At this point, it’s not just Trade Desk Derangement Syndrome. It’s Trade Desk Fatigue.

After years of being hailed as adtech’s savior — the anti-Google, the open-internet evangelist — Jeff Green has started calling out the entire industry for “hating them.”

At the Prebid Summit, Green all but dropped the diplomacy.

He accused critics of tribalism — of clinging to the old buyer-versus-seller divide like it was a flag instead of a business model. “Let’s not get lost in tribalism,” he said. “This isn’t red vs. blue, supply vs. demand.”

Translation: Stop calling us sell-side and get on board.

To Green, The Trade Desk isn’t invading the sell-side; it’s just “fixing” what he believes everyone else broke. He framed PubDesk and OpenAds not as threats but as “help” — tools to educate publishers, improve clarity, and bring “fairness” back to auctions. And in true Jeff Green style, he didn’t just defend himself — he repositioned the entire industry as the problem.

“The only people who won’t benefit,” Green said, “are the duplicators and value-lacking intermediaries.”

That wasn’t subtle.

That was a line drawn in code.

Mike O’Sullivan, Green’s right and left hands and The Trade Desk’s GM of Product, followed with a diagnosis that’s now infamous: “Trade Desk Derangement Syndrome.”

According to O’Sullivan, anyone skeptical of The Trade Desk’s intentions — SSPs, publishers, analysts, even rivals — are afflicted with irrational paranoia.

It’s funny, until you realize what’s happening: The Trade Desk feels cornered.

When a $30 billion company starts joking that its critics are insane, that’s not swagger — it’s tension.

It’s the kind of humor that covers real anxiety. Because the louder Green insists “we’re not sell-side,” the more his company builds products that look exactly like the sell side — only smarter, faster, and centralized under his architecture.

This is The Trade Desk’s new posture: part messiah, part martyr.
The company that once positioned itself as the open web’s protector is now telling that same web to grow up and get out of the way.

Back in 2022, OpenPath was sold as a cleanup job — a direct-to-publisher bridge to “remove inefficiencies” in the programmatic supply chain.

But OpenPath did more than clean; it restructured the plumbing. Major publishers — Reuters, The Washington Post, Hearst — jumped in, giving The Trade Desk direct access to pricing and performance data that had previously lived inside SSP walls.

Officially, it wasn’t about replacing SSPs. It was about “balancing the ecosystem.”
In reality, it quietly shifted routing power to the buy side.

Within The Trade Desk’s Kokai platform, SSPs were reclassified as “resellers.” It sounded benign — but it was a demotion. The real-time auction routes, the bidstream data, the logic of supply flow — all became inputs into Kokai’s buyer optimization model.

OpenPath wasn’t a test. It was a rehearsal.

Fast-forward to 2025, and The Trade Desk is back with its new double feature: PubDesk and OpenAds.

PubDesk is pitched as a dashboard for publishers to “see how buyers value their inventory.” Sounds friendly — until you notice it requires OpenPath integration, plugging publishers deeper into The Trade Desk’s environment.

OpenAds, the companion product, is a fork of Prebid — the industry’s open-source auction wrapper — rebuilt to “ensure fairness” and “improve integrity.” It’s transparency with a twist: every checksum, every signature, every line of verified code runs through The Trade Desk’s infrastructure.

Together, they create a closed feedback loop:

The seller, the system, and the scoring mechanism now speak fluent Trade Desk.

Even O’Sullivan admitted both tools “serve the buy side first and foremost.”
That’s not analysis. That’s verbatim.

The Trade Desk’s pitch is simple: “buyer-first transparency.”
Publishers get insights into what advertisers value.

But “transparency” here is one-way.
It’s not about giving publishers agency — it’s about teaching them to conform.

Every insight, every metric, every benchmark filters through Kokai’s bidder logic. Publishers aren’t seeing objective truths; they’re seeing what The Trade Desk’s AI considers valuable.

That’s not openness — it’s alignment.

Just like Google once called its ad server “open,” The Trade Desk now wraps its walled logic in the language of participation. AdMonsters recently noted that OpenAds effectively changes who defines price discovery itself. That’s not hysteria. That’s math.

Because when you control the auction logic and the analytics, fairness becomes whatever your model says it is.

The Trade Desk now controls the bidder, the pipes, and the publisher dashboard that measures “fairness.”
It’s not selling control — it’s normalizing it.

So maybe “Trade Desk Derangement Syndrome” isn’t a diagnosis after all.
Maybe it’s projection.

Because the only people acting deranged are the ones insisting that the most powerful buy-side platform in the world somehow isn’t building the sell side in plain sight.

And maybe, just maybe, Jeff Green’s frustration isn’t that people hate The Trade Desk —
it’s that they finally understand it.

Some people collect stamps. Jeff Green collects protocols.

