Reddit's AI Data Licensing Against The Trade Desk's Reset
Reddit turned highly profitable in 2025 and grew its AI data licensing arm. The Trade Desk trades at a fraction of its rival's share price. Here's how the 2026 media matchup stacks up.
Reddit (RDDT), which turned highly profitable in 2025 while expanding its high-margin AI data licensing business, closed at 149.84 on Sept. 25, 2026, down 1.89% on the day, while The Trade Desk (TTD) closed at 12.60, down 0.24%.
Two names dominate the argument over where advertising money goes next, and they have almost nothing in common anymore. Reddit (RDDT) is a first-party content platform that has found a second revenue stream selling its conversation archive to artificial intelligence developers. The Trade Desk (TTD) is the independent buy-side plumbing of programmatic advertising, a business built on other people's inventory. Going into 2026, the market is pricing them very differently.
On the last session before this was written — the close on Friday, Sept. 25, 2026 — Reddit finished at 149.84, down 1.89% from a prior close of 152.72, having traded between 149.82 and 154.76. It ended the day essentially at the bottom of its range, roughly 3.18% below the session high. The Trade Desk closed at 12.60, down 0.24% from 12.63, inside a 12.49–12.77 band.
Both slipped on a day when the broad market went the other way. The S&P 500 tracker (SPY) closed at $771.35, up 0.54%; the Nasdaq 100 proxy (QQQ) at $744.50, up 0.46%; the Dow 30 fund (DIA) at $517.49, up 0.94%. That puts Reddit about 2.43 percentage points behind the S&P benchmark on the session and The Trade Desk about 0.78 points behind — a single day, not a trend, but a reminder that neither stock is currently riding the index tide.
The licensing line is what separates the two business models
The central fact in Reddit's favor, as laid out by Nasdaq Markets, is that the company turned highly profitable during 2025 while expanding a high-margin data licensing business aimed at AI training.
That second clause carries more weight than it looks. Data licensing revenue is close to pure incremental margin: the content already exists, it was created by users at no marginal cost to the platform, and selling access to it does not require a sales force calling on brand managers or a bidding infrastructure running in real time. Every licensing dollar drops toward operating income at a rate that advertising dollars cannot match. For a company that only recently crossed into profitability, a revenue line with that shape changes the trajectory of the whole income statement.
It also changes the strategic question. Reddit is no longer purely dependent on the advertising cycle. When brand budgets tighten, the licensing contracts do not automatically tighten with them, because the buyer is a model developer with a training roadmap rather than a chief marketing officer with a quarterly spend target. That is a genuine diversification most ad-supported media companies do not have.
The Trade Desk sells access to everyone else's audience
The Trade Desk's model is the mirror image. It does not own content and it does not own an audience. It sells the demand-side platform — the software agencies and brands use to buy digital ad impressions programmatically, meaning automatically and in real time across thousands of publishers. Its economics scale with the volume of advertising flowing through the system, and it takes a cut of that flow rather than owning the inventory itself.
That is a high-quality position when ad spend is growing and when the open internet holds share against the walled gardens. It is a more exposed position when either of those conditions weakens, because The Trade Desk has no proprietary asset to sell into an adjacent market the way Reddit has with its conversation corpus. There is no licensing equivalent for a company whose product is a bidding engine.
The share price gap is stark — 149.84 against 12.60 — but share prices alone say nothing about relative value, since they depend entirely on how many shares each company has issued. What the two prices do register is sentiment direction. One stock is in the three figures; the other is in the low teens.
What an investor should actually be underwriting
The honest framing for 2026 is that these are bets on different risks.
- Buying Reddit means underwriting that the AI licensing revenue is durable rather than a one-off land grab — that renewals come at comparable or better rates, that more than a handful of buyers want the data, and that the user base does not revolt over how its posts are monetized.
- Buying The Trade Desk means underwriting a recovery in its competitive position: that the independent open internet retains advertiser budget, and that connected television and retail media keep routing through independent demand-side software rather than through the platforms' own tools.
- Owning both is not a hedge. Both are levered to the same digital advertising cycle; Reddit simply has a second engine bolted on.
60 — but share prices alone say nothing about relative value, since they depend entirely on how many shares each company has issued.
The metrics to track through the next reporting season
For Reddit, the disclosure that matters is how much of revenue the licensing segment now represents and whether management breaks it out at all. A company that discloses the line separately is signaling confidence in its recurrence; one that buries it inside "other revenue" is signaling the opposite. Watch also whether profitability holds as the company spends to grow, because turning profitable and staying profitable while investing are different achievements.
For The Trade Desk, the numbers to watch are spend volume running through the platform and customer retention. A software business that keeps its clients can survive a bad ad year; one that loses them to a competing stack has a structural problem, not a cyclical one.
There is also a governance-adjacent question hanging over Reddit specifically. Licensing user-generated content for AI training sits in an unsettled legal and regulatory area, and the contributors who wrote the posts are not parties to the contracts. That risk does not show up in a quarterly income statement, but it is real and it is the kind of thing that gets priced abruptly rather than gradually.
Where the near-term tape leaves things
Nothing in a single session decides a year. But the Sept. 25 close is a useful snapshot: two media-adjacent names declining while all three major benchmarks advanced, with Reddit's drop the sharper of the two and its close pinned near the day's low. That is the pattern of a stock where holders are taking something off rather than one where buyers are chasing.
Reddit enters 2026 with the better story — profitability achieved, a high-margin second revenue stream established, and a scarce asset that AI developers want. The Trade Desk enters it as the cheaper, more contested case, dependent on the health of an ad ecosystem it facilitates but does not own. Which is the better buy depends on whether an investor wants to pay for a proven engine or be paid to wait for a repair.
Frequently asked questions
What changed for Reddit in 2025?
Reddit turned highly profitable during 2025 and, at the same time, expanded its data licensing business, which sells access to its archive of user conversations to developers training artificial intelligence models. That licensing revenue carries high margins because the underlying content already exists and requires little incremental cost to deliver.
How did the two stocks close most recently?
As of the last trade on Friday, Sept. 25, 2026 at 20:00 GMT, Reddit closed at 149.84, down 1.89% from a prior close of 152.72, with a day range of 149.82 to 154.76. The Trade Desk closed at 12.60, down 0.24% from 12.63, ranging between 12.49 and 12.77.
Why is data licensing considered high-margin revenue?
The content being licensed was created by users at no direct cost to the platform and already sits on Reddit's servers. Selling access to it does not require manufacturing, inventory, or a large incremental sales operation, so a much larger share of each licensing dollar falls through to operating profit than a typical advertising dollar does.
What does The Trade Desk actually sell?
The Trade Desk operates a demand-side platform: software that advertising agencies and brands use to buy digital ad impressions automatically and in real time across many publishers. It does not own content or an audience. Its revenue scales with the volume of advertising spend routed through its system rather than with any proprietary media asset.
Does the share price difference mean The Trade Desk is cheaper?
Not on its own. A share price reflects how a company's total value is divided across its outstanding shares, so 149.84 versus 12.60 says nothing about relative valuation without knowing share counts and earnings. The gap does, however, reflect very different market sentiment toward the two businesses heading into 2026.
What are the main risks to Reddit's licensing story?
Three stand out: whether contracts renew at comparable rates rather than proving to be one-time deals, whether demand extends beyond a small group of AI developers, and whether the legal and regulatory treatment of licensing user-generated content shifts. Contributors who wrote the posts are not parties to those contracts, which leaves an unsettled exposure.
