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Meet Josh Buxbaum of WebPurify in Irvine

Today we’d like to introduce you to Josh Buxbaum.

Josh, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
WebPurify launched over a decade ago. As user-generated content exploded on the internet, there was a clear need to help sites keep their users safe by moderating the text other users were submitting. More importantly, young users were being exposed to offensive content, even on sites that were geared towards kids. Responding to this urgent need, we launched the WebPurify Profanity Filter solution, an easy-to-integrate service that offered pricing levels for websites with a wide range in scale, from small blogs to Fortune 500 companies. It was and still is important to our founding team that smaller sites be able to afford this very effective moderation solution, so pricing starts at just $5 per month for this service.

With the success of the WebPurify Profanity Filter, we quickly recognized the need for more easy-to-integrate online moderation services to address other user-generated content, such as image and video submissions. This led to the launch of our Image Moderation and Video Moderation solutions.

In addition to building our team of moderators who work 24/7, a big focus for us currently is also Artificial Intelligence solutions. AIM, our Automated Intelligent Moderation service not only aids our live teams, but also reduces the image volume that requires human review.

We have never lost sight of our primary goal to keep children safe online and continue to consult with many new clients on how to best protect their communities from disturbing content. Recently, we integrated technology that helps our users find, remove and report images of child pornography and missing children online. We are thrilled to be able to help organizations like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children with their mission to safeguard children.

More than 10 years after we launched WebPurify, we are delighted that it continues to be a leading moderation web service, offering live and automated solutions and reviewing over 3.5 million text submissions, 600,000 images and 10,000 videos daily.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Overall, we have been very lucky with our timing and growth. To this day, WebPurify’s biggest challenge is educating newer sites on the risks of allowing user-generated content without any moderation plans in place. Oftentimes, a new client will call us in a panic after launching a website without any safeguards in place. It happens fast—they become inundated with offensive content that causes their users to complain or, even worse, leave. We are able to ramp up solutions fairly quickly, depending on each client’s unique challenges. However, we certainly prefer the opportunity to consult with clients in the early days of development so that we can implement the right mixture of live and automated solutions from the day they launch, and avoid any damaging content and the stress that comes with it.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with WebPurify – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
WebPurify specializes in profanity filtering, image and video moderation services. Our products offer robust solutions for brand protection and regulation of user-generated content. Our clients include top interactive ad agencies needing to keep their UGC campaigns safe, popular gaming apps, social media apps, dating sites and companies with large image databases that require labeling and sorting for computer vision training.

From the very beginning, our goal was to help keep kids safe online. We continue to work with many youth-based sites to help provide a safe and enjoyable experience while protecting young eyes from being exposed to offensive content.

What sets us apart in the industry is that we do not crowdsource this important work.

Our live teams operate 24/7 from our office with admin oversight to ensure the safest moderation process possible. What also makes us unique is that we offer live, automated and hybrid moderation solutions to address various kinds of client concerns. Finally, with over a decade under our belt, we bring an invaluable amount of experience to every new client and the unique challenges that their projects face.

What is “success” or “successful” for you?
As we continue to grow year over year and expand our moderation offerings, we are helping more and more websites and communities keep their users safe. This, for us, is the ultimate success.

Pricing:

  • WebPurify Standard Image Moderation Service: $0.02 per image
  • WebPurify Automated Intelligent Moderation (automated nudity detection): $0.0015 per image.
  • WebPurify Standard Video Moderation Service: $0.35 per minute
  • WebPurify Profanity Filter Licenses: starting at just $5 per month

Contact Info:

Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.

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