In mid-2025, he took Prebid — the open-source auction framework beloved by publishers for keeping buyers honest — and forked it right down the middle. The result was OpenAds, a fork of Prebid’s wrapper that promised transparency, fairness, and cryptographic trust.

The only problem? Prebid’s community didn’t exactly send him a thank-you card.

“Let’s be clear,” said one exasperated Prebid board member who asked not to be named. “Jeff didn’t join us in transparency — he annexed it.”

Another developer was blunter: “It’s like he stabbed us with our own fork, then asked us to call it progress.”

Behind the sarcasm lies a serious question: when a major DSP rewrites the auction code, controls the identifiers, and builds the dashboards that define “fairness,” where exactly does the open web end and The Trade Desk Operating System begin?

Prebid 10.9.0 was supposed to be a privacy update. Instead, it detonated a small rebellion.

In that version, universal Transaction IDs (TIDs) — the identifiers that allowed DSPs to detect duplicate auctions — were replaced with per-seller TIDs. Each SSP got its own unique version, breaking the buyers’ ability to see when the same impression was offered through multiple paths.

Prebid.org said it was a win for privacy and publisher control. Buyers, particularly The Trade Desk, called it a blackout.

“You can’t optimize what you can’t see,” said one Trade Desk engineer in a public Slack exchange. “Prebid took away the flashlight and called it a nightlight.”

Publishers, meanwhile, defended the move. “Universal TIDs were turning our auctions into open books for buyers,” said a senior exec at a major European publisher. “They could map our floor prices and undercut us in real time.”

Both sides had a point — and both stood to lose something. But what happened next wasn’t compromise. It was counterattack.

On October 2, Jeff Green announced OpenAds, calling it “a fairer, more accountable auction.” Built by forking Prebid’s open-source code, OpenAds restored universal TIDs and layered in three cryptographic upgrades:

The pitch was irresistible: transparency through math, not trust.

But Prebid members weren’t impressed.

“Cryptographic attestation sounds great until you realize who’s holding the keys,” said one open-source maintainer. “It’s not transparency — it’s notarized control.”

Another developer called it “control theater — the illusion of openness wrapped in checksum encryption.”

And that was the real rift. Prebid removed universal TIDs to limit buyer dominance; OpenAds reinstated them — but under The Trade Desk’s namespace.

Universal TIDs are buyer catnip. They let DSPs see across exchanges, correlate duplicates, and avoid overbidding — a triumph of efficiency for the buy side and a quiet disaster for publishers.

When buyers can de-duplicate auctions, bid density collapses, CPMs drop, and publishers lose the small arbitrage that once kept their margins alive.

Prebid’s per-seller TIDs restored that chaos — and, ironically, that chaos paid better.
More bids meant more competition, more opacity, more leverage.

OpenAds flips it back again. Buyers regain their global vision, their clean optimization graphs, their data continuity. Publishers regain … anxiety.

Even The Trade Desk’s supporters concede the power asymmetry. “Of course universal IDs help us,” said a senior exec at a major DSP partner. “That’s the point. Efficiency is code for consolidation.”

The Trade Desk calls its triad of attestation tools “proof without intermediaries.” It’s a slick phrase — the kind that belongs in an investor deck. But many in the Prebid community argue the proof comes with a price.

Every verification, every signature, every audit check routes through The Trade Desk’s infrastructure. That means TTD controls both the validator and the ledger.

“If you control the receipts, you control the truth,” said one independent engineer. “We didn’t fight Google’s dominance just to kneel to a prettier monopolist.”

The irony is brutal: the open-source movement that was supposed to democratize auctions is now split between two philosophies — trust the crowd versus trust the cryptography (owned by one crowd).

Jeff Green insists OpenAds isn’t a sell-side takeover. “The auction isn’t inherently a sell-side function,” he told the Prebid Summit audience, smiling as if the distinction were self-evident.

But OpenAds runs the auction’s code, enforces its identifiers, and logs its results. PubDesk displays the data. OpenPath carries the pipes.

So if you write the rules, run the servers, and count the money — are you really just “the buyer”?

The Trade Desk didn’t just fork Prebid’s code. It forked its philosophy — replacing cooperative transparency with corporate certainty.

And that’s the war now raging across adtech’s open web: not who’s more ethical, but who owns the definition of “open.

You’ve read the public version — the part The Trade Desk would retweet.
But ADOTAT+ is where we show the stuff they don’t want you to screenshot.

Inside, we go beyond the press-release transparency to show how OpenAds, PubDesk, and Kokai quietly fuse into a closed “open” network — one that looks cooperative, but functions like an operating system where Jeff Green decides what “fair” means.

You’re not just missing gossip — you’re missing the playbook.
This is how power is shifting, quietly, under the language of fairness.

Subscribe to ADOTAT+ — because by the time Kokai decides what “quality” means, it’ll already be scoring you.