After announcing the acquisition of Adonomics earlier this week, online advertising company Adknowledge lets us know that they’ve bought Lookery’s ad serving business to be integrated into its other daughter company, Cubics (which it acquired in December 2007). The terms of the agreement have not been disclosed.
From the announcement:
Lookery has been seeking a company to acquire its ad serving business that is able to both provide you with the same or higher payouts that you are currently receiving and provide the same level of service that you have come to expect from Lookery.
The way this is written, as well as the fact that the terms of the acquisition have not been shared, suggests this was a rather small deal. Lookery raised a total of $3.15 million in funding, mostly from angel investors. We have an e-mail in with co-founder and CEO Scott Rafer for more information about the acquisition. (update: he got back, had nothing to add about the terms except to say the deal was in fact quite small in size)
Last we’ve written about Lookery, was that they were lowering guarantees for application developers to 7.5 cents per thousand ad impressions (CPMs). At the beginning of this year, that guarantee was 12.5 cents / CPM. Anyone still think monetizing social networks isn’t tough?
Cubics and Lookery say that nothing will change for app developers using Lookery’s ad network, and that the Lookery Guaranteed CPM program will continue for all participants. Lookery initially started as a Facebook ad network, but has since branched out and is now focused on collecting anonymized demograhic data about sites around the web. The company then sells this information to ad networks in order to help them target ads, a business which it is continuing.
Adknowledge / Cubics claims to be the largest social ad network, and that buying Lookery’s advertising business enables them to display over 10 billion impressions per month on social networking sites. Looking at the number of monthly impressions Lookery boasts on its website (3 billion), that means that the acquisition has made Cubics’ inventory 1/3 larger in size.
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There’s very little left to do on the ad serving market, if anything - so I am really skeptical as to what Lookery has to bring to the table. As for the guaranteed CPM deal, I think this is a huge weight on the new business and it’d take either an absolutely brilliant mind to come up with a winning strategy, or a fool to continue offering such a deal. Much bigger players have tried this (Google) and they’ve really just shot themselves in the foot with guaranteed CPM deals.
Good luck to them, this is something to keep an eye on!
Indeed, not much left to do… true innovation opportunity exists in targeting, it’s like building a CMS though… so many have tried but nobody has nailed it yet. Should be interesting to see which networks rise/fall/get acquired over the next 9 months or so.
Very true… sooner or later, Google will become the one and only player in AdServing / Display advertising, just like their dominance in Search business. Nevertheless, an interesting post.
I totally disagree with this statement that Google will be the only player in ad serving and display advertising. I know a lot of high profile people inside Google and they are interested in display CPM advertising at the moment. They are dominating with their CPC model and until that stops working, there is no need for them to pursue another model.
With regards to ad serving Google do have some great products with Doubleclick and Google Ad Manager. However, there are still a lot of alternatives.. and Google Ad Manager has a lot of issues! Plus Doubleclick is too expensive!
Steven Finch
http://crenk.com
http://adphilia.com
Check out this recent interview with Scott Rafer http://tinyurl.com/6jd5ox
Interesting when you compare this business to mobuzz esp considering the current climate. Mobuzz has been going for 4 years, aren’t making any profit and are now begging for cash off their users. Lookery has been rolling for a year, and just got bought.
Adknowledge traffic used to be fantastic: high converting, etc. For the last bunch of campaigns I’ve tried that level of quality traffic hasn’t been there. I’m wondering if others are experiencing the same.
Just want to clarify one thing. Adknowledge has only bought the ad network part of Lookery. We still are in business and are putting our focus on the audience data full time now. If you have questions, please leave them or feel free to visit our homepage at http://www.lookery.com to understand more of what we are doing.
Rex
Rex, I think I made that pretty clear in the post too, but thx
I thought you did also, just wanted to make sure people understood. I have been guilty of “skimming” blog posts myself, so I know how some may skip the facts of “buying the ad business”.
Rex
I thought Lookery served using Atlas (now part of Microsoft). So what exactly did they buy?
While some are going down, some are rising in the current economic turmoil.
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
Interesting that Cubics has bought the Lookery ad network. That leaves the competition to pretty much just Social Media, AdParlor, and RockYou. I wonder if this will have any overall effect on the eCPM rates publishers are receiving…
Craig - don’t forget about Appssavvy…
thanks Rex — was skimming and missed that…thought you sold the whole enchilada
That is the main reason to the madness of commenting on every blog that I have found - just want to make sure the skimming types understand - we only sold the ad biz to Adknowledge. Lookery is in fact in the full time business of audience data now. If you haven’t given us a look or try, be sure to come by our site and sign up - http://www.lookery.com
Rex
Thanks for the clarification…
“Lookery is a user-targeting service that helps site owners amplify their audience data.”
Really, very interesting service that you offer. All the best.