Lookery.com

Dave Cancel, co-founder of Compete.com, and I are starting to put some services together. We hope to provide the social software world with better experiences and better income. We’re starting with the better-income part.

We’re starting by setting up a network to buy and sell ads on Facebook applications. I’ve got a few clients that have been trying to be on one side of these transactions or another over the past few weeks, and all I hear are complaints. As usual, complaints are music to my ears. Complaints mean that there is a problem to solve.

Dave and I pulled the trigger Friday, 06-July, and he started jamming away. We’re starting off super-simple, hoping you all will support us from the get-go. As a result, we’re keeping none of the revenue for the first month. Every penny is being sent from advertisers to publishers.

We’re running a copy of OpenAds behind an iframe running on Facebook Canvas pages. In our first week or so, we’re offering only run-of-network ads on a CPM basis, segmented by country. We know this is only a starting point. Per-application ads, and demographically targeted ads will follow quickly, but we wanted to wade right in the minute we had any functionality at all.

Lookery is taking orders manually for now and will do whatever matchmaking we need to in order to get buyers and sellers into mutually agreeable terms. Our suggested price for this sort of media is $1.00 CPM, given overall market conditions, the scarcity of such buying opportunities so far, etc., in spite of the current lack of targeting ability. As we grow up, we’ll learn and share a lot, hopefully getting to the point where we can put our money where our mouths are, per this particular Jason Calacanis rant.

We have a Charter Advertiser, Lending Club, that we’re thrilled to have on board and whose horn we’ll be blowing. Here’s their listing in the Facebook applications directory.

We appreciate all the other interest we’ve received from publishers and advertisers on our homepage. I’m starting to respond in the next couple of hours. Please pardon the delay.