Technically Speaking

As Jay announced earlier today about the latest release, below is my embeddable statistics for this blog. Get your own audience stats for your site(s) by simply signing up and using our free code.

Now the cool thing is that the longer you use Lookery, the more you can see - or the more trends you can analyze. Here are my charts from November 2008:

Technically Speaking, you gotta love audience data that is free. Suggestions needed on how to utilize this audience data are right here.

Technically Speaking, click the image or right here to be taken to what I already wrote this morning.

Fog City Games is an interesting study in analytic data. For one thing, you’d think in the primarily male dominated gaming industry there are few sites that have a dominant female audience. Fog City Games statistics prove that females do play games online. A whopping 84% plus play games at this site.

Even more interesting are the search terms that people used to find this site. It’s great to see this list, since none of them refer to “fog city” or “fog” reside in the top 10.

What is even more interesting is that even though a major blogger has had his say or rather his suggestions about Ask.com, people do use the site. Maybe this is something Ask.com needs to think about in their future marketing or advertising initiatives since at least for Fog City Games, the audience is well over 2/3’s female. Even more interesting - Google doesn’t even come in at #2 here! It’s AOL search!

The next thing I found out about this site is #5 on the below list. These are the search terms that are called Cross-Site Audience Keywords. Number 5 should raise a few eyebrows, as while the gaming on this site isn’t war game oriented, it’s clear that the users that come here to play games also do searches for “play free online war games now” and with being 84% female, that tells me that if marketed successfully, you can market a war game to females.

These cross-site audience keywords are really nice to learn about. Not many analytic companies like to share that data with the site owner. With the statistics above that are all free for Lookery site owners, a good data analyst can really help to increase the ROI for a site.

Technically Speaking, what Lookery offers for free is just a sign up away.

Full Disclosure: The site owner is in fact a member of the team at Lookery. I picked this site purely on the cool data that his site generates. If my site generated cool data, I could write a post about it also, but unfortunately with a 92% male audience, and as small as this site is, why bother?

I was looking around again today, and I have known that OkCupid has a very diverse audience for quite some time. The tagline on their site states “100% free. The best dating site on Earth.” That is quite the claim, but while watching the Lookery Global Feed, you might tend to agree with that statement.

For one thing, how many dating sites do you know actually caters to the over 55 crowd? Also, how many dating sites do you know actually have real live females on them? Now not too worry as the global feed is something you could probably watch on Lookery in the lower right corner of the page; to pass the time and find some cool sites. A few seconds after I took that above screenshot, we see some younger females on the screenshot I snapped below.

Some of you readers are now thinking, “hmmm.. maybe I should visit this OkCupid site.. “. The skeptics amongst you are thinking “What if Rex just waited until a bunch of good feed data showed up?” The internal conflict you may be having is that the age range dropped, but what about overall? What are the breakdowns for their age and gender. Yes, the above could be a “fluke” global feed showing only females, but as I looked on their page, it appears that it’s pretty even. Yes, the males out pace the females, but not by much. Not as much as some dating sites!

Now that you know their audience a bit better, you could almost make a case (if you are looking for a good dating site) to actually sign up for this OkCupid site. The nice thing is that Lookery is not only reserved for sites with high traffic, you can sign up and learn more about your audience even if you are small time blog like this one for example.

Technically Speaking, learning more about your audience is the quickest way to help your site and audience (for blogs that equals daily readers!) grow, and doing it for free with the easy to use Lookery code is even more interesting.

I’m thinking it is pretty clear that Lookery sold the ad network about 2 weeks ago. Now many people are wondering where the money is, or rather how they can make money by using Lookery. First of all, you might want to go straight away to this post that David did the other day. I thought that was a great explanation of what we are doing currently.

Even with that being said, if that isn’t clear enough for you, Jay posted this the other day also. Yes, to answer the question that is roaming in your head after reading that post by Jay - I did jokingly say “Dude, that has to be the longest sentence I ever saw!” - Yet, it does make sense if you take a second to digest what he was saying.

One thing we are going to be doing on the Lookery blog is start doing a write up of the featured site of the week. This past Friday I posted our first in what we hope will be an enlightening series of sites that are on the front page of Lookery dot com.

By now you are saying, “Ok, Rex, where the f**k is the “Money” going to be coming from now that there is no ad network?!?” Well if you know me, and some of you do, I like to build a story before just saying, “Here ya go, here are some links, enjoy.” Story building is key to selling anything. It’s called psychology, and the more we draw you in with the story and use good psychology, the better you are going to understand the money side. Without a good storyline, you tend to lose the interest of your audience.

Some of you are only interested in knowing your audience, and that is completely fine. It’s free to use and easy to sign up. I think one of the biggest uses of this free service is the regular every day blogger. I see bloggers who use twitter daily to promote things about their blog, but yet, it appears they are shouting to an audience - but really - do they know their audience? That is where knowing your audience comes in.

Finally we arrive at the money part of this equation. It’s based on something we all learned in kindergarten actually, and that is called sharing. Specifically all we are asking is for you to share your data and you make money from that. It’s passive income. And the cool thing for the geeks reading this, is that we are sharing our API for you to do this. It’s very simple to deploy on your site.

