Weekly Update & The Trade Desk Earnings Review

For example, in Q2, EMEA had continued solid growth and share gains. Our offices in both Madrid and Paris achieved record spend in Q2. We added more major advertisers and more accounts grew their spend with us. During the quarter, we added a large regional hotel chain and a smart home energy company, to name a few.

We are seeing similar trends in APAC, where our offices in Hong Kong, Jakarta, and Sydney all achieved record spend. We're also seeing exciting growth in many of Asia's fastest-growing emerging markets. eMarketer defines Southeast Asia as Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. They predict digital mobile growth there to be about 35% in 2019. In several countries, we are growing exponentially faster than that. For example, in Vietnam, we grew 125% year-over-year.

In these smaller, but fast-growing markets, data-driven advertising is the perfect fit. The cost of sales and distribution is way lower and market-moving shifts require adoption from fewer people. I continue to predict that these emerging markets will be nearly 100% data-driven before the US.

To continue demand in these emerging markets, you have to grow supply. That's why I'm excited about the premium inventory partnerships we have developed in Asia. For example, in Thailand, we access the country's top TV digital platforms, Channel 7 and Channel 3. We also access TrueID TV, the second-largest broadcaster in Thailand. In Vietnam, we partner with the largest free TV station, VTV.

Globally, our commitment to invest and innovate in the channels that matter most to advertisers is a major driver of growth for The Trade Desk. In Q2, 47% percent of spend on our platform was in mobile. That's a new record. Mobile video spend growth was about 50%. Mobile in-app spend growth was about 63%. Data spend again was up 80%, and cross-device spend was up over 250% for the third quarter in a row.

We recently announced that Amazon Publisher Services is working with The Trade Desk. This is a breakthrough deal in Connected TV for several reasons. As always, let's start big picture and then zoom in on what this means directly for our business and our advertisers.

This announcement is a victory for the open Internet. So, many decisions by big tech players have created walls around their content and reduced transparency for advertisers. In this deal, Amazon has taken a different path. By making this announcement, they are staking four claims. One, they are joining the open Internet. Two, aside from advertising on Amazon.com, they are centering their efforts on the sell-side. Three, they are going to reduce the cost of sell-side fees significantly while being completely transparent. And four, they are partnering with the demand side instead of the go-it-alone strategies that the walled gardens often deploy.

Let me tell you why I believe these points are significant. Advertisers on our platform now have access to 100% of Amazon's third-party content providers, think Discovery, NBC, and ESPN apps on your Amazon Firestick. This is quality inventory on premium content.

Finally, as I have stated many times before, we believe our business model is exceptional. We have the luxury to not have to choose between growth and profitability. We are doing both and we have pretty much done so since the beginning. In Q2, our financial performance, and particularly our $58 million of adjusted EBITDA was significantly better than we had estimated. So, I want to give a little context.

We've increased our operating spend by more than $41 million year-over-year in Q2. This means our investment was up 50% over the previous year. Even at that rate, we couldn't invest fast enough. Of course, part of that is our investment discipline.

We invest quickly but carefully, always focused on the needs of our customers worldwide. We are also careful to ensure that we maintain our culture, which we believe is key to our success. In Q2, some of the hiring and investments we did not complete are already happening in Q3.

Fantastic. So as you know, Disney has been so aggressive in the last 18 months and it is actually so exciting to watch. A few years ago I was really touting between the forward thinking of AT&T and I feel just so excited by what Disney is doing as a partner and as a consumer as well. I think the new bundle they have coming out with Disney Plus and ESPN Plus and Hulu Plus for ads is really great. And I think it's going to be successful. But in about that same time about 18 months ago, they approached us and we just started working together. We learned something in those discussions, which is that more than 50% of the views that they're getting on their content is coming from connected devices. And they wanted to figure out a better way to monetize that.

As it relates to China, so as you pointed out, it is very early stage for us. I wouldn't characterize anything that we've experienced today as limiting or anything like that. We started a partnership with Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. We're growing that. We are seeing growth every single month and we're going slow and being very deliberate. We, of course, are going to continue to roll out in a bigger and bigger way and there is more to come before the end of the year on just some of our plans there. But things in China are going well and we're playing the long game. So, there is nothing that's happened in China that I view as a setback.