Oracle is shutting down its advertising business

Oracle is shutting down its advertising business

In fiscal year 2024, the business earned $300 million, significantly less than the $2 billion earned in 2022.

Fiscal year — is the period used by companies for accounting purposes. In the United States, it begins on October 1 and ends on September 30 of the following year.

Software giant Oracle announced the closure of its advertising business following the last quarter. The reason was the drop in revenues to $300 million in the 2024 fiscal year.

In August 2022, Oracle's advertising business generated $2 billion. Despite stable ad revenues, there was a reorganization in 2022 that resulted in many employees being laid off.

Oracle invested billions in its advertising business, acquiring nearly a dozen adtech companies over the past decade. The list of acquisitions includes:

  • BlueKai (2014) — a cloud platform for big data management.
  • Datalogix (2014, $1.2 billion) — a platform for enriching user profiles with offline purchase data to improve ad targeting.
  • Crosswise (2016) — solutions for identifying users across different devices.
  • Moat (2017, $850 million) — an analytics and verification platform that helps advertisers and publishers understand how users interact with ads.
  • Grapeshot (2018) — contextual targeting technology.
  • Infinity (2020) — a platform for automating advertising with user data.

Oracle's advertising business suffered due to Meta's decision to stop selling data outside its ecosystem after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This was a significant blow to the entire American adtech sector that works with user data.

The scandal broke out in 2018 when it was revealed that consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had illegally obtained personal data from millions of Facebook users without their consent. This data was used to create psychological profiles of voters and target political ads, including during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. The scandal caused widespread outrage and led to government investigations, as well as significant changes in Facebook's privacy policies and data management practices.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, 2018) significantly limited the activities of Oracle Advertising. In 2020, the company stopped providing third-party data targeting services in Europe. This led to changes in many of its products and resulted in the closure of some of them.

The company does not plan to close its divisions but plans to sell and exit the market.