Social Media Analytics
Klout
Klout tried to turn online influence into a single number, scoring every social-media user from 1 to 100. For a few years the score was everywhere, cited in marketing decks and even job interviews. It was also widely mocked as a gameable vanity metric that ranked a tech blogger above the US president. Lithium bought Klout for about $200 million in 2014, could not make it fit, and quietly shut it down in 2018.
- Company
- Klout
- Started
- 2008
- Ended
- 2018
- What Lithium paid in 2014 for a score it shut down in 2018
- ~$200M
- Collapse speed
- Gradual
- Preventability
- Medium
- Lesson transfer
- Universal
- Last reviewed
- 2026-07-24
Narrative
The story
The ambition
Klout had a seductive idea: measure influence. It scored every social-media user from 1 to 100 based on their reach and engagement across networks, converting the fuzzy notion of who matters online into a single tidy number. In the early 2010s, as brands scrambled to understand social media, that number found real traction. Klout raised more than $40 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mayfield Fund, ff Venture Capital, Microsoft, and CrunchFund, and built a rewards program, Klout Perks, that let high-scoring users claim freebies from brands hoping they would spread the word.
The rise
For a while the Klout score was inescapable. Marketers cited it, some employers reportedly asked about it, and users who claimed to disdain it still took secret peeks to see how they ranked against their peers. The company positioned itself as the arbiter of digital influence, and after years of struggling to make money, it said it had finally reached revenue in the "double-digit millions."
The cracks
The trouble was that the number never quite meant anything. Critics attacked the score as a gameable vanity metric, and Klout's own results undermined its credibility: at one point President Obama ranked lower than the tech blogger Robert Scoble, a result that captured how poorly a single algorithm captured real-world influence. Skeptics doubted both the validity of the scores and the need for a social-scoring tool at all, and Klout Perks never really took off. Klout had built a metric people loved to check and found hard to trust.
The collapse
In March 2014, the social-customer-service company Lithium Technologies acquired Klout for about $200 million in cash and stock, a sum one observer called "an insane amount of money to pay for Klout." The fit was never obvious. Lithium mainly wanted Klout's machine-learning and data capabilities, not the consumer score, and over the following years Klout faded from public attention to the point that its own obituary was headlined "the thing you didn't know was still a thing." On May 10, 2018, Lithium announced it would shut Klout down on May 25, saying the standalone service was "not aligned with our long-term strategy," with the arrival of Europe's GDPR privacy rules expediting the decision.
The aftermath
Klout is a genuinely ambiguous case. Its investors got a roughly $200 million exit, which by the ordinary scoreboard of startups is a win. But the product itself, the influence score that was the whole point, was widely judged meaningless, gently mocked for years, and ultimately switched off. It endures mostly as shorthand for the era's obsession with quantifying social clout, and as a caution about single-number metrics.
The lessons
Reducing something as tangled as human influence to one number makes it legible, and also makes it wrong. Klout's score spread because a single figure is easy to cite and compare, but that same simplicity is what made it gameable and, when it ranked a blogger above a president, faintly absurd. A metric that people check compulsively but do not trust has captured attention without earning belief, and attention without belief is a weak foundation for a business. The acquisition muddies the verdict: an outcome can be a fine deal for investors and still a failure of the product's core premise, and the two are worth separating. Klout proved you can make people care about a number long before you have proven the number means anything.
Causal timeline
Failure Anatomy
- 2011
- 2012
Everywhere, and doubted
The score became widely cited even as critics called it a gameable vanity metric and Klout's own rankings (Obama below blogger Robert Scoble) undercut its credibility. [3]
Information failureNo real demand - 2014-03
The $200M acquisition
In March 2014 Lithium Technologies acquired Klout for about $200 million in cash and stock, mainly wanting its machine-learning capabilities rather than the consumer score. [5]
Strategic drift - 2016
Fading away
Under Lithium the score lost public attention, to the point its shutdown was headlined "the thing you didn't know was still a thing." [6]
Strategic drift - 2018-05-25
Shutdown
On May 10, 2018 Lithium announced Klout would close on May 25, saying it was not aligned with its long-term strategy, with GDPR expediting the move. [6]
Strategic drift
Structured analysis
What Went Wrong
Root causes
A number that did not mean much. Klout reduced influence to a single 1-to-100 score that was gameable and of questionable validity, at one point ranking President Obama below a tech blogger. [1] [3]
Checked, not trusted. People compulsively checked their scores but doubted their validity and the need for a social-scoring tool, and Klout Perks never really took off. [3] [4]
Contributing factors
No fit after acquisition. Lithium wanted Klout's machine-learning capabilities rather than the consumer score, and the standalone service did not fit its long-term, messaging-focused strategy. [5] [6]
Immediate trigger
Lithium pulls the plug. On May 10, 2018 Lithium announced it would shut Klout down on May 25, saying the service was not aligned with its long-term strategy, with GDPR expediting the decision. [6]
Visible symptoms
The credibility problem. Klout's scores were widely derided as gameable and inaccurate, undermining trust in the core product. [3]
Warning signs
Perks that fell flat. The Klout Perks rewards program, meant to prove the score's value to brands, never really took off. [4]
Affected groups
Contested
Disputed points
Interpretations where credible accounts genuinely differ, presented as disputes, not settled facts.
Was Klout a failure or a success? Its investors secured a roughly $200 million exit in 2014, which is a clear win by startup standards, yet the influence score that was the product's whole purpose was widely regarded as meaningless and gameable, faded from relevance, and was shut down four years later. The failure of the product and the success of the exit are genuinely in tension. [3] [5] [6]
MixedEvidence
Claims & sources
Every numbered marker in the analysis links to the claim it rests on, and each claim to its sources.
- [1]
Klout scored social-media users from 1 to 100 based on their reach and engagement, and raised more than $40 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, ff Venture Capital, Microsoft, and CrunchFund.
- [2]
Klout had struggled to monetize but claimed revenue in the double-digit millions for the first time the year before its acquisition.
- [3]
Klout's score was widely derided as a gameable vanity metric of questionable validity, at one point ranking President Obama below tech blogger Robert Scoble, even as people still checked their own scores.
- [4]
Klout's Perks rewards program, meant to demonstrate the score's value, never really took off.
- [5]
Lithium Technologies acquired Klout for about $200 million in cash and stock in March 2014, mainly for its machine-learning capabilities rather than the consumer score.
- [6]
On May 10, 2018, Lithium announced Klout would shut down on May 25, saying the standalone service was not aligned with its long-term strategy, with GDPR expediting the decision.
Sources
RIP Klout
TechCrunch · 2018-05-10
Lithium To Acquire Social Influence Scoring Site Klout For $200M
TechCrunch · 2014-03-26
Social Media Gurus Rejoice (Or Despair): Klout Has Been Acquired
Forbes · 2014-03-26
RIP Klout: The thing you didn't know was still a thing
Engadget · 2018-05-10