• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 13, 2024

Software technology giant Oracle announced during its quarterly earnings call earlier this week that it has decided to shutter its advertising business.

During the call, Oracle CEO Safra Catz said the decision was made during the past three months.

Revenue from its ad business had fallen to around $300 million for its most recent financial year. Catz did not provide additional details with regard to the decision.

Catz said on the call that it is no longer necessary to break out the numbers.

“Throughout fiscal year 2025, I expect continued strong cloud demand to push Oracle sales and RPO even higher and result in double-digit revenue growth this fiscal year,” Catz said. “I also expect that each successive quarter should grow faster than the previous quarter as OCI capacity increases to meet demand.”

Oracle had built its ad business on the foundation of the acquisitions of many established companies including BlueKai and Moat. 

Oracle acquired BlueKai on February 24, 2014 for an estimated $350 to $400 million. Its Audience Data Marketplace was combined with other Oracle data services that built Oracle Data Cloud.

It acquired Moat, a digital measurement cloud company, for about $850 million in 2017. It used data and analytics to enhance media for marketers and publishers.

Oracle also bought Datalogix, which specialized in linking offline purchase signals to digital platforms for targeting and measurement.

It appears that the company will focus on cloud, subscription services, and artificial intelligence. Lawrence Ellison, chairman and CTO, said Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, xAI, OpenAI, and Cohere are some of the companies choosing to use Oracle Cloud Services and Oracle data centers.

Cloud and on-premises licenses business contributed $1.84 billion in revenue -- down 15%. However, its Cloud infrastructure revenue came at $2 billion -- up 42% -- a deceleration from the 49% growth rate in the previous quarter.