Good day, ladies and gentlemen. It is my pleasure to turn the floor over to Chris Toth, Head of Investor Relations at The Trade Desk. Sir, the floor is yours.
Thank you, operator. Hello, and good afternoon. Welcome to The Trade Desk first quarter 2017 earnings conference call. On the call today are Founder and CEO, Jeff Green, Chief Financial Officer, Paul Ross, and Chief Operating Officer, Rob Perdue. A copy of our earnings press release can be found on our website at www.thetradedesk.com in the investor relations section. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that except for historical information, the matters that we will be describing will be forward-looking statements that are dependent upon certain risks and uncertainties. I encourage you to refer to the risk factors included in our press release and in our most recent SEC filings. In addition to reporting our GAAP results, we present supplemental non-GAAP financial data. A reconciliation of the non-GAAP to GAAP measures can be found in our earnings press release.
We believe providing non-GAAP measures combined with our GAAP results provides a more meaningful representation regarding the company's operational performance. I will now turn the call over to Founder and CEO, Jeff Green. Jeff?
Thanks, Chris. Good afternoon, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. Before we get into our results, I just want to remind you of the expectations for our industry. Zenith's programmatic marketing forecast predicts that programmatic advertising will grow 31% in 2017, which is faster than all digital channels. The report also estimates that programmatic will grow faster than social media, which is expected to grow 25%. Online video is estimated to grow at 20%. The inevitable shift to programmatic advertising is providing a tailwind to the entire industry and has helped us kick off our year to an amazing start. Now, on to our financial performance for the first quarter of 2017. Q1 has always been our slowest quarter of the year.
Last year, in 2016, the first six weeks of the year were incredibly weak as the global market moves caused advertisers to take a deep pause. Q1 also has historically been the most difficult to predict. This year, we shattered our own record for the first quarter, far surpassing our expectations. This was a quarter where nearly everything went right, which doesn't usually happen. As a result, revenue was $53.4 million, an increase of 76% compared with a year ago. This means in Q1, we grew nearly five times faster than Magna Global's expectation for digital growth this year. Zenith forecast for 2017 expects the industry's year-over-year video growth to be 20%. Our Q1 year-over-year mobile video growth was more than 10 times that, coming in at just over 200%.
At a time we were investing heavily, we grew adjusted EBITDA by 47% to a Q1 record of $6.3 million and a GAAP net income at $4.9 million. This has been one of the strongest performances for all SaaS platform companies in Q1. It represents a number of themes. Number one, the loyalty of our customers. Number two, most of the upside surprise came from new brands or agencies joining our platform at an unprecedented rate. Number three, the reality of a consolidation in ad tech. Fourth, the market's appetite for objective ad-buying platforms. Number five, which is the other side of that coin, a move away from buying platforms that are conflicted.
Number six, the need for advertising in a global market where the signal-to-noise ratios are getting worse, and the need for products to differentiate themselves from their competitors can only be done through advertising. Number seven, the reality that many international markets are growing meaningfully faster than bigger, more fragmented markets like the United States. Finally, number eight, the need for data-driven decision-making in everything related to media, but especially the ad engine that funds media. As is the case with other SaaS companies, we have an extremely loyal customer base. For the soon-approaching decade that we've been operating this business, we've been able to accurately predict that performance of the core base of our customers, as we did this quarter. What was a real positive surprise was the incredibly strong spend from new wins, both from brands and the brands' agencies, which was much more than originally expected.
Additionally, data usage was as high as it has ever been, growing 77% from a year ago. I'm not sure we've ever had a quarter where we had a better batting average in agency and brand pitches than this one. Also in the quarter, year-over-year, our international operations grew twice as fast as North America. Finally, mobile continued to lead all our channels in terms of growth. There were also a few macro events outside of our control that created additional upside positive surprises for us. As many of you know, several brand safety incidents surfaced as a major issue on some of the leading user-generated content sites, or UGC sites. This drew attention to an issue that we've been addressing for years in the advertising industry and with our customers. Objectivity in media buying is important, and it's becoming more important.
If we are unsure about inventory, we don't run on it. We don't buy our own media because we don't have any. The controversy around UGC has given The Trade Desk a platform to talk about the core of our video strategy, which is premium content. We are being recognized by both agencies and brands as the only scaled platform in the market today that is objective, buys across all digital types, targets premium quality video inventory, and is brand safe. While looking at about 500 billion ad opportunities every day still holds some risk, our laser focus on a product-driven buy side makes it possible for us to protect brands better than any of our competitors. In Q1, we won big in a lot of places and markets. Without naming brands, we won new business inside a number of the agencies.
We won one of the world's biggest banks as a new customer, one of the major shoe companies, and a couple additional auto manufacturers. New wins represented millions of incremental dollars of spend on our platform. I recently spent time with a CMO from one of the largest brands in the world that is now spending over 50% of their advertising in digital. If it were up to him, he would spend 100% of all spend in programmatic. To have a large brand state that they will spend, in the near future, more than 50% of their ad dollars programmatically is amazing and speaks to the fact that our industry is maturing to a place where spending the majority or even all of a massive budget through programmatic types is not only possible, it's even expected.
