Lookery.com

As TechCrunch pointed out last week, Lookery is “bootstrap[ping] a data services business” on top of our ad network. It wasn’t clear from their post, but we started the effort back in October when it was Dave, Rex, and me with Todd not-yet-full-time. All that work is starting to show traction.

The Lookery stats that caught my eye today require some explanation:

• Over 2,000 new cookies are being dropped every minute
• Over 7 million keyword search referrers captured so far in July

Lookery’s data-services business, called Lookery Targeting, is a privacy-friendly, user-targeting system. We’re pooling, cleaning, and licensing lightweight user profiles pooled from across the web. Our profiles actively exclude names, email addresses and any other Personally Identifying Information. We don’t crawl for information, but instead give web publishers tools to enter data into our system. That way, we can ensure all the web sites which submit data are happy to do so.

Like MyBlogLog, we offer free reporting tools for anyone who contributes information into the system. If you run our Javascript, you’ll get a page like this automatically. The reports currently include Age, Gender, and Location. Every morning, we automatically generate reports for you on the prior day’s demographics. The same historical data is also available as a public, free API. What Lookery gets paid for is the real-time service that lets marketers target ads against our profiles.

The sooner you install the Javascript, the sooner we’ll find your audience across our network and start aggregating data for you.

That brings us back to keyword search referrers, which are the next big thing we’ll add to our free reporting and paid targeting. Like Facebook and Microsoft, we think that search can generate a lot more money for social app and Web2 publishers. I use the Facebook toolbar, and they clearly target ads to me from data they collect from using it. Using the Lookery Javascript that is getting deployed across the web, we’re also associating keywords with cookies and can target ads from them. Seven million keyword referrers this month is about 100x last month, so we’re on our way!