Today Adknowledge and Lookery announced that Lookery’s ad serving business has been acquired. This means that Lookery’s infamous 7 and a half cent CPM guarantee will be transferred over to Adknowledge via their Cubics platform. I just got off the phone with Scott Rafer, CEO of Lookery, and he stated that the ad serving business on social networks is not for startups and is instead for larger, experienced businesses that have sales teams that can support them.
Lookery will now continue to work on their data targeting services which provide greater margins for the company. Earlier this week we reported that Adknowledge had acquired Adonomics, the public Facebook application tracking service. Adknowledge has been in this space prior to Facebook, but thanks to the Facebook platform launch, the company was able to expand their advertising services via Cubics.
We’re expecting further consolidation in this space considering the vast number of advertisers providing similar services. I consistently write about the low quality of ads on the Facebook platform and that has been a big issue for developers who are finding it hard to attract decent CPM levels. An even bigger issue facing the space is the inability of Facebook to monitor the types of advertisements being served on the platform.
This has resulted in advertisements that push the limits of the Facebook terms of service, putting Facebook in a challenging position. While not surprising news, this is most definitely an interesting turn of events in the Facebook advertising space. Feel free to check out the Cubics blog for more information on the acquisition.
