Lithium Technologies shuts down Klout Perks, but will honor remaining commitments
Sarah Buhr / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Lithium Technologies bought Klout for $200 million and installed it as a consumer-facing complement to its customer-experience software, with founder Joe Fernandez stepping down about a year into the deal. Killing Perks ahead of any broader Klout wind-down shows which half of that bet Lithium is abandoning first: the perk-and-deals layer that gave brands a reason to court high-scored users.
Honoring outstanding commitments rather than stranding them is the notable detail — the same courtesy later became a talking point in other acqui-shutdowns like FullContact's purchase of Mattermark.
First-order effects
- Brands and marketers who ran campaigns through Klout Perks lose their channel for rewarding influencers, while users holding pending rewards are kept whole by Lithium's commitment to honor them.
Second-order effects
- With Perks gone, Klout's remaining value to Lithium narrows to its scoring data and Twitter firehose relationships — pushing the company toward rebuilding around measurement rather than marketplace economics.
Third-order effects
- The sequence — acquire an influence platform, strip its consumer products, then eventually retire the score itself in favor of a new methodology — sketches how acquirers treat social-influence assets: monetizable data survives, consumer-facing perks programs do not.
The trend: Influence-scoring platforms are being absorbed and hollowed out by acquirers, with consumer reward programs shut down first and proprietary social data retained last.