Lookery.com

Scott Karp largely has it right with “Banner ads on Facebook is a dumb way to monetize.” Of course, that won’t stop Lookery from using banner campaigns in order to get started. Per Guy Kawasaki, “Don’t worry, be crappy.”

ScottK’s has it exactly right with “I’m just making this up.”

So are Dave, I and the dozens of potential publishers and advertisers who have reached out to us in the past week. The sentiments are pretty consistent so far — the publishers want to make money, they want editorial control over what ads appear, and they are fine with the advertisers we have so far. The advertisers really want to pay CPA but are willing to do CPM sliced by demographics instead. The bottom line, however, is that so many are eager to work their way down the Facebook-marketing learning curve that they’ll buy the barely targeted CPM campaigns that we’ll start running later this week.

We think they’re right to get started early — that’s why we’re not taking a revenue share for our first month of operations. We want to give people an excuse to get going while proprietary learning is still going on. The lessons we’ll all learn the rest of the summer will put us ahead of the game. A big one is going to be how commercial content works in the Mini-Feed and News Feed. Since many Facebook apps are intended to be commercial media properties, there’s already commercial content in the feeds. However, three things are going to start happening quickly:

• The feed output of Facebook apps is going to become more commercial in flavor as large brands get involved. “Dave Cancel just added a pair of Nike Dunk High Premium ID’s to his feet;” and “Eight of your friends are now using iPhones;” will be in our feeds before we know it.
• The Facebook application walled garden is going to start leaking quickly, per the meme Kottke proliferated. FBML apps can and will run on other social graphs. That will be proven by Halloween if not by Labor Day. Dave and I are already planning FBML apps whose only practical use is to run on web sites other than Facebook. More radically, the need for another social graph to run apps remotely could even go away entirely depending how Facebook Remote Auth develops over time.
• Finally, feeds are proliferating and will reflect open-web behavior in combination with internal site info. MyBlogLog (Go team, go!) quietly put out the first such feed in the last few days. MyBlogLog Vitality is very good as is, acts as a beautiful harbinger of open-web services, and will offer RSS feeds of the the content before the month is out. Everyone’s multi-sourced, open-web event streams can now be mashed up. And I thought Twittervision was cool.

The punchline is that Facebook knows all these things; Dave and I are betting heavily that Facebook is actively planning to exploit it; and that these market dynamics will make Facebook (and hopefully Lookery’s stakeholders) a ton of money. Holding on for dear life during the process will at least be fun.

[NB: I was all set to end this post using a GI Joe with Kung Fu grip crack re: "holding on for dear life," but I suddenly couldn't figure out whether glorifying military toys was worse than the sexism and racism inherent in the toys' marketing. Wow, a lot has happened in the world since I was five.]