Online influence measurement site Klout got $8.5 million in new funding, led by Kleiner Perkins from its socially focused sFund.

Kleiner’s wack-tastic venture partner Bing Gordon will join the board.

Greycroft Partners is also participating in this round, as well as some of its initial angel investors.

So far, the San Francisco-based start-up–which tries to measure influence across the social Web–has raised $10 million in total.

Here is Klout’s blog post and also its official press release:

Taking Klout to the Next Level

January 10th, 2011 by Joe Fernandez

Every day here at Klout HQ we are humbled by the passion people have for their Klout Scores, the amazing ways our API is being utilized and the innovative brands that leverage Klout to connect with influencers. We can’t thank you enough for your support. We are obsessed with helping the world understand the power of influence and I am proud to announce that we have added some key partners that are as passionate about this mission as we are. We have closed an $8.5m round of funding with Kleiner Perkins leading as part of the sFund and with participation from Greycroft Partners.

Measuring influence across the social web is a monumental task. Kleiner Perkins is the firm you turn to when your goal is to change the world. As part of the sFund, we look forward to working closely with many of the companies that define the social web. The team here at Klout is thrilled to have Bing Gordon from Kleiner Perkins joining our board of directors.

Greycroft Partners is also a critical new partner for us. Greycroft offers unique insight and connections with the media and advertising world. As we continue to experiment with connecting brands and influencers this will be a big help. We are also proud to have many of our angel investors participating including ff Asset Management, Tom McInerney, Paige Craig, Bobby Yazdani and Howard Lindzon.

This new funding will be used to continue to expand our engineering team (if you want to build something awesome, come join us!). Providing accurate, understandable and actionable data about influence is the kind of challenge we love, but we have a lot of work to do here still. With this money we will be adding even more services beyond Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to the Klout algorithm. We are also investing heavily in the Klout consumer experience to help the people who influence us the most, our users, better understand and leverage their social capital.

Personally, I look forward to devoting more time to our community. The Klout Score is quickly becoming the standard measurement for online influence. We love the passionate debate that influence invokes. To us, influence is the ability to drive actions. The way influence is measured and applied is going to continue to evolve at an ever-increasing pace. Fundamentally, we believe in the power of the individual and I think it’s critical for us to continue to offer transparency and open communication with the community as Klout evolves.

Thank you again for your support! There is a lot of hard work still to come but we are incredibly excited about the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Klout Raises $8.5 Million to Enable Everyone to Understand and Leverage their Influence

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, January 10, 2011–Klout, the leader in online influence measurement, announced today that it has raised $8.5 million in a funding round led by the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer (KPCB) sFund™ and participation from Greycroft Partners. Prominent angel investors, including ff Asset Management, Paige Craig, Howard Lindzon, Thomas McInerney, Bobby Yazdani, and others, also participated in the round, which brings Klout’s funding to more than $10 million to date.

“It’s been amazing seeing the passion the social media community has for their Klout Scores,” says Joe Fernandez, CEO and co-founder of Klout. “We have a lot of work ahead of us, though. We intend to invest heavily in increasing the performance of our system to deliver the accuracy, clarity and actionability commensurate with being the standard for influence. To do so, we will need to greatly expand the number of services that are analyzed in calculating the Klout Score and provide a much richer consumer experience.

KPCB partner William “Bing” Gordon, a preeminent visionary on the future of the social web, will join Joe Fernandez, John Frankel and Allen Morgan as a member of Klout’s board of directors.

“People are hungry to get even more meaning from their daily social media use, and Klout is creating an important and new standard measure of relevance.” Says Gordon. “I hope everyone who reads this shares this message so my Klout score goes up!”

“In a very short period, Klout has established itself as a generic noun in the lexicon of the web,” says Alan Patricof, managing director and founder of Greycroft. “We believe Klout will continue to grow and be the standard measurement of influence.”

That’s more or less the logic behind Medialets, a start-up that serves up ads on Apple’s (AAPL) mobile applications, and to a lesser degree, programs designed for Google’s (GOOG) Android mobile platform. The New York-based company, founded last June, is announcing a $4 million Series A round led by Foundry Group. DFJ Gotham and angel investor Bobby Yazdani also participated.

Medialets also provides free analytics services for mobile applications. But its revenue comes from its mobile ad platform, which specializes in serving up iPhone and Android app users.

Given that mobile ads in general are in their infancy, this is a nascent market at best. Medialets CEO Eric Litman figures that the market for mobile display ads tops out at perhaps $300 million, and that ads for iPhone and Android apps can’t be more than $100 million.

But he figures that number will shoot up rapidly, of course, and perhaps hit $400 million within four years. He’s also betting that the majority of apps, and the majority of apps downloaded, will be free, advertising-supported ones.

In order for that to happen, both apps and the ads that run on them will have to move past the novelty stage. This Medialets-produced ad for Dockers, shown here running on SGN’s iBowl game, is sort of interesting. But it seems more like a proof of concept than anything else.

Still, it’s a start: