Lookery

AdKnowledge has announced the acquisition of Lookery today. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Only the Lookery ad network has been acquired by AdKnowledge, the data network portion will remain with Lookery.

From the AdKnowledge publisher blog, "Lookery has been seeking a company to acquire its ad serving business that is able to both provide you with the same or higher payouts that you are currently receiving and provide the same level of service that you have come to expect from Lookery." AdKnowledge acquired Facebook developer ad network Cubics last year.

The Lookery Guaranteed CPM program will continue within the Cubics network for those publishers who are enrolled. AdKnowledge self-reports over 10 billion social advertising impressions per month.

Found via the Facebook developer forum. There's also more information about the acquisition on the Cubics/AdKnowledge Publisher blog.

Ad network Lookery is reporting that in the first 14 days of April they served a billion ad impressions in their network. It took the full month of March to hit the one billion impression mark. Rex Dixon of Lookery noted, "Even with one less day for the month of April, we feel very confident that we will be passing some major milestones this month."

From what I can tell in their publisher gallery, a good percentage of the Facebook apps listed are from outside the U.S. I'd like to see some advertising examples from Lookery, so far all I've seen is an activity feed on their home page.

You might remember Lookery from their many angel funding posts and check out our interview with Founder Scott Rafer. Jay Meattle from Compete also joined the Lookery team last month.

Lookery CEO Scott Rafer swore on a stack of Facebook invites that he was done raising funds in his angel round. But tonight we learn that he isn't done just yet. We covered the initial batch and then the next batch earlier this month.

Lookery has added "another couple hundred thousand" from the following investors:

• Marc Benioff - SalesForce Chairman and CEO
• Tom Cole
• Reid Hoffman - LinkedIn Founder
• TAG
• Jonathan Miller
• Allen Morgan

Scott, we are hip to your "marketing technique" of getting blog posts by slowly pushing out investor names!

Finally ad network Lookery has finished their angel round of funding. For a while there, we received weekly updates on this guy or that girl being added to the roster of angels. I can't even name them all here as it would take the better part of tonight and Lost is on at 9pm. Check the Lookery blog for all of the related posts (it spans the first two pages). We initially covered the first batch of angels back on November 3.

CEO Rafer said today, "This financing will total ~$900k, and we’re now in the market for two more engineers and a product manager in Boston (near Dave) and one business development person in San Francisco (near me) or Seattle (near Todd). Please hit jobs [at] lookery.com if you’d be great and can work well while laughing frequently at our internal chat streams. Our current plan is to start looking for for an institutional round in late April after we’ve hit a few more milestones."

In all seriousness, congrats to the team. Looking forward to seeing what Lookery can do with the loot.

Lookery, the remnant advertising program for your Facebook 3rd party applications, has announced their angel funders along with a real-time feed and teased an upcoming API. First up, the funders. Scott Rafer notes that he doesn't usually like to share funding info but has done so for several reasons which you can read about on the Lookery blog. The funders are:

• Ted Dintersmith (blog), acting as an individual not as part of CRV (Charles River Ventures)
• Maurice Werdegar
• Roger Ehrenberg, who is also an angel investor in Mashery (another Scott Rafer startup).

Next up is the real-time feed. This is quite interesting - the idea is to show a "real time live view of the traffic on the network". I've never seen this before but it's an interesting and innovative marketing tactic. I guess this can only work while the network is small? Otherwise the backup for the feed will become overwhelming. Also, what in the heck is this that I found in the feed upon launch? Should this feed be scrubbed as this is the official corporate home page?

Lastly, Rex noted that an API for "contributing profiles" will be available next week during their promotion at ad:tech (why am I going to Vegas when everything is happening here?!?!) Check out our interview with Lookery founder Scott Rafer from last month.

Companies offering advertising for 3rd party Facebook applications is hot. Last week I spoke with VideoEgg about their Facebook ad solution and today I spoke with one of the newest players in this market, Lookery. Lookery is founded by Scott Rafer, former CEO of MyBlogLog. To learn more about Lookery (both for the Web and for Facebook), I poked Scott for an interview and our discussion is below.

Allen: What is Lookery?

Scott: Lookery for the Web (our new service) is an ad network that fixes the economic problem of social networks: great user profiling and so-so inventory for advertisers. We make it safe and easy for social networks to distribute their data as targeting information outside their sites, in order to make money on web sites that have great inventory and little or no targeting information.

Allen: Why Facebook?

Scott: We got started with Lookery for Facebook because I kept hearing from people that they wanted to buy and/or publish traditional marketing campaigns in Facebook apps. We saw demand and just went for it.

Allen: Can you explain what Lookery for the Web and Lookery for Facebook is, and what are the differences?

Scott: Lookery for Facebook is a traditional display advertising network that runs exclusively on Facebook applications. Like all other Facebook-only networks, we exist at Facebook's whim. We'll do very well by our Facebook application publishers as long as they let us, but they have a lot more data than we do to run a network on their site. Lookery for the Web is a service in which we're building a unique market position, building out revenue programs for content publishers and sharing back to social networks. Bridging across networks lets us add more value and more unique value.

Interview continues »