DISQUS

Thanks for writing it up.

You may also want to check out TwitterRemote.
http://bijansabet.com/post/77578021/twitterremote...

The "related posts" link for Lookery is unintentionally misleading. We sold our FB ad network in October.

This is only an indication of the gradual collapse of institutional VC in the Valley. When compensation is all management fee and no carry, this sort of thing is inevitable.

it is cool, but also a borderline goatsee.

Nick, the expression vs. sharing theme is a great one. If you pursue it in the context of comparing/contrasting FB and MySpace, people in the biz would eat it up.

RogerE also puts it nicely
http://www.informationarbitrage.com/2008/09/why...

I was asked to clarify point 4. I had specifically made it MBA jargon as the info request was for a Tuck alum speech.

"Trying to fix the customer will cost you at least half your company in VC. Focus on making your offer look like what the customer already buys."

All true, but that's why Google is able to build monopoly market share where Y! wasn't. Search and search advertising are not only both inherently algorithmic, but they are also powered by algorithms so parallel in nature as to be effectively identical. I believe Feed and Feed Advertising placement algorithms to be more analogous to search than display when seen from this perspective.

Relatedly,
(1) Lookery is seeing more and more display ads selected by Keyword Retargeting,
(2) Analytics that use keyword behavior to measure the effectiveness of brand/display advertising are emergent ("Porkbellies, Wenda, porkbellies.").

The increasing marginal returns of search advertising are now doing more than taking market share from display advertising -- they are en route to becoming display advertising's operating principle.

The Facebook Feed is FB's search results page. FB'll open it up as much as Google has their SERPs, ie not transparently. There will be third-party content (solely via Facebook Connect), third-party ads as there are already, but no third-party targeting. FB will move into the third-party feed operations and ad network biz, and everyone else will maneuver to use the best pieces and parts (including Lookery I hope) to keep up as best they can.

From a Social Feed perspective (which may not the the correct perspective for these companies), Twitter, FF, O.in, et al, are not the Gorilla -- FB is.

We have no feed inventory ourselves. That will be Gnip as EricM notes, as well as Friendfeed, Facebook themselves as they offer third-party feeds, and possibly HP at plum.com. What Lookery has is the privacy-friendly ability to target the inventory once it exists.

We don't think that anyone but the owners of the authentication mechanisms will be able to operate social advertising in the "leveraging of social graphs" sense -- and then only by combining inventory very flexibly across all parts of their own real estate. "Integrated brand campaigns" as successfully and scalably sold by Imeem and Dogster are the best example.

Social ads in feeds will not stand alone. Standalone ads in feeds will need to be targeted in other ways.

Hi Fred,
I can't sell you stock, but Lookery's got a location + search referrer targeting API you can use @ $0.25 per thousand profile accesses or $0.01 per profile per month on an all-you-can-eat basis. We've been matching search referrer URLs to cookies across our ad network since October last year. Now that we're at 1 billion Facebook/Myspace/other impressions a week on the ad network, the number of referrers is adding up nicely. We can often tell you the age and/or gender of the searcher, though NEVER, EVER do we have Personally Identifying Information like name, email address, etc.

If you list the 10, i bet we can all fill in the blanks. The triggit link doesn't make sense to me, btw.

This is precisely backwards. It's

"Both Microsoft and Google showed the world how to build and dominate great new markets and then attempted to build illegal trusts by adding html rendering to their products and services in an attempt to extend their natural monopolies into the huge majority of related businesses."

Mind posting a link to the custom theme code, so people can use it?

@JonS I was missing your point on 3rd party issues. Thanks for clarifying. It's why Lookery draws such a bright line at PII. We think that we can lead the industry into an ethically better place than it is today. Selling Personally Identifying Information is not reasonable, will likely be illegal at some point, and is common practice today. Don't be fooled by other networks' web sites about what deals they are willing to cut and what deals they aren't.

Jon,

I agree that [paraphrasing you] "the value we bring ot users needs to be self-evident" and that it is not yet. We've got a great tech team, but software takes a while to write and deploy. We'll be satisfied on our basic transparency in another 4 to 6 months, at which point we'll be as good as it gets within the ad and targeting world (though i'd guess you care little about that relative measure).

