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?
> 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.
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.
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.