and non-management compensation.

In addition to base salaries, we provide competitive compensation programs commensurate with our peers and industry, such as bonuses, equity awards, 401(k) plans, healthcare and insurance benefits, health savings and flexible spending accounts, paid time off, family leave, family care resources, employee assistance programs and tuition assistance, among many others. We also provide our employees and their families with access to a variety of innovative, flexible and convenient health and wellness programs.

Intellectual Property

The protection of our technology and intellectual property is an important component of our success. We rely on intellectual property laws, including trade secret, copyright, patent and trademark laws in the United States and abroad, and use contracts, confidentiality procedures, non-disclosure agreements, employee disclosure and invention assignment agreements and other contractual rights to protect our intellectual property. We have a small number of patents and patent applications; however, our patent applications may not result in the issuance of any patents, and our issued patents may not actually provide adequate defensive protection or competitive advantages to us.

Collection and Use of Data; Privacy and Data Protection Legislation and Regulation

To power our platform, we and our clients currently use pseudonymous data about Internet and mobile app users to manage and execute digital advertising campaigns in a variety of ways, including delivering advertisements to end users based on information such as their geographic locations, the type of device they are using, their interests as inferred from their web browsing or app usage activity or their relationships with our clients. Such data is passed to us from third parties, including original equipment manufacturers, application providers, data providers and publishers, as well as our advertiser clients. We do not use this data to discover the identity of individuals, and we currently contractually prohibit clients, data providers and inventory suppliers from importing data that directly identifies individuals onto our ad buying platform. In connection with certain offerings, including Unified ID 2.0 and EUID, we do allow users of those services to disclose some directly identifying information, such as phone number and email address, to us for purposes of transforming that information into pseudonymous identifiers to use on our platform. We also take in email addresses and phone numbers to operationalize the opt-out portal we offer in connection with Unified ID 2.0 and EUID, as well as in connection with a single-sign on tool we offer to publishers, known as OpenPass.

Our ability, and the ability of other advertising technology companies, to collect, augment, analyze, use, share and otherwise process data relies upon the ability to uniquely identify devices across websites and applications, and to collect data about user interactions with those devices for purposes such as serving relevant ads and measuring the effectiveness of ads. The processes used to identify devices and similar and associated technologies are governed by U.S. and foreign laws and regulations and are dependent upon their implementation within the industry ecosystem. Such laws, regulations, and industry standards change frequently, including those relating to the level of consumer notice, consent and/or choice required when a company uses data for certain purposes, including targeted advertising, or employs cookies or other electronic tools to collect data about interactions with users online.

12

Table of Contents

In the United States, both federal and state legislation govern activities such as the collection and use of personal data, and data privacy in the advertising technology industry has frequently been subject to review by the Federal Trade Commission (the “FTC”), U.S. Congress, and individual states and their respective regulators. Relying on Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits companies from engaging in “unfair” or “deceptive” trade practices, the FTC actively pursues alleged violations of representations concerning privacy protections and acts that allegedly violate individuals’ privacy interests. In addition, increasing consumer concern over data privacy in recent years has led to a myriad of enacted and proposed legislation and regulation both at the federal and state levels, some of which has affected and will continue to affect our operations and those of clients, inventory sources and other industry partners.

Many states have adopted omnibus consumer privacy laws. Other states are considering similar legislation. These state laws define “personal information” broadly enough to include many online identifiers provided by individuals’ devices, applications, and protocols (such as IP addresses, mobile advertising identifiers and unique cookie identifiers), individuals’ location data and hashed versions of email addresses and phone numbers. In many respects, these state laws focus significantly on advertising activities, mandating that businesses that engage in certain advertising uses of consumer personal information offer and honor an opt-out of such activities, including, in some states, through browser or device-based preference signals. (Terminology varies slightly among some of the state laws, referring to such practices as “processing for targeted advertising” or “sales” or “sharing” of personal information, but the opt-out requirement exists under each state’s law.) These state privacy laws also provide consumers other rights, such as to access, correct or delete their personal information (subject to certain limitations), opt out of certain processing of their personal information and impose special rules on the collection of data from minors, precise location data, and other types of “sensitive” personal information as well as transparency and data governance obligations. Importantly, as a consequence of the obligations under these laws, the availability of data within our platform, our related offerings and the advertising ecosystem more broadly may decline, potentially making our platform and services less valuable to our clients.

