Lookery.com

Online, each of us works hard to pull together a group of like-minded web users, unified by some common thread — an audience. We painstakingly build social software, write blogs, or aggregate information to build this audience. Then we don’t learn enough about who that audience is, and we only spend a few minutes each day or each week with them. Over and over again, they disperse anonymously onto the web for more than 99% of their online experience, our knowledge of their passions still relevant but unknown and unaddressed.

Can anyone really afford that missed opportunity right now?

Yahoo!/Facebook/Google can’t. The biggest sites on the web are actively building services to address this opportunity and will make money off smaller sites’ audiences in the process. It’s an area where Yahoo!’s MyBlogLog leads the pack, as it’s now installed on 450,000+ sites. Of course, Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, each of which are tiny — though only for now — get all the press. In each case, these web giants are investing heavily to understand their audiences entire web experience, from search to silliness. Technologically, all three services are scaled, third-party cookie systems that send all users’ aggregate — and exact — web surfing records back to Yahoo!/Facebook/Google’s private data silos.

They are acting this way because its good business.

Yahoo!/Facebook/Google will use all these terabytes of data to make more money off their audiences — and yours. None of them have announced revenue streams associated with these services, but Google staff refer to FriendConnect as FriendSense for a reason. The big guys can all immediately make money on search retargeting and traditional behavioral targeting, and they’ll be data mining their little hearts out looking for other revenue streams too.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a cut.

Instead, copy Yahoo!/Facebook/Google and generate off-site audience revenue yourself. The wonder of Web2 and cloud computing is that publishers of all sizes can easily gang up and avail themselves of the same technical wizardry as the big guys — including all the privacy management needed to keep your users anonymous and safe. First, you need a census of your users. Either by asking them or using Lookery, get exact ages and genders for each individual. The panel data that other analytics systems use will generate the same overall numbers but averages are near-useless for ad targeting.

You can only sell the data if you know which exact user is female and 37, not merely that 12% of your audience meets that description.

Next, get into the retargeting business yourself — tag your users with their individual passions and touch them during the 99%+ of the time they are off your site. Sell the data that identifies an individual as a double-diamond skier, a Dachshund’s person, a Mercedes owner, or a Mac fanatic. Or, expand your advertising sales to cover the other sites your users surf to, making more money from your existing advertisers. In either case, it’s your audience no matter where they surf, so make sure Yahoo!/Facebook/Google doesn’t make all the money from that knowledge.