This was unbelievably exciting and echoes the deep desires for meaningful partnerships and industry traction that we felt through Q1. It was a great quarter. Fake news has been a big issue in the media in the last few quarters. Some technology companies and media have said, quote, "They're a marketplace," and their hands-off approach has enabled fake news. On the other hand, we have publicly stated that we are working to defund fake news. We don't want to advertise on fake news or connect to inventory that is suspect or questionable. The idea of defunding fake news is gaining steam as one of the best, if not the best, ways to stop it. We are leading the industry as demonstrated in our interview with "60 Minutes" and the research we provided them. Also, our interviews with BBC News and the public interview with White House correspondent Todd Zwillich.
Agencies and brands alike are responding and both want to avoid and defund fake news, too. Advertising on premium inventory and taking a brand-safe approach is helping to make The Trade Desk platform one of their preferred platforms of choice. We are also benefiting from the reality that most DSP competitors are smaller and not profitable. Nearly all of them have fewer customers and media budgets than we do. To compete, you have to have a sustainable business model, add more value to the media ecosystem than you extract, and you have to be big to survive. Every time a platform looks at an impression, and we look at over 6 million a second today, it costs money. You have to look at everything very efficiently, and you have to win a lot to be competitive, all while returning a better ROI to media buyers.
Our technological advantage is making it easier for us to compete through these market forces. Shifting to our largest opportunity and biggest growth drivers, which are international, mobile, and video, I believe the trends remain extremely positive and all three areas help drive our global growth. Internationally, we have been more productive than ever, registering excellent growth in both Asia and Europe. The month of March had all-time record spend for three of our biggest international offices in London, Sydney, and Hamburg. Considering March isn't even part of the biggest quarter of the year, that's remarkable. We also saw all-time near records in Singapore, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, which again, is significant given it's only in March. Our growth and momentum in these and other international media centers are more evidence that the world, not just the U.S., is moving towards programmatic.
eMarketer estimates that China will grow programmatic over 100% from 2016 to 2018, and Magna Global estimates that countries such as Singapore and Thailand are expected to grow programmatic ad spend 3x and 4x from where it is today to 2019. As we discussed last quarter, in Q4, we opened our Jakarta, Indonesia office. Today, we are pleased to report that as planned, we opened two additional offices in Q1, one in Paris, France, and one in Madrid, Spain. We are quickly moving towards integrating inventory partners and ramping up queries per second or QPS. Take Indonesia, for example. The sheer size and opportunity in Indonesia is evident as the country has already leaped to the second-largest market in all of APAC in terms of QPS we view every single day.
We recently partnered with the leading news portals such as Liputan6 and Kompas, as well as Path, the leading social media app designed for mobile. There is a massive amount of opportunity for growth due to the compelling economics of programmatic, and with our footprint now in Asia, we are in one of the best positions to capture the growing move to programmatic. In two of our most important channels, mobile and video, we continue to make progress. In Q1, all mobile, which includes in-app and mobile video, grew significantly and represented over a third of our business. We continue to see exceptionally strong growth in mobile video and mobile in-app, which we grew 220% and 145% compared with Q1 a year ago. Mobile continues to grow, and we are well-positioned to win additional spend.
One recent example of spend moving toward mobile was a large food and drink company that wanted to use device targeting and attribution tools to yield a more efficient cost per acquisition. The target was social foodies and theater audiences. Using the tools in our platform, we demonstrated the increase in reach and conversions. Since then, device targeting was used across the board from the customer, and the percent of mobile increased to 42% of the total campaign spend on these targets, achieving a 25% better cost per acquisition. We think this is an example of what is happening more broadly, which is mobile advertising is undervalued and is going to continue to grow faster than most other channels. As connectivity and time on mobile increases, we believe mobile ads will also become higher quality and better integrated into the user experience than they are today.
We also think mobile video is one of the most untapped opportunities in all of digital. With all of these forces coming together in mobile, we enable unbiased, data-driven decisioning to more users and a return, a better ROI for our customers, not just on one site or app, but across the entire internet and all of media. Perhaps the only other area that can drive more spend than mobile over the long term is television. We are in the golden age of TV content. TV media is at the top of its game and creating amazing content that is coming online for programmatic purchases like on CBS All Access or Hulu or Sling TV, because providers like these are embracing data-driven programmatic advertising with a significantly higher CPM and better ad experiences. For many of these companies, better ad experiences are just as important as the higher CPM.
We are only at the early stages, and it will take time, but we are investing heavily into TV now, and our connected TV or CTV efforts are already paying early dividends. In Q1, our CTV spend alone was about 300% higher than where it was a year ago. In a signal of how quickly sentiment is changing in traditional TV, a year ago, our team met with a large broadcasting company, and there was little interest in partnering on inventory and implementing a programmatic strategy. You fast-forward to when we recently met again, and now they are ready to partner on a number of fronts, from over-the-top or OTT inventory access to utilizing data. Other early adopters are moving programmatic CTV forward, and we recently launched an inventory partnership with Sling TV, which is Dish Network virtual offering, and has reported a million-plus users.
We are in a very early massive transformation. Traditional TV is moving to on-demand connected TV, and connected TV is expanding from primarily subscription to primarily ad-funded. The massive adoption of ad-funded connected TV takes time, but we are forming the partnerships and making the investments needed to win in the long term. Because of the sheer size of the market, about half of the $650 billion worldwide advertising market, TV can move the needle unlike any of our other channels. I would even go one step further. TV needs programmatic more than any other channel does. While it takes big media companies years to turn the ship, they will turn as fast as they are able because understanding and adopting programmatic advertising is existentially critical to their businesses. Finally, let me just take a minute to talk about our business model.
