Despite skepticism, this type of measure of influence is extremely valuable to brands and marketing firms. By 2012 Klout had $40 million in venture capital investment and a score of competitors, including PROSkore, Twitter Grader, and Peer Index. Word-of-mouth marketing is a huge buzzword, with advertisers salivating over the possibility of getting “authentic” person-to-person recommendations cheaply. (Adweek reported that Adidas was amazed when “some random user” made an animated .gif of one of their television ads, which garnered 90,000 reblogs on Tumblr without any money involved.) Klout is the ultimate status affordance, an entire business model based around the quantifiability of importance.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 253