Social rating site Klout saw where society was heading with influencer marketing, but like many bad ideas that were a little ahead of their time, Klout will not live on to see the devastation they helped usher in.
Klout was one of the first to incentivize attention-seeking on social media with rewards of goods and services, not just incremental hits of dopamine. After Lithium acquired the company and put all their data into a machine learning dataset, they tossed it away like someone who lost a “verified” badge. Via CEO Pete Hess:
I’m writing to let you know that Lithium has made the decision to sunset the Klout service, effective May 25, 2018.
Lithium is committed to providing you with the technology and services that will enable you to differentiate your customer experience. Our recent launch of Lithium Messaging is evidence of our focus on this mission. The Klout acquisition provided Lithium with valuable artificial intelligence (AI) and machinelearning capabilities but Klout as a standalone service is not aligned with our long-term strategy.
Our goal with these AI and machine learning investments is to improve our customer care capabilities across the board, whether that’s self-service, peer-to-peer, or direct-to-brand. In the near-term, for example, we will be looking to improve agent productivity within SMM and improve the overall user experience in Community through the application of AI, while we are also planning the launch of a new social impact scoring methodology based on Twitter.
Klout is the reason we have people like Trump as leaders, social events like Fyre Festival, and platform-based celebrities like Woah Vicky.
• Sunsetting Klout (via Lithosphere)