As I've stated before, we don't believe that growth must come at the expense of profitability. In Q1, our financial performance was more than we estimated. Even with our aggressive investments in hiring, even with our aggressive investments in mobile video and global growth, the majority of the incremental revenue we generated in the quarter that was above our guidance contributed to EBITDA. We delivered strong adjusted EBITDA dollars of $6.3 million, an increase of 47% over the prior year. Comparatively, this year, we also are investing at a more aggressive rate. We think we're setting the bar for what software companies have to produce to compete in the advertising business. The industry is continuing to see ad dollars shift to programmatic, and we continue to win big, and our customers are expecting to spend significantly more with us than they did entering the year.
For 2017, we are increasing our expectation for the year. We now expect revenue to be at least $291 million, and we are also increasing our adjusted EBITDA estimate. We expect our adjusted EBITDA percentage to be in line with the more mature SaaS companies at 27% for the rest of 2017, which revises our EBITDA guidance to $78 million for the year. Agencies and brands are looking for a data-driven, easy-to-use platform solution that delivers a better ROI for their ad dollars. The Trade Desk is the answer, and this is why we're the biggest independent market share leader in the DSP space. It's why our customers are sometimes our very best salespeople, and why we believe our market momentum will continue. I'm going to turn the call over to Rob to discuss our quarter in more detail.
Thanks, Jeff, and good afternoon, everyone. We started off the year with the best first quarter in our history in terms of our revenue and the number of customers we won, the number of people we hired, and the locations we opened. We are executing well, exceeding our targets and delivering strong results, highlighted by our 76% year-over-year revenue growth for the first quarter. Our growth in Q1 was driven in part by our mobile video channel, which grew by over 220% on a year-over-year basis. The first quarter is the time to invest in our customers and in our own new hires. Educating agencies and brands on the benefits of programmatic, winning new business, as well as training, onboarding, and getting our new hires up to speed is a big part of our focus in Q1.
This is an important quarter from an operational perspective, and we are entering the summer and back half of the year with a lot of momentum, and we're excited about the opportunities in front of us. From an operational perspective, I'll update you on the progress we made in our 3 core priorities. To remind, that's one, which is to remain our customers' objective and independent trusted advisor. Two, to continue to grow our omni-channel presence. And three, continuing to grow our international footprint. An example of our success in Q1 was working with one of our newer agency customers to win the marketing spend from a very large financial institution. Our dedicated sales, account management, and trading teams spent well over a year investing to win this business.
It started with our team working to become the independent trusted advisor to a large digital agency, one who had never done a campaign on our platform before. Our account teams earned their trust and trained them on the benefits of The Trade Desk platform. The agency then introduced us to the financial institution in the pitch because they believed in us, and together with the agency, we were able to win the advertiser's multimillion-dollar programmatic business. The brand valued our independence, transparency, and alignment with their own business over all the other criteria that they were evaluating. Our account teams earn the trust of agencies every day by continually highlighting the benefits of The Trade Desk and proving it, not only with results and insights, but also as evidenced by a 95%-plus customer retention rate for now the thirteenth quarter in a row.
One benefit that is resonating even more now is the value of working on an agnostic platform where ad buyers can purchase brand safe inventory objectively across the Internet and buy it holistically across multiple channels. In a time when there's a lot of focus on brand safety and reports of fake news, it is important to demonstrate that The Trade Desk is providing ad buyers the control they need to buy only the premium or quality inventory they want and avoiding riskier types of inventory, such as user-generated content sites. I want to focus on growing our omni-channel presence. The strong growth we have seen in mobile and video have enabled our clients to have a higher level of coordination and consolidation of their marketing spend across the whole marketing funnel, from awareness to consideration to purchase.
The ability to target market messages throughout the complete customer journey is a key function for an omni-channel buying platform. This is enhanced by using proprietary data and technology, including both first-party data and third-party data from companies like Oracle and Acxiom across all channels, it is making a real difference for advertisers and their agencies. For example, we can deliver highly targeted ads to the roughly 12 million people in the U.S. who are likely to purchase a vehicle by the end of the year, or to the many millions of people worldwide who are likely to buy the 200 million PCs estimated to be sold for the remainder of the year. In Q1, our total mobile spend, including in-app and mobile video, represented over a third of our business and grew 113% year-over-year.
While overall mobile advertising in 2017 is expected to grow by about 30%, according to Zenith. At nearly four times the growth of the industry, we continue to gain our share of incremental ad dollars moving to programmatic, we expect this trend to continue to grow around the world. In the first quarter, our native channel saw robust growth as we continued to launch several new native inventory suppliers on our platform. Our team has spent the last few quarters training media buyers at agencies on how to incorporate native ad units into their ad campaign strategies. In just Q1 of this year, we saw native spend surpass our entire 2016 total spend native. It has been a truly phenomenal growth story for us, we believe we're still in the early stages of growth for our native channel.
A global eyewear brand, in partnership with their agency, was striving to deliver a more efficient cost per landing page visit in some of their ad campaigns. The advertiser was intrigued by the potential of native inventory to deliver on this goal and began testing native for efficacy. The agency team quickly repurposed existing advertiser assets for native on our platform. After a two-week test running similar spend on our native channel versus a competitor, the click-through rate achieved through The Trade Desk platform was 3x that of the competition, while at the same time providing a cost per acquisition that was 37% less. As a result, the advertiser could both scale their marketing spend on native while also driving a more efficient marketing outcome.
