Lookery Blog

New Publisher and Advertiser dashboards!

2008-07-03T20:54:25Z

You asked, we listened. Today we released two much requested dashboards. We also released a new streamlined sub-navigation design.

NEW Publisher Dashboard for Ad Impressions:

NEW Advertiser Dashboard:

Let us know what you think!

We’re giving Lookery.com a makeover!

2008-07-01T04:18:20Z

Lookery has morphed quite a bit since launching last year. We realized many months back that our website had not kept up. We’ve been working on fixing this, and over the weekend released a site re-design.

This release included a new about page, global activity feed, new navigation & design… and many many behind the scenes upgrades which will enable us to release new features much more quickly in the future.

Special thanks to Jesse, Zvi and the rest of the team at JESS3* for helping us out with the re-design!

Over the next few days, based on your feedback we will continue to tweak what we just released, improve user flow, and will also be releasing some additional features that we’ve been working hard on. Let us know what you think. We’re listening, and reacting.

Lots more good stuff to come in the next few days, and beyond!

Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery (the Bebo Ad Guarantee)

2008-06-30T18:51:16Z

According to PaidContent.org, Bebo plans to offer App Developers a 40 cent CPM guarantee for running ads on their apps. 40 cents is a BIG number in the world of social media - more then even what Google guarantees MySpace.

Given the overwhelming success of Lookery’s own guaranteed CPM announcement (3 billion impressions a month and growing), it’s certainly easy to see why Bebo might want to make such a public guarantee. Especially one with such a high payout that folks are likely to wonder if it’s too good to be true. Nothing like a good PR stunt to jump start the app developer program.

And given the current details - it’s more a stunt then developer bonanza. First, it’s only for the first 3 impressions. With 2 ads per page and an average range of 6 to 10 pages per visit - that means only 15-25% of an app’s impressions are even potentially eligible. So on an average basis your eCPM is no longer 40c but likely as low as 10.25c if the non-guaranteed impressions are earning a 5 cent CPM. 10 cents isn’t much better then the going rate for most quality apps as it is. Second, the guarantee only applies to US impressions - given that Bebo traffic is less then 25% US - that lowers the number of qualifying impressions and oversized earnings even more.

For Bebo’s guarantee to be a big winner for app developers and for real wow factor - a 40 cent Global guarantee that covered all of an app’s available impressions would be the way to go. Now that would be game changing.

Please welcome Erin!

2008-06-20T15:38:08Z

Err… Well not really.

Please welcome Chris Kelly to the team. Erin is Chris’ girlfriend and more importantly she’s an amazing cook. Checkout her creations on her blog, Erin Cooks. Now that Chris is on the team we get access to all of Erin’s leftovers. :-)

Jay and I worked with Chris at Compete, where Chris worked on all things Web and Django related.

Chris and Jay are busy this week finishing up our first “real” Lookery.com website. Look for it next week.

This morning was Chris’ first day; Erin sent along some amazing Banana-Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies and Peach filled Muffins. Re-dunk-u-lous!

Lookery - Secrets Exposed

2008-06-20T15:36:15Z

If you’re interested to know what we’re up to at Lookery listen to this interview my partner Scott Rafer did with Social Times last week.

Download audio file (Interview_with_Scott_Rafer_of_Lookery.mp3)

PS. Checkout our new Lookery East Coast Office (Cambridge, MA)

Thanks to the Viximo guys for renting part-time space to us.

We are only in the office a couple of days a week as we all prefer to work from home and to keep it frugal (cheap).

Note: This was also cross-posted here

TiECon East - Panel on Emerging Models in the Web Space

2008-06-09T22:55:12Z

I was asked to put together a group of interesting folks to discuss issues related to, the oft abused moniker, Web 2.0 for the TiECon East event held in Waltham, MA on May 30.I picked people that I thought were the most interesting and capable of having a conversation about the future of the Web and business models related to it.Thanks to the following folks bringing their insight to the panel:

Fred Wilson - A VC from NYC is a thought leader in this space with a wicked (we saw that word here in Boston) sense of humor to boot.
Don Dodge - The man with the coolest name in Tech is in BD with Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team. He always has insights given his vast operating experience.
Brian Balfour - Founder of Viximo, based in Cambridge, MA, is leading the charge with new ways to monetize social networks with digital goods.
Nabeel Hyatt - Nabeel runs Conduit Labs, a social gaming platform. You can find him sipping lattes at Open Coffee Boston and talking entrepreneurship.
And David Cancel, Lookery CTO and Founder, asked the interesting questions and steered the panel.

