LifeStreet Corp. is putting a bit of Nascar into online advertising.

The San Carlos, California, company claims to have become the largest advertising network on Facebook—with a $40 million run rate—with technology that pits different online advertising strategies against each other simultaneously and lets advertisers see in real time which get the best results.

“This is no vanilla ad server,” said CEO Mitchell Weisman, who founded LifeStreet in 2005 after leaving the controversial and now defunct Redwood City, California, behavioral marketing firm Claria Corp.

Weisman said LifeStreet in 2008 launched an ad network called LifeStreet Media that quickly achieved a $3 million to $4 million annual run rate. Last April, LifeStreet, which has various projects, focused on the ad network, and by year’s end it was on a $40 million run rate, he said.

LifeStreet raised about $3.5 million from Exigent Ventures and other investors, but never used most of the capital. The company is looking to hire 10 people in the near future, mostly in sales and marketing.

U.S. traffic has jumped around, rising from less than 800,000 in February 2009 to 75 million people in October and, more recently, to 60.9 million in January, according to Compete.com. Globally, LifeStreet reaches more than 100 million people, Weisman said. Last month, LifeStreet bought the SocialCash ad network, its main competitor, for an undisclosed price.

LifeStreet is confident enough in its targeting capabilities that it buys ad inventory from publishers and then sells “leads” to advertisers on a performance basis. Online dating service Zoosk, for example, pays LifeStreet when somebody clicks through a display ad and signs up for the service.

Romain Galoisy, director of online marketing for Zoosk, said that for the last six months he has used LifeStreet specifically within Facebook, and they have consistently delivered high-quality leads.

“They’ve done a pretty good job at driving a lot of sign-ups,” Galoisy said. “We are very satisfied.”

Weisman and other executives at LifeStreet were previously at Claria Corp., where Weisman worked from 1999 until 2006 and became director of business development. Weisman’s biography on LinkedIn says he helped build Claria into a profitable, 200-person company with revenue over $100 million. Prior to that, Weisman, who studied economics, held positions at various financial services and venture capital firms.

Claria was previously known as Gator Corp., which distributed what some called adware, others malware or spyware, bundled with free software programs. The company became embroiled in litigation, and in 2003 it changed its name to Claria. In 2006, after Weisman left, Claria took on $40 million from notable venture firms. Its fortunes declined, however, and though it got $11.5 million more in funding and was renamed JellyCloud, it went out of business in October 2008.

Weisman said that LifeStreet is fundamentally different from Claria because it is in the display-advertising business, not the adware/pop-up business, and the environment in which it is working has rules established by Facebook.

“Our dedication to compliance with Facebook’s rules has been one of our most valuable competitive differentiators, helping us win market share throughout 2009 as Facebook banned noncompliant ad networks,” he said.