The third priority we're focused on is widening our geographic footprint to make sure we serve our customers locally in the markets that are important to them. In every quarter of 2016, our international growth spend percentage outpaced that of the U.S. In Q1 2017, that trend continued. Our international business amounted to about 11% of our total spend, and our teams in Germany, the U.K., and Australia each set their all-time spend record in March. Singapore and Hong Kong continue to grow well over 100% on a year-over-year basis. The adoption of programmatic and the market growth we are seeing across Asia is accelerating. We believe the same progress will happen over time in our newest locations, in France, in Spain, and in Indonesia.
In Q1, I spent two weeks in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo to meet with our teams, potential customers, as well as other data and inventory partners. With respect to China, it's a really interesting market for The Trade Desk. The QPS for inventory is roughly where the U.S. was back in 2010, so it's still really early. The China market is maturing rapidly. There are many types of data and inventory partners. They're all really unique. Everyone we met there was very globally minded. They knew about us, they knew our story. They were open to partnering with us. The main takeaway is that there's a lot of opportunity for us in China over time. I'd say more than I previously thought.
While I do expect it to take years, I expect China to eventually join the U.S. as one of our two biggest markets in the world. We were well received in China. We do need to invest in this market. That means hiring the right people on the ground, building out our integrations with quality inventory sources, expanding our data partnerships, then executing our business operation just like we have in every other market we've entered. Overall, we feel really good about our first quarter success and our prospects for the remainder of the year. We have made tremendous strides in our customer engagement, in our hiring and training the next generation, continuing to advance our international strategy. The advertising industry is still in the early stages of its programmatic transformation. We see a huge opportunity in front of us.
With that, I'm going to turn the call over to Paul to discuss our financials.
Thanks, Rob. Good afternoon, everyone. As you've seen in the numbers, 2017 is off to a great start, and we're really pleased with our Q1 financial performance against our key metrics. Revenue increased 76% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA increased 47% year-over-year, and GAAP net income was $4.9 million, all while still investing aggressively in areas critical to our future growth. Revenue for the first quarter was $53.4 million, which was above our expectations and reflects both the expansion of our share of spend by our existing customers, plus the addition of new customers and advertisers. As Jeff mentioned earlier, intra-quarter, we continued to see customers move more dollars onto our platform, helping to drive the revenue upside.
For the quarter, approximately 87% of our first quarter gross spend came from existing customers, who we define as those customers that have been with us for over one year. Our operating expenses increased in line with the growth of our business to $51 million in Q1 versus $27 million during the same period in 2016. The increase in operating expenses was primarily due to increased investments in personnel, primarily in technology and development as we invest there for future growth, and in general and administrative expenses, which primarily reflects public company costs that we did not incur a year ago. Also in the quarter, we recorded $3.3 million in bad debt expense related to two specific smaller customers during the quarter. Total other expense net was $800K, and income tax was a $3.8 million benefit in the quarter.
Our Q1 income tax reflects adoption of a new accounting standard, ASU 2016-09. Under this standard, we received a discrete tax benefit of $5.3 million, primarily related to stock option exercises. GAAP net income was $4.9 million for the first quarter of 2017 or $0.11 per fully diluted share. Our adjusted net income was $7.8 million for the first quarter or $0.18 per fully diluted share, compared with adjusted net income of $3.5 million or $0.09 per share in the comparable quarter last year. We use adjusted EBITDA as a core metric for our business. We calculate our adjusted EBITDA by excluding stock compensation expense and, in the case of 2016, the non-cash warrant expense.
Adjusted EBITDA was $6.3 million, with a corresponding margin of 12% of revenue during Q1 2017, as compared to adjusted EBITDA of $4.3 million or 14% of revenue during the same time last year. The increase in adjusted EBITDA dollars reflects growth of our top line, offset by our increasing investments in product, people, global expansion, public company expenses compared with a year ago, and bad debt expense. Net cash used in operating activities was $23 million during Q1, as expected, given the seasonality of our business. Because of this seasonality, it's best to look at our trailing 12 months of operating cash flow and free cash flow, of which we generated $36 million and $23 million respectively. Our DSOs at the end of Q1 were 82 days, an increase of six days from the same period a year ago.
DPOs for Q1 were 60 days, an increase of nine days from the same period a year ago. As you may have seen in our recent press release, we entered into an amended credit facility that enables us to borrow up to $200 million on our revolver, which is up from $125 million. While cash flow from operations will fluctuate quarter-to-quarter due to seasonality and timing, our net cash position of $81 million and our new revolver is more than sufficient to manage working capital for the foreseeable future. For Q2, we are expecting revenue of $67 million and adjusted EBITDA of $14.5 million. Updating full year 2017 expectations, we now expect revenue to be at least $291 million and adjusted EBITDA to be at least $78 million or 27% of revenue.
Total other expense net is expected to be between $2 million and $4 million, and our income tax rate is expected to be in the mid-forties. With that, I will hand it back to Jeff for any final comments and of course, Q&A. Jeff?
Thanks, Paul. The recent favorable trends, along with the inevitability of programmatic, are driving the winds on our platform. During the quarter, we hit records for this time of year in the U.S., Singapore, Japan, and London. The growth we are seeing in Hong Kong, Germany, and Australia is something we've never seen before. Our land and expand strategy is working. AdExchanger recently ran an article about the top 10 brands in programmatic. We power seven out of the 10 of these biggest brands, which is incredible. The most promising thing about our business is what we can do to expand the brands and agencies that we already touch. Getting a little spend is exciting, but growing it to a level that transforms their businesses is more than exciting. It's world-changing. We have already accomplished a lot so far this year.
