> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
Perhaps the value of TikTok is not just in monetary returns. Cut down a beautiful tree that gives fruit every year for lumber, all you are left is a pile of money.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Oracle cloud has the most generous free tier ever. I've got a 24GB ram VPS on it that I have run a minecraft server on for the last year. Never paid a dollar for it.
Yes, and they’re notorious for rejecting credit cards. They can also shut down your machines at any time if paying users want more capacity. I moved off after they killed my machine and caused me to lose a bunch of data because I couldn’t spin up another (capacity full)
@quinnypig's tone[1] wears on me a bit. I don't mean that in judgement, we all suffer from followers disease[2]. I just don't like the effort of having to parse through the tone of everything to figure out what's actually going on.
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
They bought a ton of adtech companies (primarily data providers) in the 2010ish range. As one of my former colleagues said, "the lawyers at Oracle considered cookies to be on-prem software" which says a lot about Oracle's view of advertising. If you're really successful, you either become a media company, a bank, or a consulting firm. Oracle is firmly #3 while companies like Apple figured out how to become a media company and a bank. Though it's a little early to claim "figure out" I suppose.
Mostly due to acquisitions, they own a huge range of business applications, both generic (such as Peoplesoft and NetSuite) and industry-specific (e.g. Cerner in healthcare). These kinds of apps tend to have high lock-in: once your business is running on one or more of them, migrating to something else can be an expensive megaproject.
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
I think they offer a lot of niche-market products that all sort of work together as a "suite" with the core product of course the db. I work in the utility industry and they are present everywhere.
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.
Consulting fees for said DB and escalating DB licensing costs. They have an atrocious reputation and I'm honestly amazed they invest as little into training sessions/cold call advertising as they do.
We use Oracle's Grapeshot (they acquired them in 2018) which is a solid platform for audience targeting and brand safety for ads.
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)
It is pretty sad to hear - we've had solid results with Oracle's Grapeshot (segment audiences and brand safety for programatic advertising).
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.
It's pretty simple: ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). All our campaigns are performance-based. If one segment provider/SSP does well, it automatically scales spending. Likewise, if the performance drops.
They were just a dumb pipe for most of their segments, but the bluekai branded segments were better than the completely unverified nonsense you might accidentally buy if you weren’t careful. Addthis was always garbage, dlx is good, etc. just a process of vetting vendors which the hotline used to be able to help with.
Big spenders made contracts for reduced pricing, but anyone could use oracle data with a few clicks (most wouldn’t even know the data was going through Oracle). That was a big issue when I was there - execs could not handle not being able to predict revenue and so they wanted every big spender on contract, so they reduced prices for them. Then we stopped providing support for anyone who wasn’t on a named account list.
Because it was lucrative? Oracle have some expertise handling large amounts of data, and also have easier access to large corporations which other players do not necessarily enjoy. It sort of worked, the revenue was in the billions.
Why didn't they start a streaming TV service or open a chain of fast-food restaurants? Those things are lucrative too, and also benefit from competence at handling large volumes of data.
Those ideas might be missing the networking part. I’m not sure if their people know the right people. I’m also not confident their track record would inspire confidence in their ability to execute on that type of service. It doesn’t seem well aligned. Ads on the other hand aren’t so far fetched.
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?