[HN Gopher] Oracle is shutting down its ad business
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Oracle is shutting down its ad business
Author : marban
Score : 75 points
Date : 2024-06-14 17:39 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.adweek.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.adweek.com)
| oneplane wrote:
| Imagine what would happen if Oracle were to shut down its legal
| business.
| JacobHenner wrote:
| Oracle had an ad business?
| tanelpoder wrote:
| Reminds me of the IBM Cloud slogan: "We have a cloud?!"
|
| I think it was @quinnypig who coined it...
| refulgentis wrote:
| @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
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I figured the IBM slogan would be something like "We have a
| product people actually want to buy?"
| Gigachad wrote:
| 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.
| mtillman wrote:
| 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.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| How Oracle is able to survive these days? I guess the moat of
| Oracle DB?
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| 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.
| jl6 wrote:
| They sell to execs, not to developers, and they have a lot
| of certifications and assurances that make them "low risk"
| to that audience.
| skissane wrote:
| 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
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Even my power bill is generated by a platform called
| OPower. The O stands for Oracle as far as I can tell
| skissane wrote:
| > The O stands for Oracle as far as I can tell
|
| 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
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Isn't it core of ad tech, that average public doesn't know who
| got their data?
| tcmart14 wrote:
| Not gonna lie, I honestly have the same reaction.
| Matsta wrote:
| 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)
| schnable wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Who ate their lunch?
| throwaway-blaze wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why did Oracle not acquire TikTok (US)? It seemed like a
| good move for them.
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| 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.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| It had one? lol
| Matsta wrote:
| 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.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Really, I've heard their audience segments were garbage
| Matsta wrote:
| Fair enough. We run about 10 different providers and
| automatically scale spend on who works best. Grapeshot is
| usually up in the top 5 for us.
| soared wrote:
| 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.
| dotcoma wrote:
| Why did Oracle set up an ad business in the first place ??
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| Gormo wrote:
| 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.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| 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.
| riiii wrote:
| I would never have advertised a single iota with oracle. The fear
| of having my pants audited off would have caused premature death.
| soared wrote:
| They were just a pipe, you had to spend dollars through a
| different vendor and used oracle stuff as an add on.
| yegle wrote:
| I guess we can remove a few hostnames from adguard/pihole
| blocklist now?
| waynesonfire wrote:
| Same thing that happened to AT&T.
| chevman wrote:
| Anyone know if Eloqua is included in this spin down?
|
| https://www.oracle.com/cx/marketing/automation/
| soared wrote:
| From what I've read they haven't discussed how the spin down
| will affect any of their products.
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(page generated 2024-06-14 23:01 UTC)