Oracle has announced the shutdown of its advertising business, which had dwindled to about $300 million in revenue in fiscal year 2024, down from a reported $2 billion in 2022. The decision was announced by CEO Safra Catz during Oracle’s fiscal 2024 Q4 earnings call.
The shutdown marks the end of more than a decade of ad-oriented acquisitions by Oracle, including firms like Vitrue, Eloqua, BlueKai, DataLogix, and Moat. However, the advent of stronger privacy protection measures and regulations like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation affected the profitability of the data-driven advertising business.
Despite the shutdown of the advertising business, Oracle recorded $53 billion in sales in the past 12 months, up six percent year on year, and a profit of $10 billion, up 24 percent. The company’s stock has soared in the past few days, buoyed by announcements of deals with Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and OpenAI.
The closure of Oracle Advertising is expected to lead to layoffs, with the director of data science engineering at Oracle Advertising indicating on LinkedIn that his team of data science experts is looking for new employment opportunities.
Read more: www.theregister.com