Nobody can make money on social network ads. Even Google (which controls a lot of the inventory on MySpace) is having a hard time. How worthless are these ads? Lookery, an ad network for social apps on Facebook and elsewhere, is renewing a promotion, guaranteeing 15 cents per thousand page impressions to app developers who sign up. With two ads per page, that comes to 7.5 cents per thousand ad impressions (CPMs). Back in January, Lookery was offering 12.5 cents per ad impression. So that means Lookery has cut its ad rates nearly in half.

Other social app ad networks, such as Social Media, are commanding CPM ad rates of around 50 cents by focusing on higher-quality inventory. Lookery is not so picky, and thus is probably more reflective of the what the majority of Facebook apps can expect to get (85 percent of its inventory is from Facebook).

Promoting a guarantee to starving app developers who have no other options is working for Lookery. When it offered its first guarantee in January, it was serving 140 million ad impressions per month. Now it is serving about three billion per month. (Social Media serves two billion).

Lookery is hoping all of those pennies will add up, but it isn’t counting on it. CEO Scott Rafer says the ad network is running at break even in terms of gross profits. But his plan is to use it to “bootstrap a data services business.” To that end, he is beginning to collect age and gender audience metrics from all the publishers in the Lookery network. For instance, the Facebook app Friendzii (which seems like it is geared towards people with no friends who are hoping to meet some) is actually most popular among 35-to-44-year olds.

If Lookery can’t sell ads to marketers, maybe it can sell the data.

It’s not a lot of money, but Lookery’s $900,000 seed round includes Reed Hundt, Charles River Ventures, and HT Ventures. That’s right, Reed Hundt. The former chairman of the FCC. He thinks there’s gold in Facebook ads, apparently, even though Lookery is a distant fourth compared to other social ad startups Slide, RockYou, and SocialMedia. Maybe even fifth, if you include iLike. But who is counting? Lookery is going for volume and hoping to make a couple cents on each ad.

Does Hundt even use Facebook? it looks like he’s set up a profile, at least. Reed, time to add a picture!

It should come as no surprise that the ad inventory on social networks like Facebook are not worth much. A new offer by Lookery, a startup that places ads on social apps inside Facebook and Bebo, is offering a guaranteed ad rate of 12.5 cents for every thousand impressions (CPM). The promotion, which runs through April is probably close to what Lookery can get for ads it places on Facebook. Add in 2 cents per thousand impressions for serving the ads and you get to about a 15 cent CPM. That is probably a good average for the bulk of inventory on Facebook, which makes up the vast majority of Lookery’s business.

This is a market-share play for Lookery. By offering a guaranteed rate, it hopes to attract enough application publishers to get to a billion impressions a month, up from 170 million in December. Lookery is smaller than the other major social-app ad networks, like Slide, RockYou, and Social Media. On social networks, more so even than on the Web in general, advertising is obviously a volume game. And Lookery is trying to catch up to the larger app ad networks, which may very well have higher average CPM rates, by taking all the low-hanging penny inventory that is out there.

Find out more here.

So Facebook will finally allow users to group friends and control information flow based on friend type. For guys like Robert Scoble, who have 5,000 friends (the limit), this may be a way to finally sort through the real friends from the fans. It’s a much needed feature that people have been requesting for a long time.

It also shows the steady maturity of Facebook from a college network to a full on world network, where friendships, business contacts, family and other types of relationships need to be more fully described. And this is also as much about privacy as it is about organization - users will be able to limit the information that certain friend groups receive.

A few existing applications are going to be affected, like Slide’s Top Friends application, the most popular third party app on Facebook. Lots of other applications will likely need to be tweaked to work properly when this launches (so many of them access the friends list). And this will shut down at least one “startup” we’ve been tracking that was creating this exact feature as an application. At least they can quit now and stop putting good time and money after bad.

Building Facebook applications is a big dice roll. If it’s too popular or too obvious of an idea (even if it hasn’t been done yet), Facebook is just as likely to compete with you as pay a few bucks and just buy you (they are probably more likely to compete with you than buy you, actually).

Some developers will probably wonder if getting a cash grant from Facebook’s just-announced fbFund will lessen the likelihood of direct competition from the company. Only time will tell.

Update: Wired is writing about a slew of Facebook ad networks and the almost inevitable fact that Facebook will be competing with them directly, too. We’ve covered most of these: SocialMedia, VideoEgg, Lookery, fbExchange, and RockYou. Also mentioned are Cubics and Appfuel. Lots of brave souls racing to build a business before Facebook comes in and stomps all over the scene.

People aren’t wasting any time trying to figure out how to monetize all those thousands of Facebook apps that have sprung up over the last couple of months. At least three advertising experiments have launched - the most promising, by far, is RockYou.

fbExchange

The first out the door was FBExchange, a copycat of the LinkExchange idea from the nineties. It was created by the 30Boxes Calendar team - Narendra Rocherolle, Julie Davidson and Nick Wilder. Display others’ ads on your facebook application and build up credits, which can then be used to run your own ads on other apps. It’s a cheap and easy way to get exposure for your application, should the viral Facebook machine not create enough growth to keep you happy. See GigaOm for more. The company says they’ve booked $200k in revenue after just two weeks live.

Lookery

Lookery, founded by serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer, is a straight up advertising network targeted solely at Facebook applications. They say they’ll have access to deep demographic data on users and can therefore target ads to users with very specific characteristics - a woman between the ages of 20-25 in New York, for example. That theoretically will lead to much higher advertising rates. I like the idea, but Facebook itself has access to the same data and more and has had trouble selling high CPM ads at scale. Lookery needs big scale to be successful, and so will likely struggle in the early days. For now, Rafer says, they are passing 100% of revenue to content providers and will start to take a cut in a month or so when the economics support it.

RockYou

RockYou has been quietly testing their own idea of an advertising network - selling “users” to other applications. They’ve had a tremendous amount of success building viral applications on Facebook so far. Their Super Wall app, for example, has nearly 3 million users and is adding hundreds of thousands of new users each day. It’s basically what it says - a better “wall” where friends can leave messages. With Super Wall, people can add pictures, video and other rich media.

They’re offering to promote third party applications on Super Wall, and charging on a per-user-acquired (CPA) basis. When a user is signing up for Super Wall they are asked if they’d like to also add a additional application (the advertiser). See the screen shot to the right (click for large view).

The test so far are going very well. CEO Lance Tokuda told me today that they moved $30k in inventory in just four hours. They are testing various price points, but the low end seems to be around $0.30 for each user they sell to another application, and they believe they can get as much as $1 over time. The effective CPM (or revenue per 1,000 pages) is a “multiple of $20″ he says. This make them possibly the first Facebook application to have found a real way to monetize users and pageviews.

Tokuda also says they have developed an API for Super Wall and will give free access to other applications to build their functionality into it. This can make your head spin a bit - Facebook is now widely considered a platform, and now Super Wall is a platform on top of a platform. It’s a good thing I guess that no one is slowing down long enough to really think too hard about how quickly the online world is evolving. Instead, they’re experimenting wildly. And some of this stuff is going to stick.