Our efforts to go arm in arm with the agencies are working. We have seen strong growth and deeper engagement with agencies and brands, and one of our strongest strategic assets is the independence and objectivity that comes with not owning media, and it significantly differentiates us from the competition. This could not be more evident than what occurred with the brand safety issue in Q1, and this is opening doors for us around the world. This is a marathon and not a sprint, and we continue to make big investments in our key growth areas and are focused on getting to the next level, accelerating programmatic adoption and making it easier for agencies and advertisers to spend programmatically. We are still early on in the programmatic adoption, and I see nothing but blue skies ahead for both the industry and The Trade Desk.
The opportunities in programmatic are enormous, and we believe we are positioned better than anyone else. With that, we look forward to your questions. Operator, let's begin.
Okay, thank you. The floor is now open for questions. If you do have a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad at this time. Questions will be taken in the order they are received. If at any time your question has been answered, you can remove yourself from the queue by pressing one. Again, ladies and gentlemen, if you do have a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad at this time, and please hold while we poll for questions. Our first question comes from Shyam Patil. Please state your question.
Thank you. Hey, guys. Congrats on the phenomenal quarter and outlook. I have a couple of questions. First, it looks like you beat the top line by about $10 million, but you raised the annual revenue by over $20 million. Can you just talk about that and where you're seeing incremental strength? Then I have a follow-up.
You bet. First, thank you on offering congratulations, and thanks for the question. Let me just talk a little bit about the way that we have visibility into our business. The thing to keep in mind, just like all SaaS companies, we have a core group of customers that come back again and again and again. That 95% client retention is the core portion of our business where almost 90% of our revenue comes from, and that's the part of our business that's super easy to predict. Then there's that new stuff, and Q1 is where a lot of new stuff comes from because media or particularly advertising is a really seasonal business. At the beginning of the year, everybody are making decisions about the rest of the year.
This just happened to be a year where we've won a lot of new business. We won that business through the agencies for the most part, even though it was mostly new brands inside of the agencies. The thing that I especially just want to highlight on that fact is that you may say, well, okay, well, there's this portion of your business that is harder to predict. In a quarter like this, where you beat by so much, is it equally likely that there will be a quarter where you miss by that much? The answer is no, because the upside surprises come from those new wins. That core business is solid and steady. This just happened to be a case where we batted a 1,000 and a lot of things went right.
The visibility in our business is as good as it's ever been, and we're super excited about what the foundation that those new clients and new brands represent.
Great. Second question, couple of parts to it. Just on the recent P&G win in North America, and it looks like some countries internationally as well. I know you might be limited in what you can specifically say about P&G, but just generally speaking, can you help us think about just how a large customer like that is typically onboarded, the timing that you roll out and how long it typically takes for revenue to reach a full run rate? Second part of that, it seems like in the industry, we're seeing an ongoing shakeout of competitors, like Turn and then others, like MediaMath, asking to be seeing large customer losses. Can you just talk about competitively for new deals, how the conversations have changed versus say, a year ago?
You bet. Let me take the first part of your question. There isn't a lot that I can say about P&G, but I can say a couple things. Number one, we did win some P&G business. We did strike a global deal with them, which we worked on with them as well as with their agencies, particularly their lead agency here in the U.S. I can also say that their contract with AudienceScience ends on June 30th. I want to highlight that we won the business by working with the agency. This does not represent a new trend in terms of us going direct and cutting out the agency. In fact, much the opposite. We worked very closely with their agencies to strike this deal.
not talking about P&G and just talking about the concept of ramping up big clients, I will say the bigger they are, the slower they are to ramp. It just takes them time to move. They are very big, well-oiled machines that just take a long time to get things in place. I expect this to pay dividends in the future, way more so than it does in the short term. I'll also say that big companies, because of their very nature of being slow to ramp up, they get more sticky over time. What's going to happen in 2017 is we're going to spend a lot of time integrating, and it's our hope that that makes it more and more likely that we work together in the future.
The way that we look at this inside of The Trade Desk right now is we have a lot to prove and a lot to win, and we're just starting. We're excited about the start. The second part to your second question as it relates to competitors. I do think there is definitely some consolidation happening, and there's a lot of pain right now in ad tech, where players that have older business models or are smaller are just struggling to compete. More and more of those dollars are going to those of us that are big and growing, and success creates virtuous cycles. I do think that the competitive set is getting smaller. That is a good thing for the industry as a whole.
It does feel like there are way fewer companies competing in specific pitches, but as you would expect, those that are left are better competitors. It's a better marketplace where people are adding more value than they're extracting. This is great news for programmatic. This is great news for our industry. It's great news for us as a company. For any of those companies that are adding more value than they're extracting, this is great news. It does feel like a lot of people that were in the consideration set even a year ago aren't anymore.
Thanks, John. Next question, Mike.
Our next question comes from Mark Kelley. Please state your question.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. First one is on Snapchat. They talked a lot about the strength they're seeing in programmatic last night. I think they noted 20% of impressions were through their API last quarter. Just curious if Snapchat's a partner and just your general thoughts on that platform. Second, can you just talk a little bit more about the connected TV ecosystem? What kind of inventory you have access to? I know you mentioned Sling TV. But I think there's some unique inventory on something like a Roku home screen, for example. Any color there would be super helpful. Thanks.
