Lookery.com

Image via CrunchBaseOn September 19, Fred Wilson blogged about Placing Ads in Feeds, closing with:

My firm Union Square Ventures thinks that this is one of the big emerging opportunities in online advertising and we are looking for a company to back in this area. If you are working on it, please email me and we’ll have a conversation.

Lookery isn’t looking for funding, but I couldn’t resist the opening and a chance to get the word out. Our comment interchange turned into a substantive thread, so I’ve reassembled it here.

Scott Rafer
Fred, I can’t sell you stock, but Lookery’s got a location + search referrer targeting API you can use @ $0.25 per thousand profile accesses or $0.01 per profile per month on an all-you-can-eat basis. We’ve been matching search referrer URLs to cookies across our ad network since October last year. Now that we’re at 1 billion Facebook/Myspace/other impressions a week on the ad network, the number of referrers is adding up nicely. We can often tell you the age and/or gender of the searcher, though NEVER, EVER do we have Personally Identifying Information like name, email address, etc.

fredwilson
scott,
can you get ads into feeds?

Scott Rafer
We have no feed inventory ourselves. That will be Gnip as EricM notes, as well as Friendfeed, Facebook themselves as they offer third-party feeds, and possibly HP at plum.com. What Lookery has is the privacy-friendly ability to target the inventory once it exists.

We don’t think that anyone but the owners of the authentication mechanisms will be able to operate social advertising in the “leveraging of social graphs” sense — and then only by combining inventory very flexibly across all parts of their own real estate. “Integrated brand campaigns” as successfully and scalably sold by Imeem and Dogster are the best example.

Social ads in feeds will not stand alone. Standalone ads in feeds will need to be targeted in other ways.

fredwilson
This is really a useful conversation for me and I am glad we can have it out
in the open for everyone to see and join in, Scott.

So you don’t see facebook, twitter, friendfeed, outside.in, etc opening up
their feed services to third parties like lookery who can fill them
occasionally with relevent marketing messages?

Scott Rafer
The Facebook Feed is FB’s search results page. FB’ll open it up as much as Google has their SERPs, ie not transparently. There will be third-party content (solely via Facebook Connect), third-party ads as there are already, but no third-party targeting. FB will move into the third-party feed operations and ad network biz, and everyone else will maneuver to use the best pieces and parts (including Lookery I hope) to keep up as best they can.

From a Social Feed perspective (which may not the the correct perspective for these companies), Twitter, FF, O.in, et al, are not the Gorilla — FB is.

fredwilson
Agreed. But the little guys (or littler) may be where the innovation happens. That’s how it was in display ad networks. Yahoo did it themselves. The other guys banded together (or were banded together by third party networks) and things like ad.com, right media, tacoda, and quigo happened

Scott Rafer
All true, but that’s why Google is able to build monopoly market share where Y! wasn’t. Search and search advertising are not only both inherently algorithmic, but they are also powered by algorithms so parallel in nature as to be effectively identical. I believe Feed and Feed Advertising placement algorithms to be more analogous to search than display when seen from this perspective.

Relatedly,
(1) Lookery is seeing more and more display ads selected by Keyword Retargeting,
(2) Analytics that use keyword behavior to measure the effectiveness of brand/display advertising are emergent (”Porkbellies, Wenda, porkbellies.”).

The increasing marginal returns of search advertising are now doing more than taking market share from display advertising — they are en route to becoming display advertising’s operating principle.