Coming full circle now, it’s about what you know (your audience) and now you know where is the money (sharing your data). It’s a simple concept to grasp, and hopefully in the coming months we will tell the story well enough so that everyone out there understands this data stuff is not only interesting, but yes, it can make you money.

Technically Speaking, I hope I told a more concise story about where Lookery is at today. Sign up and start learning more about your audience. If you have the data, and are inclined to grow that data into something worthwhile, you should share it with our growing community or network of sites that power our team to move forward and create more for products for you!

The news now is very old since the first major blog to break the news. This of course was first put out to the world right here as well as here. This let out the fact early about the Adknowledge buy of the Lookery ad network, but it’s time to move forward with what we are doing best.

That specifically is helping site owners to amplify their audience data. It’s what we have been doing actually for months now, and with the sale of the ad network, we can now focus all our resources on that fully. Adknowledge was the right choice when the opportunity presented itself to us to give our publishers a well known ad network home.

Coverage was pretty good today after the actual press release went live. One thing I’d like to clear up is that in no way are we based out of “Palo Alto” as stated in this post. It should have said “the San Francisco - Boston with side shows in Seattle and St. Louis based Lookery” - well at least it would have been more truthful!

While many posts simply regurgitated the press release, no big deal as I have done that myself, other outlets dug a little deeper and wanted to know more. Since we started last July on the Facebook application network, there was the coverage on the sites dedicated to that space. Coverage went pretty much everywhere, even overseas.

To be quite clear, the last two post comments that I left - one word - babelfish! I am not fluent in any language outside of English which I happen to get by in. I did however want to acknowledge them for the coverage of the sale of the ad network, but also so that I didn’t appear as the ignorant American - as they say, “When in Rome… ” - I gave it my best effort to use their language in responding.

Technically Speaking, it’s time to come over to Lookery now that the ad network part of Lookery is gone and check out how you can amplify your site(s) audience data today by signing up and becoming part of the growing Lookery network - we gang up on the ASL (Age, Sex, Location) and KW (Keyword) / cross-site audience KW data for you!

In this current day of information overload, I figured I’d offload a few tidbits in my blog post today. If I had the time each day to do this, it would be like the good ol’ days here on Technically Speaking. Unfortunately, only time these days to catch my breath occasionally. While the economy is in the dumps, my company Lookery as tweeted by Todd the other day, is booming. We are all busy and slammed with enough work for 3 or 4 people.

Check Your State - If you are interested to see where your state stands in the general election coming up on November 4th, you need to go to this site. Currently, Missouri is now leaning Obama, but just last week it was leaning McCain. Thanks to @billstreeter for the original URL he sent over which lead me to the above.

Cloud Contacts - This is Allen Stern of Centernetworks new start up called Cloud Contacts. I say “new start up”, as those who remember, he had another great start up that didn’t quite take off a little more than a year ago. That one was dealing with running ads on video content. Again, and probably like this one - he was ahead of his time. Read the great write up here on CNET by Rafe Needleman.

Scott Rafer in Berlin - Wow, almost is like dejavu for us guys who started Lookery. Last time Scott was in Berlin, that was when this whole Lookery journey started. Though last time, he was on a well deserved vaca, this time he was speaking at the Berlin FBDevCon. Side Note: Scott, I’m usually still groggy and sans laptop connected at 7am my time zone!

This Is Cool - Especially if you are a smoker (which I am)! The idea seems like it could work, only the one time I tried the patch, as soon as I stepped down successfully - I went back to smoking with no nicotine input into my system. I am hoping that Drew does quit for good. Smoking Everywhere is what he is using, and I wonder if you can really “light up” like the video showed.

Technically Speaking, if you haven’t gone Lookery yet, you really need too with the new cool site design as well as the enhanced audience analytic data page. What I really enjoy is the more direct message (tagline) on who we are and what we are all about:

Lookery is a user-targeting service that helps site owners amplify their audience data.

twittermoms as profiled by TechCrunch earlier this afternoon has been with Lookery for about a week now. Already they have some pretty nice demographic data.

As I noted in my comment, this is only some of what you can see for FREE. That is empirical audience analytic data!

So the question for you people out there reading this - How come you haven’t signed up your site for Lookery? OH you run a Wordpress blog? Well we took care of that for you also with a WP Plugin for Lookery!

Technically Speaking, we don’t bite, and we go down as easy as Google Analytics. When you sign up you have the full access to your data as outlined here, so what are you waiting for?

[ This is cross posted from our CTO's blog ]

Today I created a simple plugin that allows you to easily add the Lookery Audience Analytics tracker to your Wordpress blog.

Lookery’s Audience Analytics is like Google Analytics + Compete.com but instead of measuring your site’s “pageviews” and “clicks” Lookery helps you analyze your site’s audience.

We’re working on some great analytics that should be out real soon. Despite being quite early we’re already seeing sites such as ThisNext and ReadWriteWeb signup as early adopters.

I love your feedback. Please let me know how we can improve our analytics and our new Wordpress plugin.