The requirement under certain states’ laws to honor users’ requests to opt out of certain disclosures and uses of data for advertising purposes through preference signals, such as the Global Privacy Control (“GPC”) or similar signals, reflects a broader attention that privacy advocates, the media and some government regulators, have devoted to digital advertising in recent years. If the use of the GPC or similar technical signals is adopted by many Internet users, is imposed by additional states or by federal or foreign legislation, or is agreed upon by standard setting groups, we may have to change our business practices, our clients may reduce their use of our platform and services, and our business could be harmed.

As our business is global, our activities are also subject to foreign legislation and regulation. In Europe, including the U.K., the European Union (the “EU”), the European Economic Area (the “EEA”) and the countries of Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, separate laws and regulations (and member states’ implementations thereof) govern the processing of personal data, and these laws and regulations continue to impact us. The General Data Protection Regulation (“EU GDPR”) and the United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protection Act 2018 (the “UK GDPR”) (the EU GDPR and UK GDPR are hereinafter referred to collectively as the GDPR), which apply to us, define “personal data” broadly. Together with related laws, such as the ePrivacy Directive, we and our clients and inventory partners face enhanced data protection obligations, both as controllers of such data and as service providers processing the data. These laws also provide certain rights, such as access and deletion, to the individuals about whom the personal data relates, and require consent for certain activities. IAB Europe previously collaborated with the digital advertising industry to create a user-facing framework (the Transparency and Control Framework, or “TCF”) for establishing and managing legal bases under the GDPR and other U.K. and EU privacy laws including the ePrivacy Directive (discussed below). Although the TCF is actively in use, its viability as a compliance mechanism is under review by the European authorities and we cannot predict its effectiveness over the long term (as further detailed in the Risk Factors section). Maintaining compliance with the requirements of European privacy laws and regulations, including monitoring and adjusting to rulings and interpretations that affect our approach to compliance, requires significant time, resources and expense, and may lead to significant changes in our business operations, as will the effort to monitor whether additional changes to our business practices and our backend configuration are needed, all of which may increase operating costs, or limit our ability to operate or expand our business.

13

Table of Contents

Additionally, in the EU, the EU Directive 2002/58/EC (as amended by Directive 2009/136/EC), commonly referred to as the ePrivacy or Cookie Directive, directs EU member states to ensure that accessing information on an Internet user’s computer, such as through a cookie and other similar technologies, is allowed only if the Internet user has been informed about such access, and provided consent. A replacement for the ePrivacy Directive is currently under discussion by EU member states to complement and bring electronic communication services in line with the EU GDPR and force a harmonized approach across EU member states. Although it remains under debate, the proposed ePrivacy Regulation may further raise the bar for the use of cookies, and the fines and penalties for breach may be significant. We cannot yet determine the impact such future laws, regulations and standards may have on our business.

To address the transfer of personal data from the EEA, Switzerland and U.K. to the United States, we rely upon, and are currently certified under, the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Frameworks (“DPF”) and the U.K. Extension to the EU-U.S. DPF. However, the long-term viability of the DPF is uncertain and the extent to which other European mechanisms can be used to transfer personal data to the United States remains in question. If all or some jurisdictions within the EU or the U.K. determine that these mechanisms cannot be used to transfer personal data to the United States, then we could be left with no reasonable option for the lawful cross-border transfer of personal data. In such circumstance, continuing to transfer personal data from the EU to the United States could lead to governmental enforcement actions, litigation, fines and penalties or adverse publicity. Such consequences could have an adverse effect on our reputation and business, such as by requiring us to establish systems to maintain certain data in the EU, which may involve substantial expense and cause us to divert resources from other aspects of our operations, all of which may harm our business. Other jurisdictions have adopted or are considering cross-border or data residency restrictions, which could reduce the amount of data we can collect or process and, as a result, significantly impact our business.

In addition, the online advertising ecosystem is subject to best practices and self-regulatory standards, such as those promulgated by the Network Advertising Initiative, or NAI, the Digital Advertising Alliance, or DAA, and their international counterparts.

Available Information

We file Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, proxy statements and related amendments, exhibits and other information with the SEC. You may access and read our filings without charge through the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov or through our website at http://investors.thetradedesk.com, as soon as reasonably practicable after such materials are electronically filed with or furnished to the SEC pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Exchange Act.

Website addresses referred to in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are not intended to function as hyperlinks, and the information contained on our website is not incorporated into, and does not form a part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K or any other report or documents we file with or furnish to the SEC.