I think the details of user data collection and targeting are important, but I can happily accommodate you and speak in generalities. At the broad strokes level you wish to discuss the topic, DoubleClick does the exact same thing as the rest of us. There's no rationale to exclude them unless you have some agenda beyond privacy concerns that you are not disclosing. A very, very small percentage of users (effectively zero) know that viewing an ad includes the implicit, opt-out arrangement with regard Doubleclick's user data and clickstream collection.

Like Doubleclick, Lookery is also an ad network. We run a billion ads a week on MySpace apps, Facebook apps, and similar. We've been doing that for a year and the data services for a few months. We uncovered a desire from a variety of sites large and small to learn about their audiences, anonymously and in aggregate, without being forced to run advertisements. We're satisfying that desire.

If you ever want to chat details, any action by Congress would impact us AFTER all the other companies mentioned in this thread. We're the least invasive of the bunch. If Congress shuts down all user targeting by networks, we will of course be affected.

Scott

P.S. I'm happy to exclude the ISPs from the conversation. It appeared you weren't aware of such practices.
P.P.S. If you want to know which web sites you visit are running third-party measurement systems that are not attached to ads, I'd encourage you to install this Greasemonkey script that our CTO built: http://davidcancel.com/2008/07/01/my-web-beacon... Web site owners choose to run these things in order to improve their sites, nobody forces them.

Go, David, go.

Here's the bit just posted on Om as to why we go and stay angel as long as possible.
http://gigaom.com/2008/09/06/fr-5-reasons-to-go...

@brianhoffman I've launched at DEMO before years ago and Mashery did very well buying a table at TC50 last year, but the truly bottoms up approach is better if you can do it. That's the approach we took at MyBlogLog and Lookery. It's ok so far.

@JonS Of course we can match a cookie on your machine to the record in our system. That's the only reason cookies exist. What we can't do is match it to your name, email, birthdate, hair color, drunken party pictures, whatever (unlike Facebook, Nebu etc.) I've spent a lot of time with the EFF over the years, including on the giant cookie system called MyBlogLog which I ran. I love and support the EFF, but each and every commercial internet venture makes them squeamish.

Like you, the EFF makes the blanket request for opt-in systems, and then ones that store no PII. I believe that commercially viable systems can be created that meet either request, but not both.

We're working hard to both 1) exist, keep creating jobs/salaries/etc., and 2) add the easiest, clearest opt-out system anyone's ever seen. I'm not thrilled that we haven't had time to finish it yet, but we're doing the best we can.

Do you know that each ISP in the US sells your data an average of 10x a year? And they have all of it. Nebu's pitch was "Quit selling user data to ad networks, Quantcast, and Comscore. Go to marketers directly and make much more money."

@ Jon S, Tough to tell if you are taking a real look at the situation with your remark, but it's worth being clear on this point. Nebu and the like install big hardware in your ISP and watch every single thing you do and target ads to you individually. It scares me too.

We don't watch you at all. We try to get age, gender, location, and some of your search into -- with zero ability to connect it to you as a human -- and help sites and marketers generally steer the web your way. It's a less invasive level of information than behavioral networks use today (and priced accordingly lower), but it's a level proven effective by marketers over 50 years.

You are going to see a lot of networks talk about privacy friendly targeting including us. We stick exclusively to birth year (not date), gender, location, and common KWs. We built the whole system to the spec "legal in Germany," which has the toughest online privacy laws on the planet. We're about to announce around that includes a big German investor, because we hit the spec. :)

On our end, we share all the targeting data we aggregate on our network pages, e.g. http://lookery.com/network/thisnext . As soon as we can, we'll open up cookie management for individuals in a simple and UI-easy way.

i keep misreading this as Amsterdam Bot Sex.

Was MyBlogLog a b2b? sorta. sorta not. It was true there too.

I answered the Poll in the WOM area, but I didn't intend my answer the way you meant the question. TC and Om barely count when I'm out doing blog marketing. It's the thousands of smaller pubs that matter. As Lookery ramps up PR around the search keyword services that are coming out this month, I'll spend hours a day responding to blog posts from people i would never have otherwise encountered. It'll be worth every second and can be sustained indefinitely.