I had the pleasure to speak with Scott Rafer a few days back for nearly an hour as we discussed his new startup Lookery.com as well as the challenges of advertising in facebook applications. Lookery is bringing together advertisers and facebook application publishers in a relatively painless way that helps both parties. Note to Om Malick, Scott seems to communicate just fine via skype.

Scott is a serial entrepreneur and has an impressive track record, his most recent startup MyBlogLog was purchased by Yahoo about 6 months ago. Dave has joined forces with Compete.com co-founder David Cancel. They are already hiring people.

Lookery hopes to bridge the gap between facebook application developers and advertisers wishing to have a presence on facebook. Over time they should be able to offer more complete user demographics for each application; which could actually make the advertising very relevant. Publishers will also have a choice of which advertisers they choose to use in their applications. Initially they will serve typical banner ad sizes on application canvas pages.

Most developers have no desire to do any form of sales; and they typically are not Biz Dev types… So this will really help them to monetize their applications. I speak with a lot of really smart people; and Scott impressed me with his ideas, concepts and insights about advertising potential for facebook apps. The bottom line is that I am really looking forward to seeing how this plays out.

A few quotes from the interview with Scott:
“We have a few million pages of inventory”
“We have been testing and are currently serving ads in a test mode”
“FB apps are the first place advertisers and publishers can buy/sell demographic ads in a reliable way — even if they’re needs or inventory are tiny. Lookery is going to help them do so ASAP.”
“We’re open for business now, actively signing up both advertisers and publishers. We’re posting the first this next week with improving targeting week by week.”
“We’re not taking a revenue split for the first month of operations. Every penny will go all the way from advertiser to publisher while we’re working out the kinks.”
“Dave C is one of the great analytics people out there. At MBL, I broke the taboo of publishing analytics with social profiles. Combining those two for FB apps will be tons of fun.”

The bottom line is that this looks to be a great first pass at helping to get more relevant advertising into facebook applications easily and it could be significant as time progresses. Keep up to date on their progress at the blog on Lookery.com

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook advertising, lookery, compete, facebook marketing, facebook applications, scott rafer, david cancel

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