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> In August 2022, Business Insider reported that Oracle Advertising made $2 billion in revenue. At the time, revenue was only growing by 2% a year and many empl

> In August 2022, Business Insider reported that Oracle Advertising made $2 billion in revenue. At the time, revenue was only growing by 2% a year and many employees had been laid off as part of a reorganization in 2022, Business Insider reported. 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?

bpodgursky 2y ago
GDPR, death of 3rd party cookies, and mobile app data-sharing crackdowns is a big obstacle for adtech. If they hadn't been investing in server-side integrations, all $2B could easily have been at technical risk.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  knowing Oracle (and sap) they probably didn't had a supplier/demand kinda of ad business. they probably bought all the companies aggregating data in a way that was kosher under gdpr and would corner the compliance market. 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)
  - munk-a 2y ago
    I'm sure there are one or two counterexamples but ad-tech clients were very resistant to GDPR and nearly all violated the requirements. Even to this day a lot of international market advertising companies will adhere to GDPR in region and violate it out of region - the site banners are a separate issue and are usually rolled out by content platforms to all clients for simplicity.
    - bpodgursky 2y ago
      > international market advertising companies will adhere to GDPR in region and violate it out of region 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.
      - munk-a 2y ago
        To clarify - a lot of advertisers have gone to the trouble of writing one stack that's GDPR compliant and an entirely different stack that's not GDPR compliant - if you're outside the EU you're not going to get the one that complies with GDPR. In the past with privacy situations like these we'll usually see one large market (CA, EU, NA) adopt more restrictive rules and the rest of the world sort of get a free ride because it's not worth the cost to build an entirely separate product for the unrestricted markets - with advertising this has not happened... if you're not in the EU you're not getting any of those benefits.
  - vineyardmike 2y ago
    > they probably bought all the companies aggregating data in a way that was kosher under gdpr and would corner the compliance market 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.
virtuosarmo 2y ago
Ouch - did not realize it was $2 billion in revenue in 2022. They said earlier this week the business had declined to $300 million annually.
- morkalork 2y ago
  Who ate their lunch?
  - throwaway-blaze 2y ago
    GDPR/CCPA were punch 1. 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.
    - smcin 2y ago
      Why did Oracle not acquire TikTok (US)? It seemed like a good move for them.
      - criddell 2y ago
        Why would China want to sell it? I think they would rather shut it down than give up control. It would be like Russia demanding the US to sell of Voice of America during the Cold War.
        smcin 2y ago
        Because the US was clearly coercing them to divest it or else be banned (in the Anglosphere). Many US social media sites are banned in China and Russia.
vineyardmike 2y ago
You're missing the lede: > 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.

bpodgursky 2y ago

GDPR, death of 3rd party cookies, and mobile app data-sharing crackdowns is a big obstacle for adtech. If they hadn't been investing in server-side integrations, all $2B could easily have been at technical risk.

1oooqooq 2y ago
knowing Oracle (and sap) they probably didn't had a supplier/demand kinda of ad business. they probably bought all the companies aggregating data in a way that was kosher under gdpr and would corner the compliance market. 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)
- munk-a 2y ago
  I'm sure there are one or two counterexamples but ad-tech clients were very resistant to GDPR and nearly all violated the requirements. Even to this day a lot of international market advertising companies will adhere to GDPR in region and violate it out of region - the site banners are a separate issue and are usually rolled out by content platforms to all clients for simplicity.
  - bpodgursky 2y ago
    > international market advertising companies will adhere to GDPR in region and violate it out of region 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.
    - munk-a 2y ago
      To clarify - a lot of advertisers have gone to the trouble of writing one stack that's GDPR compliant and an entirely different stack that's not GDPR compliant - if you're outside the EU you're not going to get the one that complies with GDPR. In the past with privacy situations like these we'll usually see one large market (CA, EU, NA) adopt more restrictive rules and the rest of the world sort of get a free ride because it's not worth the cost to build an entirely separate product for the unrestricted markets - with advertising this has not happened... if you're not in the EU you're not getting any of those benefits.
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  > they probably bought all the companies aggregating data in a way that was kosher under gdpr and would corner the compliance market 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.

virtuosarmo 2y ago

Ouch - did not realize it was $2 billion in revenue in 2022. They said earlier this week the business had declined to $300 million annually.

morkalork 2y ago
Who ate their lunch?
- throwaway-blaze 2y ago
  GDPR/CCPA were punch 1. 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.
  - smcin 2y ago
    Why did Oracle not acquire TikTok (US)? It seemed like a good move for them.
    - criddell 2y ago
      Why would China want to sell it? I think they would rather shut it down than give up control. It would be like Russia demanding the US to sell of Voice of America during the Cold War.
      - smcin 2y ago
        Because the US was clearly coercing them to divest it or else be banned (in the Anglosphere). Many US social media sites are banned in China and Russia.

vineyardmike 2y ago

You're missing the lede: > 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.