There’s insight into Twitter’s rumored recent $15M venture round. Apparently, it hasn’t closed and anything you read in the blogs was pure conjecture.

The conversation is great. But the video quality sorta sucks. Oh, and the sound needs to be fully jacked-up. But if you work in this space, this video should be of interest to you.

(cross posted from here)

Lookery Online, Business Normal

2008-06-09T16:30:27Z

It appears that Amazon.com may be down at this time. Even though we use their cloud computing services, Lookery is up and running just fine.

Then There Were Eight - Welcome Raj Bala

2008-06-20T15:37:26Z

Please welcome Raj Bala to the team. Yesterday was Raj’s first day at Lookery. Raj is a serial tech entrepreneur and well known here in the Boston startup community.

Raj comes to us from BigSwerve where he was founder & CEO. BigSwerve was acquired by Lijit Networks in January, 2008.

Raj joins Jay and I in our Boston office as a founding member of our engineering team.

Welcome Raj!

Online Video - Not Here Yet - How a Big Number isn’t really That Big

2008-05-13T18:11:12Z

[David asked me to cross-post this post over here from my blog - Original Post]

Comscore (via Allen Stern at CenterNetwork) reports that 11.5 billion videos were watched online in March in the U.S. 11.5 billion sounds like an awfully big number. But it’s not. At least not in terms of web scale. Comscore itself estimates that total page views online are estimated in the trillions per month. Heck we even our 9 month old ad network delivered almost 3 billion ads in April. It’s estimated that MySpace and Facebook combined do more then 100 billion page views a month.

And Comscore which likely undercounts pages views by a factor of 2 to 3x is OVERstating videos. In their stats, they estimate the AVERAGE online user watches 83 videos a month! Seriously. Personally I can’t believe that stat. I’m as addicted to the Internet as the next guy and I watch maybe 30 videos a month. Maybe.

So even if you take Comscore’s numbers at face value, 11.5 billion isn’t that big of a number when you look at the economic size of the video market. Assuming a range of $1 to $5 cpm and 1 ad per video (any format, method, size, style doesn’t really matter), you’re looking at a TOTAL market size of just $11.5 million to $57.5 million for all online video. That’s out of a total online ad market of about $2 billion a month.

My point isn’t to say online video won’t be or isn’t important. It’s more a comment about the incredibly large scale required to build a large media business or market. The media business is about a little off a whole heck of a lot. That’s why ads are priced in cost per thousands. And the need to have immense scale also explains why the media business gravitates towards consolidation but that’s a post for another day. When videos viewed starts approaching trillions then we’ll be somewhere.

Lookery Dashboard Updates

2008-06-10T01:31:37Z

Over the past day or so, we released a whole slew of updates to the dashboard!

While most were small usability and under the hood improvements, when you sign in, you’ll immediately notice two new tabs - “Buy Ads” and “Browse Network Directory“, and a much cleaner and streamlined “Your sites” Overview page.

Make sure you check these, and all the other changes out. Also, please keep the feedback coming. We’re listening, and reacting.

1 Billion ads served - in half the time

2008-04-15T17:16:23Z

We just crossed over the 1 Billion ads served mark again this month (@ about 9:50am pacific time). Last month we ended up serving a little over 1.3 Billion ads in 31 days.

This month we reached 1 Billion ads served in about 14 and 1/2 days. Even with one less day for the month of April, we feel very confident that we will be passing some major milestones this month.

Todd discusses Lookery with Rodney Rumford of FaceReviews

2008-04-10T22:26:12Z

In this video, Rodney of FaceReviews interviews Todd about Lookery. Even though this video is a little old (~ 6 months), and we’re so so much further along in our evolution, it is still a worthy watch:

I’m 39 and I don’t need to see a ringtone ad ever again

2008-04-08T18:11:28Z

If I was 39, I probably wouldn’t ever want to see a ringtone ad ever again either! Scott discusses Lookery in this video interview with Intruders.tv:

Outage: 4/4/2008

2008-04-04T17:08:20Z

UPDATE: As of 2:30pm pacific time, it appears that all of the issues have cleared now. Ads should be serving normally again.