» Amplify your Wordpress Blog with Lookery

[ End of our CTO's cross post]

Now the millions of Wordpress blogs don’t have an excuse. It’s quite easy to start viewing great statistics about your audience. Whether you love stats or only casually follow them, you should always have another point of reference. Lookery gives you that for FREE. All you have to do is sign up for an account.

And if you love that money, well we are also an ad network! We serve over a billion ads a week to sites within the social networks such as MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, and the list goes on. We also serve ads outside the social nets. The combination of the two means we are a powerful force in the ad network world. But if you are in it for the love of statistics, well you have come to the right place.

There have been some detractors to our business over the past few days since our coverage of our recent closing of funding of $2.25 million. That’s quite fine, as we welcome the opportunity to educate our users and our potential new users. In the next few months we will be quite busy letting people know that Lookery isn’t the evil doers that have left a bad taste in the mouth of many online.

It’s not the first time that personally speaking I have been related to the dark side or being pointed out as evil. I usually smile at the challenge of speaking to that ignorance of not knowing it all. The worst thing that I have always seen in the human character in general are the people that are willing to go out and spread the word of evil only because they are not educated in regards to what they speak of. See for example the Salem Massachusetts witch burnings. In other words, you know them well - the mister or miss know it all that in the end really only has a vague idea of what they are really talking about.

Misinformation has always been a challenge to overcome, but we are in love with the opportunity and challenges that lie ahead. While we will always have an ad network for the money that our publishers love to receive monthly, what good is running ads if you have no idea what your audience wants, likes, or is really coming to your site for? That is why you have to love the free opportunity that is available to you to study the analytics that have always been there, but now we make it visual.

Technically Speaking, I cracked a smile at the person that accused Lookery of being evil; honestly do you think it’s the first time I’ve been associated with evil in my life? Take a number, sit back, and become educated on Lookery’s goodness.

Lookery spent the last few days in Boulder, CO and thanks to the people at TechStars for letting us use their cool space called the bunker. It was great meeting some of the Boulder startup people on Thursday evening at our get together we had. Also nice to finally meet in person was Gnip’s founder Eric.

Being the virtual company we are, as I mentioned jokingly in my last post about “Lookery East” and “Lookery West”, it was great finally having all of Lookery in one location. The about 10 miles west of the Mississippi puts me in the Lookery West “office“; virtually of course.

During our time in Boulder, VentureBeat was the first to finally cover our latest funding round of $2.25 million. They always do a great write up since Matt only hires the best writers to cover the beat.

Other coverage you can read of this is GigaOm’s coverage by Carleen Hawn - which tells the story of how to go really lean and do funding in a way that makes sense, and also another PaidContent post by David Kaplan who did correct the post, as it originally stated we “troll” for data which is a bad implication to crawling for data. We don’t “crawl” for data folks, companies and private sites give us data!

Why would companies just give us data?

Because we do not break privacy boundaries. All the data we have is anonymous. I guess that is one point I really want to stress. We are in total compliance with all the privacy laws. The above blogs did great coverage, but there are always comments about privacy and the data we collect. I’d like to address that now.

People, you know the type, will always say we (Lookery) can identify you and where you live and who your children are and what kind of car you drive, you sexual preference, what you like to eat, etc.. etc.. from our data. No we can’t. ASL (Age, Sex, Location) or AGL (Age, Gender, Location) data is what we collect. The two terms you will often see(ASL and AGL) are what we do. We are not the bad guys that get all the press that you read about lately. Those companies that collect that kind of data scare all of us.

To address the question, companies either just love us or they want some money! Data is worth love and money to many. The money part, you really should contact us and speak to one of our data sales experts.

The love part is - who wouldn’t love to see data about their site and use it to drive more traffic? It also becomes love once you can show advertisers what is driving traffic to your site. And of course that can lead to money for your site. So love and money. Anonymous data. You just gotta love it - especially for blogs and site owners - who would love to just make some more money!

What can a regular web site or blog do to take advantage of the data that is out there today?

Why they can easily sign up and start running the JS code today. We already have announced in the past few weeks all the great data you can see for FREE about your site.

There really should be no fear factor in putting the JS code on your site, as noted in this blog post - it’s a cookie! That’s it. A simple cookie that you already are using (I’m assuming you are if you are a site that loves some stats!) - Google Analytics!

Here are some cool stats about my blog, and I get this information for free and so can you by signing up for a Lookery account, and placing a simple javascript on your site(s). My site’s stats are right here in the Lookery network pages.

The above screenshots are the August 2008 stats for my site. Since my readership is no where near one of the big dog blogs, there is still little data for September 2008. But of course, you can check that out at my network page link above!

Oh and if you are a blog/blogger that maybe wants to see what drives the big dogs, you should check out ReadWriteWeb. They are one of my favorite blogs to read with their great blogger crew that is headed up by blogger/writer extrodinaire Marshall - no last name needed.

Technically Speaking, if you haven’t installed the Lookery cookie (JS Code) on your site yet, you are soon going to be left behind all of your peers in whatever type site you have. The adoption of the Lookery cookie has been phenomenal thus far and we’d love to be able to show you the free data that is out there about your site!