Okay, well then at that 15 million instead of looking at 7 million 7.5 million, we look at 6.5 million. What does that change about our overall business? Almost nothing. So I think many have not understood that this is affecting those in the ecosystem at very different rates. And really this is a revaluing of the internet and that some sites are becoming more valuable and some are becoming less valuable. And just like anything in equities markets, when you revalue it, the people who are in charge of assigning that value or doing the buying and selling, that’s an opportunity for them to add value. And this for us is an opportunity for us to add value. We are helping our buyers figure out what to buy. And I would argue we’re adding more value than we ever have as a result of it.
And so as a result, this is very good for us. Thank you so much for the question.
Chris Toth: Thanks, Shweta.
Operator: Up next, we have Vasily Karasyov with Cannonball Research. Please proceed.
Vasily Karasyov: Thank you, good afternoon. Jeff, thank you for the helpful color on the cookie deprecation issue. In a related topic, can you set the record straight on Privacy Sandbox? What is your view and what is Trade Desk testing there? What does it even matter to you? Because there’s been some discussion in the industry press. There is some confusion, I would say. Thank you so much.
Jeffrey Green: Thanks, Vasily. I appreciate the question. And as was mentioned previously, I have written fairly extensively on Privacy Sandbox on our news platform, The Current. So if anybody wants to read more details, there’s also a great report by Bill Simmons, who was previously the CTO of DataZoo, which was acquired by Roku, who also had just a great POV on this, also on The Current. So as I mentioned before, there’s two different things happening at roughly the same time. There is cookie deprecation, which is, Chrome is removing the use of third-party cookies, and they’re doing that gradually. They introduced 1%, and that created a lot of discussion about it. But really, as an industry, so far, we — beginning of the year, 35% of cookies were already gone because of Safari and Firefox, and now it’s 36%, or something like that.
So it wasn’t a dramatic move, but the fear that it’s going to go from 36% to 100% removal has lots of people concerned. I think it even has Google concerned who’s doing this because they fear that they’re taking something away and they’re not replacing it with anything, Which gives their engineers a very difficult dilemma. What do we replace it with? So what they’re proposing to replace it with is this product called Privacy Sandbox. Now it’s a series of different APIs. There’s actually more products than just Privacy Sandbox, but everyone in our industry just talks about that umbrella of APIs as Privacy Sandbox. I really believe that Google has missed an opportunity to build something better than this. They’re increasing the complexity and they are deprecating at the same time.
So I just, I don’t think any good product ever deprecates an ecosystem and makes it more complicated at the same time. So I’ve been fairly critical of that. Some of us, some of our leaders, if we’re going to test it, and some of our leaders have publicly said we’re not going to test it. And then I publicly said we are going to test it. And the reason we’re going to test it is, I just don’t think you get to be a food critic if you’re not willing to taste food. So yes, we’ve been fairly critical of it. And yes, I don’t think it’s a good product, but we have to try. And this may be the most iterated on product that I’ve ever seen from Google. So they keep changing it a lot. So it is actually hard to keep up with, but the broad strokes haven’t changed a lot and the product is continually disappointed as you’ll read from most op-eds outside of Google.
Google says it’s great, everyone else says it’s not. I think it’s incredibly complex. I think it’s not fully understood by more than 10 people on the planet. It’s really complicated. But it is not that hard to see that this is a deprecation to the internet. It is a deprecation to the Chrome user experience. And then, of course, there’s lots of speculation about what Google’s motives are in doing all these things at this exact moment when they’re under a tremendous amount of pressure. But that’s a totally different topic. But as far as our position on Privacy Sandbox, we don’t think it’s a good product, but we will test it, hope that it gets better. Would love for Google to innovate instead of deprecate. But in the event that they don’t, it does give us a lot more traction around UID2, and The Trade Desk is going to be fine no matter what.
So I’m only invested to the point that I deeply care about the open internet and would really like to see things like journalism thrive. And I am very concerned about the impact that cookies will have on things like journalism that are pretty dependent on browser-based traffic. So with that, I’ll move on to the next question. Thank you for the question.
Chris Toth: Thanks, Vasily.
Operator: The next question comes from Dan Salmon with New Street Research. Please proceed.
