Klout

The site that scored your online influence from 1 to 100, sold for $200 million and switched off the week GDPR arrived

Shut down
19902026

Klout was a San Francisco company that measured social media influence and published it as the Klout Score, a number from 1 to 100 calculated from activity on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other networks. Brands used the scores to pick influencers and handed out Klout Perks; users argued about them constantly. Lithium Technologies bought Klout in March 2014 in a deal reported at around $200 million and shut the site down on 25 May 2018, the day GDPR came into force.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2008
  2. 2008 Launch
    Klout is founded

    The Klout Score, 1 to 100.

  3. 2011
  4. October 2011 Decline
    A scoring change resets everyone

    Scores moved overnight and users revolted.

  5. 2014
  6. 27 March 2014 Acquisition
    Lithium Technologies buys Klout

    Reported at around $200 million.

  7. 2018
  8. 10 May 2018 Shutdown announced
    Lithium announces the closure
  9. 25 May 2018 Shutdown
    klout.com shuts down

    The day GDPR took effect.

The site through time

Browse klout.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Klout, Inc. 2008–2014 Founded Founded by Joe Fernandez and Binh Tran; about $40 million raised
Lithium Technologies 2014–2018 Acquisition, $200M Reported at around $200 million, mostly stock

Key figures [edit]

MetricValueAs ofConfidence
Valuation (USD) ▲ $200M 27 March 2014 Reported The reported price Lithium paid

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Lithium Technologies, which had bought Klout in March 2014, announced on 10 May 2018 that the site would close on 25 May 2018, saying the Klout Score was not core to its social customer service business. The date was the day the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation took effect, and Klout was a database of scores calculated about people, largely without their involvement.

Our analysis: Klout sold a number that measured nothing anyone could check. It ranked people on signals from networks it did not own, so every API change at Twitter or Facebook moved everybody's score, and the score itself created a small industry of people gaming it. That was survivable while brands paid for influencer lists; it was not survivable once a regulation arrived that gave every European the right to ask what the score was, how it had been calculated and to have it deleted. Lithium had bought Klout for its data, not its website, and closing the site cost it nothing.

History [edit]

A number for how much you mattered

Klout was founded in 2008 by Joe Fernandez, who had come up with the idea while recovering from jaw surgery and unable to speak, and Binh Tran. The product was one number: your Klout Score, between 1 and 100, calculated from how many people reacted to what you posted across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and later Instagram and YouTube. Barack Obama and Justin Bieber sat at the top; everybody else got somewhere in the fifties and wondered why.

The score turned into a small economy. Brands bought influencer lists and gave out Klout Perks, free products for people above a threshold; a Las Vegas hotel and several airlines used scores for upgrades; a few job adverts asked for a minimum Klout Score, which became the standard example of everything wrong with the idea. Klout raised about $40 million and claimed to score hundreds of millions of people, most of whom had never signed up.

Bought for the data

Lithium Technologies, which sold community and social customer service software to large brands, bought Klout in March 2014 in a deal widely reported at around $200 million, mostly stock. Lithium wanted the scoring engine inside its own products, not the consumer website, and after the acquisition the site drifted: the Perks programme wound down, the mobile apps were dropped, the score stopped being a talking point.

On 10 May 2018 Lithium announced that klout.com would close on 25 May. That was the day the GDPR took effect across the European Union, and a service whose entire business was profiling and scoring people from third-party data, without asking them, was exactly what the regulation had been written about. Lithium framed it as focus, not compliance. Both were true.

The domain today

klout.com is gone; the address does not resolve to a working site. Lithium was itself merged into Khoros in 2019, and the scoring engine went with it.

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Sources [edit]

  1. RIP Klout TechCrunch 10 May 2018 [archived]
  2. Klout loses its influence, announces shutdown on May 25 Search Engine Journal 11 May 2018 [archived]
  3. Lithium acquires Klout TechCrunch 27 March 2014 [archived]
  4. Klout: where did it go wrong? Econsultancy 16 May 2018 [archived]
  5. Lithium to shut down Klout in wake of GDPR Relevance 14 May 2018 [archived]

Last verified: 18 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).