Oracle Is Shutting Down Its Ad Business

Software giant Oracle shared that it is shutting down its ads business during its earnings call last night for the quarter ending March 31, as revenue declined to $300 million in the 2024 fiscal year.

“In Q4, we decided to exit the advertising business, which had declined to about $300 million in revenue in fiscal year ’24,” CEO Safra Catz told analysts, according to an earnings transcript.

In August 2022, Business Insider reported that Oracle 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.

Oracle spent billions on entering the advertising business, acquiring nearly a dozen ad technology companies for over a decade. Notable acquisitions include data firms DataLogix, bought in 2014 for $1.2 billion, and brand safety platform Moat, purchased in 2017 for a reported $850 million.

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 could share.

The General Data Protection Regulation further restricted Oracle’s business. The company stopped offering third-party data targeting services across Europe in 2020, ADWEEK reported.

This affected many of its data products in the region and led the company to shut down a publisher audience tool that relied on third-party data, NowThis, in Europe in 2019. Oracle killed NowThis entirely last year, AdExchanger reported. The company is the subject of class action lawsuits over user privacy.