Software giant Oracle announced last night in its quarterly earnings report for the quarter ending March 31 that it will discontinue its advertising business after revenue for fiscal 2024 fell to $300 million.
“In the fourth quarter, we made the decision to exit our advertising business, which had declined to approximately $300 million in revenue in fiscal year '24,” CEO Safra Catz told analysts, according to the earnings call.
In August 2022, Business Insider reported that Oracle's revenue had hit $2 billion. At the time, revenue was only growing 2% annually, and many employees were being laid off as part of a 2022 restructuring, Business Insider reported.
Oracle has spent billions to get into the advertising business, acquiring nearly a dozen ad tech companies over the past decade, with notable purchases including data company DataLogix, which it bought for $1.2 billion in 2014, and brand safety platform Moat, which it bought for a reported $850 million in 2017.
Oracle's bet on the advertising industry was marred in 2018 when Meta, then doing business as Facebook, stopped providing data to third parties, including Oracle, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a major loss of insight that Oracle could have shared.
The General Data Protection Regulation further restricted Oracle's operations: ADWEEK reported that the company stopped offering third-party data targeting services across Europe in 2020.
This affected many of the company's data products in the region, and the company shut down NowThis, a publisher audience tool that relied on third-party data, in Europe in 2019. AdExchanger reported that Oracle discontinued NowThis entirely last year, as the company is the target of a class action lawsuit over user privacy.