Dan Salmon: Okay. Great. Thanks. Good afternoon, everybody. I’ve got two questions. Jeff, you mentioned your single sign-on initiative, OpenPass, in the press release and your prepared remarks for the first time in recent memory. Could you talk a little bit more about that initiative? It’s important to your identity and authentication strategy? And even more specifically how it works together with UID2. And then the second, just maybe for Laura on this one, but also in the prepared remarks, Jeff mentioned that JVPs now represent one-third of your business. Can you give us any more detail on how that breaks down between agencies and direct client relationships? Thank you.
Jeffrey Green: You bet. So first let me take a minute to explain where we’re at with OpenPass. So first, this is in a closed invite-only beta, and you’re right, we haven’t talked about it a lot. There have been a number of things where people are watching us closely lately and we’ve been scooped or people talk about it before we get a chance to talk about it. I think this was one of them. But let me explain what it is, first of all. So if you have ever used Shopify, I think that’s the easiest way to understand it. I’m a big fan of Shopify, both the company and the product itself. The first time you use Shopify, you go through a checkout process that feels just like any ordinary checkout process, you actually don’t even necessarily see the value.
I actually think it was brilliant that Shopify, at least the way I experienced it, never took the time to explain what they were doing. I just experienced it. That was the fastest way to get people to adopt it was to get a few merchants to do it. And then where you really see the beauty of their signup process is the second time you go to a merchant and you see Shopify there, and then you see how much faster the checkout process is. And then if you’re like me, you say, how did they do that? Where did they get the information? How is it secure? And then I’m literally putting together flow charts to understand how this worked and realize that both is faster and more secure than what I had before and it was just genius. It is kind of the opposite of what I was just criticizing in Google’s product and Privacy Sandbox where it complicates and deprecates.
This is something that makes it both easier and more secure. And when you get both of those things together, then it’s amazing. So that’s exactly what we’re doing with the SSO, which is we are trying to make it easier for people to sign on to websites. So the most lightweight, it’s not joined with an email service. We’re not launching something like Gmail. But instead, we’ve created this product that is OpenPass. We have a few publishers that have signed up during this invite only beta. So of course, we run it on The Current, our own product, but also on Snopes and OK Magazine and Radar Online and a few early adopters who want to try this and the results have been really fantastic. And again, where you really see the benefit is when you go to a second or third or fourth site after you’ve been to that first one.
So we recognize that the way to get this network effect is to partner with some of the biggest companies in the world that have sign-ons and also have a desire to make the ads on their site more relevant and more competitive with more bidders than just Google. And so, we think our value proposition is really compelling, and especially once you get that flywheel spinning, then it becomes almost financially irresponsible for people not to sign up in that we can bring them higher CPM. So we’re very excited about the early results. We have some big ideas about how to rapidly create adoption. And we’re excited about what that represents for things like journalism, if we can get this to the scale that we want it to be. Laura, the second part of the question is for you.
Laura Schenkein: Yeah, thanks, Dan. On the topic of JVPs, they absolutely continue to be a key driver of spend growth in our business. And as we noted, about a third of our spend was under a JVP exiting 2023. And we had, I believe exiting the year over 45 JVPs with a robust pipeline of additions to that. Those JVPs represent billions of dollars of future spend. And what gets me most excited about them is that, those JVPs are helping us get closer to our clients. And to your point, that’s both brands and agencies who are signing up to do things that will drive incremental ROI for their marketing budgets. It can be anything from increasing data usage to adopting UID2 to focusing on decision [CTB] (ph) spend and I can go on and on.
And the way that we look at those is that, they’re effectively a win-win for The Trade Desk, they’re a win-win for the agency and for the brand where they’re structuring a framework that works best for their business. We don’t actually break down the percent that’s coming from the agency versus coming from the brand. And the main reason for that is that, even the JVPs that we’re siding with our brands, we are talking to the agencies that are working hand in hand with the brand as we are structuring those JVPs. And our relationships with agencies has never been stronger. So we just constantly say, we’re never losing sight of the key role that our agencies play in helping our brands execute their business. And for that reason, we don’t really look at it as a breakdown, but more in terms of how can we get closer to all parties that are spending on our platform.
Chris Toth: Thanks, Dan.
