Lookery.com

Unfortunately, it was a Mudware Award from Rafe. Dave quickly covered us, and now the new site makes better sense. However, www.lookery and blog.lookery are not yet unified. That will happen shortly. The basic marketing palaver is:

Lookery provides demographic marketing services in and around social networks. We’re working to fix the the basic economic problem that social networks face: great user profiling but unpredictable ad inventory. We make it safe and easy for social networks to distribute their data as targeting information outside their web sites, in order to make money in partnership with web sites that have great inventory but little or no user targeting information.

At the technological level, Lookery is a big third-party cookie network with APIs for submitting user profile info and for targeting ads. The profile information is limited exclusively to non-personal information, specifically Age, Sex, and Location. We have no place in our system for information that creates end-user privacy risk.

The new site includes a self-service Javascript facility available for sites that want to get in the front of the line to make money using demographic targeting. We’re still explaining the details human-to-human, but real marketing information will appear soon.

As part of that delay, the Terms of Service are still forthcoming. The most important aspect of the TOS will be data ownership of end-user profiles. There’s lots of discussion over who owns the profiles across the web — social networks or end-users. We’re sure of only one thing about those owners — it’s not Lookery. Contributors of profile and other information control their submissions and control the deletion of those submissions. We aspire to the kinds of practices and economics that makes those deletions rare and ill-advised, but data deletions will be as convenient and safe as we can make them. The same is true of end-user opt-out. It will be available on every page of our site in about a month.