Lookery
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Lookery (founded 2007 by Scott Rafer, former CEO of MyBlogLog — acquired by Yahoo! in 2007) was a B2B SaaS audience-targeting company. It began as a third-party ad network on the Facebook platform, then refocused on collecting user data — a 'universal cookie mechanism' — to help other ad networks target ads anywhere their users surfed. It raised over $5 million (including a $2.25M round for the ad-data business) and sold its ad network to Adknowledge before winding down.
02 / Lookery FAILURE REASONS
Why it failed
In his shutdown postmortem, Rafer listed Lookery's sins 'in chronological order': continuing dependency on a large partner, not knowing when to cut bait on a failing asset, and building ahead of the market. The company was completely dependent on the Facebook ecosystem — as he put it, 'there is no difference between Verizon Wireless and Facebook in this context.' When Facebook wouldn't release anonymized data in a timely fashion, the team cloned Facebook's targeting system and sold the ad network, but the replacement 'universal cookie' project was built well before the market demanded it.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded
Founded in 2007 by Scott Rafer as a third-party ad network on Facebook's platform.
- Refocus on data
Sold the ad network to Adknowledge ('the social ad space has become a poor place for startups to compete') and refocused on collecting user data for ad targeting; raised $2.25 million.
- Orderly shutdown
On August 24, 2009, CEO Scott Rafer announced from the Lookery blog that the company was winding down operations, posting a public postmortem of its mis-steps.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
CEO Scott Rafer announced an orderly shutdown of Lookery on August 24, 2009.
- 02
The company had raised $2.25 million for its ad-data business.
- 03
No bankruptcy filing or asset sale proceeds were disclosed.