You bet. First on Snap. I, like many of you, were listening closely to Snap's first earnings report, and noted that programmatic got a few shouts out in the course of the call. I'm so glad that you've asked the question because it gives me an opportunity to create some distinction. When Snapchat, and the same frankly goes for YouTube and parts of Facebook. When they talk about programmatic, often what they're talking about is buys that are bought through an API. In that API, what buyers have the ability to do is simply assign budgets. You hand them over to Snap or Facebook or YouTube, then they decide what inventory you get, what impressions you get, and they even often determine price. By handing over all that control, it makes it so that there's no one objectively determining which impressions you get.
That decreases the value of programmatic. When we talk about the macro advertising pie, we talk about the $650 billion, and we think that there's $12 billion that is in price-discoverable programmatic. That form, we don't believe is price-discoverable, because you simply hand over the dollars and you get what you get. The theme that I liked about hearing so much about programmatic, or hearing at least references to programmatic on that call, is that I'm hoping that Snapchat is open to price-discoverable programmatic, where we can participate in decisioning. I'm optimistic that we can become a partner of theirs. As it exists today, where there's not an opportunity for us to layer on decisioning and data and participate in price discovery, there's not much for us to do together. We don't do much at this point.
I'm super optimistic that things will change in the future. I believe it's inevitable that all three of those companies will change. I do frankly think it's also the best way for Snapchat to optimize their own revenue. They're an amazing business. They're sitting on some of the most desired video inventory because it's really hard to advertise to millennials. Perhaps that's a good segue to the second part of your question, which is around connected TV. Inside of connected TV, there is definitely a shortage of inventory, particularly on the premium content, because so much of the plays get played inside of Amazon and Netflix, where there aren't any ads today. There are great partnerships that we forge with companies like Roku and CBS All Access and Hulu.
We have very minimal inventory, the way that I would characterize it with those partners is we have gotten a taste. They all have programmatic tests that are happening that they can prove those out. I think it's fair to say that all those tests have gone really well over the last year, as they've gone through their new front and up-front recently, they seemingly all carved out just a little bit more than they have in the past to really continue or expand upon those successful tests that happened, especially last year and the first part of this year. I'm optimistic that way more of that will continue to open up.
I also believe that the subscription models are sort of tapped out or they're capped in the sense that consumers can't afford to keep signing up for more subscriptions where there's not ads. The desire from a marketplace, from the consumers to have more ad-funded options is going way up. Given the desire to advertise in the new VOD world, I think it represents a tremendous opportunity for all of TV, but especially companies like ours.
That's great. Thanks, Jeff.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Brian Fitzgerald. Please state your question.
Hey, guys, maybe a couple questions. Jeff, maybe riffling a bit off your comments around competitive sets, pain in the market. My question is around how you built your engine, your model, maybe versus some other guys who grew into programmatic, maybe from a vertical ad perspective and then just lopped services onto it. One of the ways I think about it is, I do the analogy that you guys are more like a continuous multivariate differential equation versus some other guys who are more like discrete linear algebra functions, just adding lines and lines of code. One scales and gets a more exacting solution, and one doesn't scale and has a broader solution. Can you talk a little bit about it maybe from that lens focal point, your secret sauce versus your competitors?
Yeah. This is one of the hardest things to talk about just because anything that is super defensible and highly technical is really hard to reduce down to something that can be explained in a few minutes. This is at the core of what we do better than our competitors, which is not just that we built a business model that is way more like SaaS in the sense that it's recurring and predictable, but we built technology that led us to that model, not the other way around. We didn't start by saying, "Oh, we want to build a SaaS company. Let's build tech that looks like that." We said, "What is a way that you can consistently and constantly learn from the dollars that you spend?
What we have done is we've built a platform that is always on, that people log onto, they put their own data and insights into it, then using those data and insights, we extrapolate from that and go use all the third-party data in the world that we can get access to legally and ethically so that we can then use that to make better decisions in everything that they do. It actually gets smarter over time. Getting smarter over time makes it more and more defensible, which is part of the reason why we talk about when we ramp up a big customer, it takes time. We have to go prove ourselves.
After we have all those learnings and we've applied the budgets and the data that we have for years and years, we think we have such an advantage over a newcomer that we're going to keep doing that as long as we keep paying attention to it and building the right products and listening to our clients and maintaining our position as a product-driven company. There is nothing that can make this company A fail faster than us ceasing to be a product-driven company that ships product every single week, and that is the core of who we are.
Got it. The only other question I have, maybe a quicker one, is just on the international side of things. As you continue to see growth there, can you define, is it coming from new customers versus existing customers? When you onboard customers, do they ramp similar to what you saw on the onboarding process took in, say, North America? Any color there on the international side of the growth?
You bet. I'm going to let Rob address most of this, but I'll just preface by saying, of course, our international growth was more than double the growth of the United States. Some humongous wins, and there's color that deserves color from both Europe and Asia, and I'll let Rob do that.
For sure. Thanks, Jeff. Real quick, Brian, it is coming from both Europe and Asia. It is across the board. Anywhere outside of the U.S., we're growing more than twice the pace we are in the U.S., even though the U.S. is growing very fast. To your question, where is it coming from? Largely, it looks like our overall business, in that 80+% of it's coming from existing agencies or existing partners. Within those agencies or partners, we're getting more and more of their advertisers. The advertisers that we do work with, they're becoming more and more programmatic in terms of how they spend. In the first quarter, we mentioned we had the best months or best quarters we've ever had in the U.K. and in Germany and in Australia. Singapore just missed their all-time records.
