What happened to sociomantic?

[Mathias LANG]

On Sunday, 26 April 2020 at 19:43:23 UTC, bauss wrote:
> I know it's not entirely D related but I believe it partially 
> is as sociomantic had some influence on D.
>
> I can't seem to find any specifics on sociomantic closing other 
> than the general stuff but what are the specifics behind the 
> end of sociomantic?
>
> It's pure curiosity so if it's anything confidential that's 
> understandable.

Sociomantic got bought by Dunnhumby in fall 2014, so quite a 
while ago. Dunnhumby is a data analysis company so Sociomantic 
wasn't competition, and it was a vertical move, not an horizontal 
one. Sociomantic shutdown has more to do with its business model 
than its acquisition.

What happened, essentially, and without going into detail, is 
that the online advertising landscape drastically changed over 
the past decade.

When Sociomantic started in 2009, Facebook was not yet the 
behemoth it is today, and was an open platform on which 
advertiser could bid. That stopped in 2016 
(https://medium.com/jounce-media-blog/fbx-is-dead-long-live-native-rtb-5355ad14f78a) which was a huge blow for Sociomantic.

There are a few other reason I can think off, but again, I'm not 
going to go too much into details. The final blow, however, came 
from Google: by using their competitive advantage, they plan to 
essentially killed third party advertisers by removing the 
ability to do cross-site tracking 
(https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/14/21064698/google-third-party-cookies-chrome-two-years-privacy-safari-firefox).

Whether or not that's a good thing is up for debate, but the 
result is that, the business that Sociomantic was in is just 
dead. Sociomantic is not the only one affected, CRITEO stocks 
dropped by 33% in the two days after the announcement from Google 
(https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/why-criteo-stock-dropped-today-2020-01-14).