read the CC transcript to answer most of your questions on my comments:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4149772-trade-desks-ttd-ceo…
On Asia/international - small base growing rapidly
"While we move forward with expanding our partnerships on inventory and data, we are also pushing forward with our third priority which is expanding our geographic footprint. In Q4, international spend outpaced that of the U.S. by more than 3x. Exiting the year, our international business amounted to just about 13% of total spend globally. Nearly every one of our offices outside of the U.S. grew over 100% year-over-year for the full-year 2017.
Today, Asia is nearly one-third of the total global ad spend and is expected to see some of the fastest programmatic growth in the coming years. eMarketer estimates that China grew programmatic spend by 49% in 2017 compared with about 28% in the U.S. In Southeast Asia which eMarketer defines as Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines, digital mobile ad growth of about 60% is expected in 2018. We are extremely bullish on growth in Asia."
Analyst basically asked question about small CTV base and when it becomes material- Green’s response:
"Awesome. So as it relates to programmatic TV, I mean when we talk about the expediential growth happening year-after-year like, once you experience the numbers like we’re putting up and we’re talking about, we use numbers like 1000% growth and we talked about how it looked like that last year. We’ve been in TV for a couple of years now. When you’re putting up percentages like that for multiple years, it’s impossible for it not to become material really fast.
So I really expect those green shoots that we’re seeing now in early 2018 to be much taller by the end of 2018. So I think 2018 is the year that it becomes material. But we’re growing the rest of our business which is already scaled so much that it is going to take years for it to be the kingpin that eventually will before it becomes the largest piece in the pie and what we just talked about mobile being 40% of our business before it surpasses mobile as the largest chunk of the business."
The “not linear” comment from Green is in this response to CTV analyst question. Analyst had read that by 2020 10% of tv would be programmatic and he was asking Green if he agreed with that number:
"Yes, so thank you. I love the question, I love the topic. So the thing that it’s hard to predict inside of TV, and I kind of alluded to this in the last question or last response. I just want to be a little bit more explicit in this response. So the thing that’s hard is, if you’re running a big TV company, still 90% plus of your revenue come through linear television and I think many of them are acknowledging that that business model is going to change, like linear television is not going to last for 20 more years. But nobody knows how long they can ride the wave that they’ve been on for a while.
And they make a bunch of money from it and they like the way that it works and they’re afraid of all the change that comes that they may not make as much money in the programmatic world and the digital world as they did in a linear television.
But what that does is it creates a ticking time bomb in a linear television, which is fewer people are watching, so they add more commercials to make up for the fact that fewer people are watching and they create a work experience. I think all of us as consumers can acknowledge that the experience in terms of just that add to content ratio that has become worse over the last few years.
Even though the content have gotten better and invariably the cost of the content has gotten much more expensive, which is why I call it a ticking time bomb. So the thing that’s hard for an analyst to do is figure out when that an inflection point starts, when does the bomb go off? When the consumers really say that they’ve had enough and when does it stop looking like this early adopters of cord cut instead of everybody cord cutting and that is the hardest part to predict.
So I don’t know 10% is really aggressive, whether 10% will happen by 2020 is an open question. I do believe that’s aggressive. But it’s also not - it’s not impossible and largely depend on how well three or four or five companies make their content available and make the transition and when they see this as a landgrab opportunity, it changes everything.
And it will be really interesting to watch companies like AT&T and Comcast and NBC more specifically, ESPN, Disney, like these companies the way that they make that their content available will determine whether or not that that 10% as possible, while at the same time consumers are changing. The one thing we can be sure of is the move will not be linear, meaning that the shape of the adoption curve will not be linear and that that’s why the super hard to model."
When you read Q3 transcript, Q2 transcript, Q1 transcript, or any interviews with the CEO (TMF or otherwise) you will see the consistency of his predictions and focus. The company is just flat out executing.
-Dreamer