It's coming right after a Q4 spend and growing as fast as any market on a year-over-year basis. We're really seeing it everywhere. It's largely coming from our existing clients spending more or putting more of their agencies or excuse me, more of their advertisers onto our platform.
Got it. Thanks, Rob. Thanks, Jeff.
Got it.
You bet. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Aaron Kessler. Please state your question.
Great. Thanks, guys, and congrats on the quarter. First, maybe just on header bidding. I think the notion is that header bidding would kind of open up amount of inventory open to the DSP. Thoughts there. Maybe a little bit of feedback on the wins that you've had in Q1. Kind of what was the feedback? Was it technology reason for the win? Was the primary decision being made by the agency versus the brands? Thank you.
Great. Yeah. Let me start by just talking about header bidding. As it relates to header bidding, it definitely feels like it's becoming more and more sort of mainstream or more common for publishers to be using header bidding. It's also more and more common for them to add more tags. It feels like the premium publishers, for the most part, have all adopted some form of header bidding. It also feels like for the most part, they have more tags on their pages than they need or than is sustainable. It's putting more pressure on SSPs and exchanges. It feels like from the sell side, there is pressure being put on the publishers to narrow that down. Instead of simultaneously running six, seven, eight, 10 auctions, you instead simply run three or four, and that is much more sustainable. To us, it doesn't matter.
It just ensures that we get the opportunity to look at everything. Then we also get to choose those that provide either better visibility or they take a lower fee, so it enables us to be more competitive. Whatever additional cost is incurred by us looking at more of the impressions, we make that up by making good choices. We are fine with however it shakes out. Header bidding has been one of the best things that ever happened to our business. It feels like header bidding is maturing, which is perhaps why you are hearing a little bit less about it in 2017 than you did in 2016.
As it relates to those wins and whether they are coming from brands or whether it is coming from the agencies themselves, I will say that brands are participating in the process of deciding to buy in tech more than they ever have before. I am delighted at the way that many of the biggest are thinking about it, which is while they want to be more involved, they recognize the value that the agencies are adding, and they want to keep them involved at providing the managed service. They recognize that their skill set is especially good at rolling out products into 150-plus markets, that is where global agencies do really well. They also recognize that they have to have some amount of insight and some amount of a data relationship with the technology. That is becoming more common as well.
I love it when things like the P&G partnership happen, which is we work closely with the agency and the brand to establish a partnership going forward.
Great. Just maybe a question for Paul. I noticed the technology expenses are up about $5 million sequentially. Was there anything one-time within that? Should we think of that as a good baseline going forward for the rest of the year?
In the tech and dev?
Correct.
Yeah, no, you should look at that as a baseline going forward. We're investing really aggressively in technology right now.
Got it. Thank you.
Yep.
Our next question comes from Kip Paulson. Please state your question.
Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Just a couple for me. In the year-ago second quarter 2016, both gross spend and revenue accelerated from the first quarter of 2016. Could you remind us what drove that? Do you view this as a tougher comp for the current quarter? Is there anything else driving the deceleration in revenue growth implied by your second quarter guidance? I think it's down to 42% growth versus 76% in the first quarter. Thanks.
Yeah. I'll sort of answer in reverse order. There's nothing inherently flawed in the business or in our future. There's no speed bump in front of us that's making us say, "Oh, there's got to be deceleration." There is a little bit of difference in the comps. In Q1 last year, you just remember that at the beginning of the year, the global markets, meaning the financial markets, took a pretty substantial trip downward. That caused everybody in advertising, and when I say everybody, I mean especially big companies, which is where we focus and that's the core of the clients that we service, that caused them to pause. I think it's fair to say that our Q1 was weaker last year, and our Q2 accelerated as a result of just having a weaker Q1.
When you're comparing year-over-year, you just have to remember it, like the comparison to last year is just a little bit different than this year. We, of course, are modeling off that core that we talked about, and we're as bullish as we've ever been on our business. There's no other reason than just a little bit of differences in the denominators.
Okay, great. Just one other one, if I could. I might have missed it, but is there any update to your gross spend guidance for the year?
No. We provide gross spend on an annual basis, and we haven't given that on a quarterly basis and don't plan to.
All right, great. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Kerry Rice. Please state your question.
Thanks a lot. Two questions, primarily. The first one is, in my understanding on many times how brands spend, particularly if they're new brands, maybe they come in and they run some test budgets, and then they build their spending on the platform from there. Is that a fair way to think about this? As these new wins that came on Q1, maybe their Q1 spend was still relatively small compared to their overall budget, and so maybe through the year, we'll see that grow, and probably hit a pretty high peak in Q4. Is that fair to think about it that way, Jeff? The second question is, you talked a little bit about data-driven decisioning. Can you talk a little bit about the data tools that you can offer your advertising clients to help them spend more on your platform?
Maybe one quick one for Paul. Thanks.
You bet. The way that brands ramp up, I'll answer briefly and then I'll ask Rob to just add some color to it. They go both ways where sometimes what they do is they know that they're committed to programmatic. They've spent on another platform, and for whatever reason, they decide to move it over, and they can move it over all at once. There are other cases, which is frankly more common, which is they run a test, and they sort of take the crawl, walk, run approach. I would say that represents the majority of the time that they're testing and then they ramp up. I'm not sure what else you would add to that, Rob.
