I spoke with Klout in December 2013 about this -- I was interviewing for a Director position in the marketing department.

The long-term play for Klout's social influence algo was a monetization one -- selling the data to restaurants and brands who then leverage it to treat some customers and prospects "better" than others. The idea that you can "buy things with Klout" (cc James Altucher) and have a standard of influence for customer service was the underlying premise to all of it.

The problem, however, is scalability. Klout launched the Perks program in 2010 and attracted a lot of interest for just this -- monetizing influence data so brands could target their ideal consumers. But setup costs were enormous and it didn't scale. In fact, the person I spoke with at Klout essentially said it was a "$10-20mm /year business unit at best."

Now combine that information with the evolving landscape of content marketing. The amount of content available to us is officially overwhelming -- you can learn anything you want (and likely for free) at any time, from any device. We simply don't value quality content anymore as much we value the curation of quality content.

This is why RSS readers like Feedly.com and others startups for content curation (Summly, Contently, etc) are growing faster than the publications themselves (ie: NY Times paywall). Content is becoming the commodity, and curation is the new secret sauce.

If I recall correctly, User once tweeted something to the effect of "Sometimes I go to the book store and spend $100, other times I spend nothing. Curation is everything."