Lookery, the Facebook advertising network...with lots of data

venturebeat.com

8 points·terpua··4 comments

I think it's incredibly risky to build an ad-network on Facebook because of backwards-integration (i.e. Facebook will just build it too if it's successful).

Once Facebook has a proprietary system, they can leverage all the other data they don't give developers access to and in doing so give marketers the best ROI. Marketers will flock to Facebook's system, leaving companies like Lookery and Peanut Labs with, well, peanuts.

Witness what's already happened with Peanut Labs. They created a succesful online market research tool (a.k.a. "polls") that they embed on social networks and SNAPs.

Facebook could have used Peanut Labs, but instead they built their own system, Facebook Polls.

Where are market researchers going to go now? Peanut Labs or Facebook?

Facebook, obviously, because Facebook can insert polls directly into the News Feed and target them better than Peanut Labs can.

Granted Peanut Labs might be a better fit for smaller social networks that don't have the scale and power of FB, but that doesn't mean marketers will prefer to use them. Marketers will flock to the system with the most users from which they can extract the most information. That system is Facebook.

All new competitors have access to the ridiculous amount of data available to Facebook apps.

Is anyone else here interested in or working on a behavioral targeting project?

Hell yes. I think there's a big market for selling UGC-type data as behavioral targeting data... the current systems are relatively unsophisticated-- they tell a marketer what kinds of sites you've visited, but not what you were talking about.

It doesn't look like anything special, there is a lot of room for competitors in this market.

There must be people planning on applying to YC for this same idea.

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