We currently are experiencing an ad server outage. We are working with the ad server support team on this issue. We apologize for the inconvenience and we will update this blog post as well as our support site as soon as we are back online.

Thank you for your patience with us, and we apologize for the inconvenience we are causing you.

Lookery Guarantee: $0.25 Euro Guarantee

2008-05-17T20:13:02Z

As Scott announced at the NextWeb conference, Lookery is now offering social network applications a $0.25 CPM guarantee for Euro traffic. To qualify for the Euro Guarantee, social network application publishers need to agree to a:

Dedicate all their traffic in the targeted countries (EU plus a few neightboring countries) for a minimum of 90 days
Applies to all social network applications platforms (Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Friendster, Hi-5, etc.)
Up to 2 ads of different sizes above the fold
Net 30 terms

Note: Any publisher interested in the guarantee must apply at Lookery.com and go through an approval process which typically takes 48 to 72 hours.

With this new program, Lookery now offers publishers three programs:

Revenue Share - Lookery’s standard program where Lookery splits ad revenue with its publishers per the market rate in our network for their traffic (Net 15 terms)
$0.125 CPM Global Guarantee - Lookery’s program where publishers dedicate 100% of their traffic to Lookery for at least 90 days (Net 30 terms)
$0.25 CPM Euro Guarantee - Lookery’s program where publishers dedicate 100% of their Euro traffic to Lookery for at least 90 days (Net 30 terms)

With the above information in mind, publishers in either guarantee program (EU or Global Guarantee) will be receiving payments on the 30th of the month for their traffic the month previous. Publishers who are on the RevShare program will continue to be paid on the 15th of the month for their traffic the month previous.

Bringing in the reinforcements

2008-04-03T15:35:57Z

Our small team at Lookery is growing quickly and I am happy to announce that Jay Meattle joined us this week.

Last week was Jay’s last at Compete where he and I worked together for over 3 years. While at Compete Jay was the Product Manager for Compete.com and part of the small team responsible for creating it.

At Lookery Jay will be heading up Product Development for us and helping us launch the new products we’ve been heads-down working on.

Welcome Jay!

MySpace: Yes, we already said that…

2008-03-30T19:15:46Z

Last October, even before MySpace officially started their public announcement and ramp up of their new platform, we clearly stated that we would support MySpace applications.

All you need to do is sign up via our www.lookery.com site - and self serve your ad tag for your MySpace application. If you already have an account, than simply login and ad your MySpace app to your account, and self serve your ad tag.

And it keeps getting better…

2008-03-29T03:32:07Z

Thanks to Scott and the team for welcoming me aboard - very happy to be a new member of the Lookery crew! With my first post comes exciting updates… I’m happy to say that we’ve been successfully running CPC campaigns for the past few weeks and are in testing phases for CPA. If you have any questions, please feel free to shoot me a line at claire [at] lookery [dot] com.

Please Welcome “Hair’ min jard”

2008-06-10T01:33:16Z

We became six people last Monday, and now we have two people in San Francisco. We’re no longer completely virtual.

(Sorry, Daniel, but I get to Seattle more often than Cupertino.)

Claire Herminjard joined Todd and me at GSP West last week as her first two days on the job. She’s taking care of some business development and all the inside sales for us. Yesterday, Claire and Rex teamed up to close the first sale that Todd and I didn’t have to know about. On Day 7. Great.

David’s Right, and Jason’s Wrong.

2008-03-08T01:16:21Z

We’re all Mac, etc., per Jason’s dollars and cents comments, but his workaholics suggestion is a terrible idea. David @ 37 Signals has it right. If you work to hire great people, driving them into the ground is self-defeating. So is locking them in a room until the fluorescent lights make them glow.

March so far at Lookery has been crazy, with a few folks working beyond what’s reasonable. It should let up in a week or so, but I’ll have to find additional resources otherwise. Burning out this great crew is not an option.