How did Unity come to ingest bad data causing an est. $110m rev loss?
Can anyone shed light on what happened here? What type of bad data would cause such a massive loss in ads revenue? From The Motley Fool: "Operate Solutions generated roughly 57% of Unity's first quarter fiscal 2022 revenue. It's also the segment that encountered two major technical problems in Q1. Unity made changes to how its platform targets ads to consumers, then discovered issues with its targeting accuracy. This problem combined with a second issue: Unity's ad targeting technology relies on data to power its algorithms, but in Q1, the platform ingested bad data from one large client, hurting the reliability of its algorithms predictions. Unity management estimates the problems will cost the company about $110 million (about 8%) of its full-year revenue in 2022, with much of the damage expected to come in the second and third quarters. Unity can fix the issues but doing so will likely delay the rollout of some additional revenue-generating products." #unity #tech #ads
Could be literally anything. Maybe they have a third party source of demographics information that changed format and they parsed it wrongly. Maybe they incorrectly classified everyone as in market for a product even after they’d bought it, at great opportunity cost. Maybe they were effectively targeting at random due to a bug. Did they do a tech write up?
I was thinking it too was related to targeting accuracy but don't these platforms have contractual terms preventing the use of clients data to inform the optimisation of another client potentially a competitor? If it's a data management/data contract issue in terms of incorrect schema then that is twice as embarrassing for Unity
Is “unity” game engine ?
Yes, but they also offer Unity Ads allowing game developers to show ads in their games in return for revenue.
They also purchased ironsource which further expands their presence in mobile advertisement
Unity will have a great and surprising earnings this Feb
It is just a lie. Period. Yeah, some incidents drastically impacted the models' performance, but attributing 110M loss to them – it's BS. Just people were thrown under the bus because the leadership has a very superficial understanding and they didn't have any better / more clear explanation for that.
can you cite where this article came from? i'd love to know more as well.
Guessing their ad engine is pulling in irrelevant data. But other than that I won’t read too much into motley guys. Unless it’s an excerpt from earnings call.