What Was Klout and Why Did It Matter?

Klout was an analytics company that gave social media users a “Klout Score” between 1 and 100 based on their activity on social media platforms. 

Founded in 2008, Klout seemed like it was on the road to lasting success. It was even acquired by a company called Lithium Technologies in 2014 for a whopping $200 million. 

But four years later, on May 25, 2018, Klout went dark. 

A History of Klout 

Klout owes its existence to one of the most objectively awful medical procedures a person can undergo: jaw wiring. 

In 2007, when he was 30 years old, a businessman named Joe Fernandez had to have his jaw wired shut for three months as part of a surgery. 

Fernandez ate by blending soup and spraying it through his teeth with a syringe, according to an interview for a 2018 article in The Ringer. Unable to speak, he had to rely on social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, to stay in touch with the wider world.

That’s when Fernandez got an idea. What if word-of-mouth was measurable in some way? What if you could assign a numerical value to a person’s social media influence? 

With extra time on his hands, Fernandez decided to test his idea. 

He wrote a script to pull data from then-Twitter’s then-open API. Then he used an Excel sheet of Twitter handles to create a scoring system based on each user’s follower count, engagement levels, and overall influence on Twitter. 

In the scoring system, 1 signaled extremely low influence and 100 signaled extremely high influence. By mid-2008, after his jaw had healed, he shared the prototype for Klout with some friends.

The Rise of Online Influence

According to Fernandez, his friends thought the idea was stupid. 

Back in 2008, the word influencer didn’t really exist, after all. It didn’t have a spot on Dictionary.com until 2016, and it was absent from Merriam-Webster until 2019. 

I did a quick Google Trends analysis of the search volume for the word. It was basically irrelevant between 2007 and 2016.

But Fernandez was ahead of the times. Maybe he sensed that influencers would soon become incredibly relevant. Maybe, by building Klout, he helped make influencers influential. 

His friends might not have loved the concept of a social media scoring system, but the idea quickly gained traction with social media users themselves. 

The Klout website looked something like this on November 11, 2009. 

On the left-hand side of the screen, you could see recent influencers’ “K Scores,” or Klout Scores. You could also see which topics said influencers were influential about. 

On the right-hand side of the screen, users could sign up for a Klout account to track their influence on Twitter. 

By April 2010, the search term “Klout score” went from a flatline to a tiny peak on Google. And by June of 2012, it had exploded in popularity. 

Clearly, people wanted to know how much influence they had. 

Klout quickly left the beta stage. Soon, you could see your Klout Score based on your LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter presence. You could even earn Klout Perks if you had a good Klout Score. 

Klout Perks included free products, access to exclusive events, big discounts, and even travel opportunities for social media users with the most, well, clout. 

All from companies who hoped to get some exposure from the social media users’ content. 

Sounds a lot like the influencer of today, does it not?

Here’s what Klout.com looked like in January 2012.

By late 2012, Microsoft had invested in Klout. Celebrities knew about their Klout scores, and some even had Klout accounts. Forums like Quora and Reddit regularly hosted discussions about Klout.

This is where I found information on what constituted a “good” Klout score. 

What Was Considered a Good Klout Score?

40 was an average Klout Score, 50 was a good score, and 70+ was amazing, according to the discourse in one Quora thread. 

But no one could figure out the exact formula for how Klout scores were calculated—or if they were even remotely accurate. 

In the Quora thread above, blogger David Fitzsimmons says, “Rather bizarrely Klout scores me at 61 and says I am an expert on Iceland (never been) & being a Mum (I’m male) among other things. Perhaps most weirdly I am an expert in toilets.” 

(Fitzsimmons’ blog is still live. You can see the full breakdown of his Klout experience there.)

This cheeky Business Insider piece from 2011 breaks the scoring system down a little more. It appeared to have three main components. 

Alyson Shontell, author of the Business Insider piece, compared her scores with Justin Bieber’s. At the time, Bieber had an overall Klout Score of 100.

• Network Influence (Bieber 79, Shontell 32)
• Amplification Probability (Shontell 43, Bieber 21)
• True Reach (Bieber 7.2 million, Shontell 7k)

Shontell’s overall Klout Score of 59 was no match for Bieber’s 100. 

Back then, no one could believe that Justin Bieber was more influential than anyone else in the whole, entire world. 

So Klout updated its algorithm around 2012. With this update, then-president Barack Obama beat out Bieber with a score of 99 vs 92, as captured for posterity in a 2012 Forbes article.

By then, a Klout score included more than just Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn data. It also included data from Google+, Wikipedia, Bing, Instagram, and Foursquare. 

Flouting Your Klout 

At its zenith, Klout had 20 million users and a spoof competitor called Flout, which let you set your influence score at whatever number you desired. 

The spoof site was created by Pat Nakajima, a then-employee of GroupMe, and Anoop Ranganath, then a Foursquare employee. 

