Lookery provides demographic marketing services in and around social networks. We’re working to fix 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.

In July 2007, we launched a conventional display advertising network for Facebook applications, called Lookery for Facebook, because we kept hearing from people that they wanted to buy and/or publish traditional marketing campaigns in Facebook apps. We saw demand and went for it. We quickly learned where we could provide lasting value for social networks, application publishers, and outside sites, and started coding away.

The result is Lookery for the Web, a service to which social networks contribute basic, anonymized profile information and get paid when we use it for real-time ad targeting. The critical issue in designing the service is that user anonymity is strictly maintained. We’re sticking solely to Age, Sex, and Location in order to provide concrete value to marketers while holding absolutely no data in our system that puts users at risk.

The full-time team so far is seven — Dave Cancel, Rex Dixon, Todd Sawicki, Daniel Deng, Claire Herminjard, Jay Meattle and Scott Rafer. We’re pulling in part-time help from all over the place, and getting the system up to speed.

Please let us know what else we can or should be doing, or when we’re unclear in how we provide updates.