Klout evolves into a content creation platform as it seeks to help you become more influential
Klout is evolving from a service that told you how much influence you had in terms of a numerical value, to a service that now tells you why you're influential and how you can improve on that.
Context & Ripple Effects
Klout's arc since its $8.5M Kleiner Perkins raise in January 2011 has been a fight over what a single number means: it pushed scores into the Twitter timeline via a Chrome extension, then rebuilt the metric around real-world influence in an August 2012 redesign, and landed Microsoft as a strategic investor with Bing integration that September. Along the way it absorbed real criticism — The Atlantic Wire's 'Klouchebag' piece and Brian Solis arguing Klout and PeerIndex measure something other than influence.
The February 2014 move answers those critiques structurally rather than defensively: instead of defending the number, Klout is becoming the tool that produces the influence it measures. The story drew same-day pickups from TechCrunch, Fast Company and Business Insider, signaling broad attention to whether a measurement company can reinvent itself as a creation platform.
First-order effects
- Users shift from receiving a score they can't act on to getting explanations of why they're influential plus suggested content — turning Klout's data feed into a daily-use product rather than a periodic vanity check.
- Klout's own corpus of user-generated content becomes training input for its influence model, collapsing the gap between measuring influence and manufacturing it.
Second-order effects
- Perks partners like Cathay Pacific, whose SFO lounge deal rewarded high scorers, now get a richer behavioral signal than a static number — but also face questions about whether self-improving users still represent organic influence.
- Rival influence scorers such as PeerIndex must decide whether to follow into content tooling or stay pure measurement, splitting the category along the exact line Solis's 2012 critique drew.
Third-order effects
- If measurement firms keep absorbing the production side, the influence-analytics market consolidates around closed-loop platforms where the same vendor creates, measures and monetizes the content — raising fresh independence questions for anyone relying on those scores.
- The pattern points toward influence scores functioning less as reputation infrastructure and more as engagement funnels, which would put them on a collision course with the networks whose activity they index.
The trend: Influence measurement is evolving from third-party scorekeeping into integrated create-and-measure platforms, with each vendor betting that owning the content loop beats auditing it.