If you haven’t already sensed it—I’m sure you have—Klout was more than a little bit controversial. And it was the butt of plenty of jokes.

Still, it was popular enough that Lithium Technologies, now part of Khoros, acquired it from Fernandez for that massive sum of $200 million on March 27, 2014. In this Wayback Machine screenshot from 2015, Klout looks a little more polished.

But the often-mocked and only vaguely understood site would only last for three more years. 

Why Klout Shut Down

Everyone seems to have their own opinion on why Klout shut down. The biggest—and probably most accurate—is that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became law throughout the European Union in April 2016. 

The regulation applied to any business that could potentially serve or collect data from individuals in the EU. 

Which basically covered most businesses around the globe. GDPR introduced strict rules that required transparency, accountability, and explicit user consent for collecting and processing personal data.

This would make it much harder for businesses to scrape data—even from public platforms like Twitter—without getting the user’s informed and explicit consent.

The official deadline for GDPR adherence was May 25, 2018. 

Yep, that’s right: the exact same day that Klout was shut down. 

The GDPR was formed to solve a problem: the lack of control and protection over personal data in an increasingly digital world.

Klout was part of that problem.

If you look back through the era when Klout was most popular, you can see signs of discomfort with the platform.

A 2012 Reddit thread on r/xkcd—a subreddit for fans of the xkcd webcomic by Randall Munroe—gives you an idea of this. Munroe linked to this comic in the thread. 

Under the link to the comic, Redditors wondered what Klout even was. Then, once they found out, they expressed disdain for the whole idea. 

But they also did some digging and unearthed a troubling 2012 piece in WIRED about Klout. 

The piece alleges that in some situations, companies were looking at their potential new hires’ Klout scores before offering employment. Never mind their actual work experience. 

And then there’s the part of a quote that was quoted on that 2012 r/xkcd Reddit thread: “At the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas last summer, clerks surreptitiously looked up guests’ Klout scores as they checked in. Some high scorers received instant room upgrades, sometimes without even being told why.” 

Did all those guests know they even had a Klout score? 

Maybe not. 

This was the big problem with Klout: it wasn’t based on transparency and consent. 

My Experience with Klout 

Back in 2014, I was trying to start a remote editing business. I made a Twitter account and started posting regularly in an attempt to promote my services. 

After several months, a friend suggested I look up my Klout score to see how influential I was on the platform.

I didn’t know what Klout was. And I definitely had no idea that I was being scored. I remember looking myself up on Klout for the first time and seeing my name next to those big white numbers superimposed on orange. 

I felt a vague sense of violation, like a stranger was watching me through a window while I went about my work day. Why was this site collecting information from my social media? Could anyone look me up and find this Klout Score? 

I remember pushing the feeling away. I had work to do to increase my Klout, whether I liked it or not. 

But within a year, my editing business hadn’t taken flight. I was working as a substitute teacher instead, and I forgot all about Klout. 

Until I sat down to write this piece. 

Now, I’ve concluded that Klout shut down because of its shaky foundation. There was no opting in to having Klout publish a score about you. 

And according to some users, it was ridiculously hard to remove yourself—and your score—from Klout. Worse are the rumors that when Klout noticed people were trying to opt out of having a score, it doubled down on making the process difficult.

Under a 2011 article about how to opt out of Klout, an anonymous commenter wrote, “Thank you. A friend said she’d easily opted out, but when I tried to opt out the way she had, I found that Klout had made it more difficult, and I gave up. It’s a pernicious little site…”

Even in the Wild West of the Internet, this type of shadiness was clearly not well-received. 

And as the web continued to explode in use, lawmakers finally began to realize the real-world effects of weak and outdated internet privacy laws. 

Hence the GDPR. And the increased scrutiny on how companies collect, process, and use personal data. 

A slew of other national and global laws soon followed the GDPR’s example. 

In short, Klout could no longer rely on harvesting user data from social media without user consent. 

After May of 2018, when Lithium Technologies shut Klout down, it never made a comeback. 

The Legacy of Klout: Why it Mattered

Controversial though it was, Klout was one of the first platforms to measure individual people’s online influence. 

It helped us start talking about what it means to have clout in the digital world. Perhaps most importantly of all, it gave early indicators of a link between digital clout and its real-world benefits. 

And it almost certainly contributed to the rise of influencers as we know them today. 

That’s because Klout pushed individuals and brands to think critically about their online engagement. Organizations started to value social media as a place to connect with consumers in a way they hadn’t before. 

Even though the idea of an “influencer” seemed strange before Klout, countless brands have harnessed the full power of influencers in the years since Klout disappeared.

But Klout’s downfall also shows us what happens if we try to be sneaky about digital influence and privacy. If we try to get ahead faster by skipping something as important as obtaining consent. 

They want transparency, openness, and the right to choose whether they participate in something.

Even in a virtual space like the internet.