Klout for Good: AIDS Walk SF

Klout for Good: AIDS Walk SF:
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Klout believes everyone has influence, and influence comes with responsibility. Klout for Good aims to help leverage your influence to make the world a better place for everyone.
Every year in July, people from around the San Francisco Bay Area gather at Golden Gate Park for the annual AIDS Walk San Francisco to help raise greatly needed funds for HIV/AIDS programs and services throughout the Bay Area. In 2011, more than 25,000 people from all over the Bay area participated in the AIDS Walk San Francisco and raised $3 million dollars.



This year, Klout is proud to be one of the first tech startups to officially walk the 10K course and raise funds to help support the local community, but we need your help. Support Team Klout and the AIDS Walk SF by donating your influence on Klout for Good. Each Tweet will push the Klout team 2.5 meters towards the finish line of its digital race, and closer to ending AIDS as we know it.
Also, stay tuned as we’ll be giving you live event updates and photos on our Twitter and Facebook page on July 15th, so you can take part of the experience with Team Klout. We thank you for your support!
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Welcoming Our Newest Kloutlaw – Emil Michael

Welcoming Our Newest Kloutlaw – Emil Michael:
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(reposted from Klout)

Klout team members (or Kloutlaws as we prefer to call ourselves) are a special breed. We are obsessed with empowering everyone to discover and be recognized for their influence and pride ourselves on the passion with which we embark on this mission.
Today I am proud to announce that Emil Michael has joined Klout as our COO and is the newest member of our Board of Directors. Emil is more than overflowing with all the qualities of a Kloutlaw and will be overseeing all business functions of Klout. Emil has an extensive background as an entrepreneur and operator that includes time as Senior Vice President of Field Operations for TellMe Networks, a senior official at the White House, and an investor/advisor in some of the best tech companies in NYC and Silicon Valley.



This hire is incredibly special to me personally. Since I started Klout four years ago with a dream where every person was recognized for the power of their voice online, I’ve been fortunate to be joined by an amazing team. It started with my co-founder, Binh Tran, who focused on technology, and Matt Thomson, who was our first business hire and has basically filled every role possible. Now, with over 40 billion API calls monthly, millions of Klout users and brands like Chevy, Microsoft, Gilt and others recognizing the Klout of their customers, we are making this vision a reality. With the addition of Emil we are poised to take everything we’ve done to the next level.
Please join me in welcoming Emil to Klout with a +K on his Klout profile.


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Minneapolis Startup: Wahooly Giving Away Equity At Chicago Tech Week 2012 VIDEO INTERVIEW

Minneapolis Startup: Wahooly Giving Away Equity At Chicago Tech Week 2012 VIDEO INTERVIEW: Wahooly has had a lot of buzz lately. Their model which has been described by many as Kickstarter meets Klout, encourages social rockstars to mobilize and support startups for an equity stake.  As serial entrepreneurs, Wahooly co-founders Dana Severson, and Connor Hood know that the hardest thing for startups to do is gain traction, especially [...]

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Don't forget to check out Team Wahooly™ on Facebook 

The fight against scam ads—by the numbers From the Official Google Blog

The fight against scam ads—by the numbers: This is the second in a series of posts that will provide greater transparency about how we make our ads safer by detecting and removing scam ads. -Ed.
Last month, I shared an overview of the technology Google has built to prevent bad ads from showing on Google and our partner sites, including our efforts to review accounts, sites and ads. To illustrate the scale of this challenge, today I’d like to provide some metrics that give greater insight into the scale of the problem we’re combating.

Bad ads have a disproportionately negative effect on our users; even a single bad ad slipping through our defenses is one too many. That’s why we’re constantly working to improve our systems and utilize new techniques to prevent bad ads from appearing on Google and our partner sites. In fact, billions of ads are submitted every year for a wide variety of products. We have a set of ads policies that cover a huge array of areas in more than 40 different languages. For example, because we aim to show safe, truthful and accurate ads to our users, we don’t allow ads for misleading claims, ad spam or malware.

Ads that are in violation of our ads policies aren’t allowed to be shown on Google and our AdSense partner sites. For many repeat offenders, we ban not just ads but also advertisers who seek to abuse our advertising system to take advantage of people. In the case of ads that are promoting counterfeit goods, we typically ban the advertiser after only one violation. Here are some metrics that give some insight into the scale of the impact we have had over time, showing the numbers of actions we’ve taken against advertiser accounts, sites and ads. You can see that the numbers are growing—and growing faster over time.

Year	Advertiser Accounts Suspended for Terms of Service and Advertising Policies	Sites Rejected for Site Policy	Ads Disapproved
2011	824K	610K	134M
2010	248K	398K	56.7M
2009	68.5K	305K	42.5M
2008	18.1K	167K	25.3M

We find that there are relatively few malicious players, who make multiple attempts to bypass our defenses to defraud users. As we get better and faster at catching these advertisers, they redouble their efforts and create more accounts at an even faster rate.

Even in this ever-escalating arms race, our efforts are working. One method we use to test the success of our efforts is to ask human raters to tell us how we’re doing. These human raters review a set of sites that are advertised on Google. We use a large set of sites in order to get an accurate statistical reading of our efforts. We also weight the sites in our statistical sample based on the number of times a particular site was displayed so that if a particular site is shown more often, it’s more likely to be in our sample set. By using human raters, we can calibrate our automated systems and ensure that we’re improving our efforts over time. In 2011, we reduced the percentage of bad ads by more than 50 percent compared with 2010. That means the proportion of bad ads that are showing on Google was halved in just a year.

Google’s long-term success is based on people trusting our products. We want to make sure that the ads on Google are safe and trustworthy, and we’re not satisfied until we do.

Posted by David W. Baker, Director of Engineering, Advertising

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