Yeah, that's exactly right. A perfect example, a large global agency we started working with out of the Midwest. We won it in Q3 last year. They started working with us, one advertiser, just a portion of that advertiser's programmatic spend. We crushed their goals. We gave them great insights, they gave us more of that advertiser's budget throughout Q3 and Q4. They added another advertiser as we headed into Q4, the same cycle, Kerry, as you described, where they give us a little bit, they see how we do. They continue to earn trust. They give us more. We entered 2017 with that large agency with two advertisers, and three or four weeks into the quarter, they called us and said, "Hey guys, we have 12 brand-new advertisers that we're going to put on your platform." Now, that wasn't 100% of their spend.
It was the same cycle. 12 new advertisers, a little bit of their spend, then we got to go prove it, as Jeff has mentioned a couple of times. That is the sort of the way it generally works, and we were happily surprised to the upside to get 12 new advertisers. Frankly, coming into the year, we thought that would be 4 to 6. Getting 12 right off the bat was a great start, and that has been happening a lot.
Kerry, just to answer the second part of your question about, tell us about the data-driven tools that we provide. Let me just talk a little bit about the evolution and the way we have thought about it historically and where we sort of sit today. We started by saying we want to be the most transparent and give the most amount of power and control to the users of our platform. I would argue that what we have done for most of the last 10 years that we have been in business is we have overwhelmed them with data. While other, especially the big digital outlets where you go buy most of digital, they get really crappy reports. Impressions, clicks, conversions. That's it.
We said we are going to go so far beyond that, we are going to get so much granularity, so much insight, and we are also going to make it possible for them to use as much third-party data as they want, and we will let them slice and dice any way they want. We still have all those tools, but what we have gotten way better at is what's effectively AI, which is Audience Predictor that enables them to just turn it on, and immediately we go shopping for other data and other insights that we can target against with price in mind. In other words, we go shopping for them for value. This is where the objectivity matters. We talk a lot about objectivity in media.
It matters just as much in data. For instance, I always use this example, Democrats are way more likely to drink grapefruit juice than Republicans. I have no idea why, but there is a difference. No one would ever think to type in, "I, Democratic candidate X, want to target grapefruit juice drinkers," but it can be a data segment that is worth buying because there is correlation there. Using AI, that can be surfaced, used, transacted on while doing the very best thing for the client at the very best price, without the need for complexity that I think we have often done in the past. It's the tools that we create are they get to upload data and insights, which we protect at all costs because we are aligned with them by being buy-side only and do not own any media.
Then we extrapolate on that to go use third-party data around the world. Those tools are at the core of our product offering. By doing that and then looking for the needles in the haystack of those millions of ads available every second, it feels like our objectivity plus our technology make it so that we're just going to keep winning.
Great. Then one for Paul on the tax rate. Paul, I think you mentioned the mid 40% for the year. That seems lower than what maybe we had previously had in our models. Is there something that's changed there, and that's just kind of the outlook going forward?
Yeah. The best that I could tell you is model in the low to mid 40s, then each quarter, there's going to be some noise around benefits from stock options and then variances from international taxes. Of course, we'll explain those as they happen. Our core rate is about 40%, so that's where you should start.
Thank you.
Sure thing.
Our next question comes from Dylan Haber. Please state your question.
Hey, guys. Congrats on another strong quarter. Two questions, first for Paul. Which international markets are currently your largest contributors to overall spend? Do you still expect international to be roughly 15% of revenue by year-end? For Jeff, what is your perspective on how independent DSPs can grow in conjunction with or will be impacted by the walled gardens such as Facebook, Google, et cetera, long term, especially in relation to inventory access? Thank you.
Yeah. As far as international markets are concerned, the U.K. is our largest international market, but Singapore is a very close second. Those are followed by Germany, and then Australia. During the first quarter, gross spend outside the U.S. was over 10%. It was a little bit over 11. Yes, because it is growing faster, we still are marching toward that 15% number we laid out last time.
Cool. In response to your question about walled gardens. Long term, I believe it's in the best interest of the walled gardens to open up to the scaled and brand safe independent DSPs. I can speak from having recent conversations with people at YouTube that's something they also think about. Perhaps, at some point in the not too distant future, things will open up. While I don't think that's part of their immediate plans because they don't have to, and they do use that as a way to get advertisers to come to them in the short term, I think long term and in the next few years, you'll see most of the walled gardens turn to opening things up. I believe it's the best way to monetize YouTube. It's the best way to monetize Snapchat.
It's the best way to monetize anything that has scale because there will always be incremental demand with data insights that can't possibly be stored inside of those walled gardens. It makes it impossible for them to optimally monetize their own content without enabling other people to buy on top of it. If you take the biggest brands in the world and say, "You have to choose, either you use Facebook or you use YouTube's data or you use your own," they will always choose their own. Then if they can use tech that helps them make better decisions, especially given that we add more value than we charge them, it makes it a no-brainer for both them and for the publisher to monetize that way.
Some people have said, "Hey, I think long term you have trouble getting access to walled garden inventory." I think exactly the opposite. In the short term, I think I have the problem, and in the long term, I think I don't.
Great. Thank you very much.
Okay. There appear to be no further questions at this time. This will conclude today's call. We thank you all for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a great day.
Thanks, everyone.
Thank you.
Got it.