Oracle is shutting down its ad business
adweek.com
adweek.com
Did Oracle correctly predict that the business was contracting significantly and manage decline with layoffs? Or did they overcompensate for slow growth and kill a $2 billion business?
but then nobody cared for real about any of that and there was never the market they hoped.
taking this out of my butt. but is very likely from the little bits i had to interact on ad ecosystem from them (mostly tools to companies in the compliance traffic validations, which did take on in the late 2000s)
Nobody cares what nonsense the EU tries to claim about EU citizens living outside the EU. GDPR doesn't matter if you're operating outside of the region.
They actually exited Europe because they didn't want to comply with those laws. Combined with all the lawsuits they're apparently facing, I think it's the opposite.
> but then nobody cared for real about any of that and there was never the market they hoped.
Well, the industry moved to exclusively first-party data in response to these laws, so yea, no one really cared for their data anymore.
Oracle can run a big database of data in the cloud, they clearly had no desire to maintain the data sources and comply with laws when sharing. The engineering effort Google/Facebook put into maintain their privacy compliance is a lot higher than most people probably realize. Oracle lawyers work on the offensive, not defensive.
Apple killing IDFA was punch 2.
Ad dollars shifting massively to GOOG / META / AMZN meant advertisers (and agencies) didn't need to have 3rd party data anymore to power campaigns ... they could use the platform's great data and match their 1st party customer data to it.
Oracle bought great data companies but didn't have any 1st party ad inventory to use the data with, and they got boxed out. If they had acquired TikTok back when Trump wanted them to, it might have saved their data biz.
It would be like Russia demanding the US to sell of Voice of America during the Cold War.
Many US social media sites are banned in China and Russia.
Oracle’s bet on the advertising industry was undermined when Meta, doing business as
Facebook at the time, shut down its data to third parties including Oracle in 2018,
following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. That was a major loss to the kind of
insights Oracle Advertising could share.
> The business generated $300 million in revenue in the 2024 fiscal year, down from a reported $2 billion in 2022
Followed closely by news that they shut down in Europe over European data laws, and they're the focus of class action law suits over their data privacy policies.
They also spent billions buying their way into this business, so its not clear that $2Bn/yr in revenue was ever profitable after accounting for their costs for prior acquisitions.
I think it was @quinnypig who coined it...
For instance, here, the original B2B tech company, still turning over billions upon billions, wouldn't provide the base unit of B2B tech?
Really?
Interrobang of surprise at that?
I don't think so. You'd have to be very young and made 0 effort into ex. checking IBM's business metrics over the course of your lifetime.
[1] my current standard for this is "how long would you feel people were talking about your efforts accurately, if they talked the same way you do?" -- standards are leaky and hard to word.
[2] The Algorithm has multiple tentacles, you end optimizing for your most engaging behavior
Of the products I'm immediately aware of, they have a billing data system, a meter data system, and an enterprise asset management system. They try to sell upper management that all components work together easily, and because IT is not our core business, this is an enticing pitch to the chief level audience.
Also, historically they had a big push for their apps to use their own tech products (DB and middleware), so the tech side of the business benefited from the apps side. Although, I remember when I worked there (6+ years ago), they were trying to move away from that somewhat, and cloud apps teams in particular were being given more freedom to use whatever technology they thought was best for their product rather than forced to adopt Oracle Whatever. Plus, acquired products run on all kinds of different tech stacks, since (at least my personal impression was) the tech stack wasn’t a huge concern in deciding what to acquire
It doesn't. Opower was founded, under that name, in 2007. Oracle acquired it in 2016. Any suggestions the O in its name stands for "Oracle" are a retcon founded on a coincidence
The product is still working since the news broke this week, and my assumption is they are going to try and sell it on as it's still a solid product and performs wells and brings us nice ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
We were meant to meet them in person next week but got cancelled at the last minute.
I've heard all products will run normally, and everyone still has a job. However, they don't know what will happen in the near future. I assume Oracle is trying to flip off all parts of the business; if not, they'll shut them down.