Empire Avenue

» see empireavenue.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

empire avenue's peak years overlap with my online life, but the demographic did not. the user base was social-media marketers and twitter-power-user types, the influence-tracking crowd that read mashable and ran social-media-marketing world events. on ttnet in ankara through 2010 to 2015 i was running stack overflow and twitter and youtube but i was not in the marketing-twitter cohort that empire avenue grew on. for whatever reason, it stayed in my periphery.

duleepa wijayawardhana started empire avenue in edmonton in 2009 with co-founders. the public launch was february 23 of 2010. anyway, the mechanic was a virtual stock market. you joined, the system gave you a starting share price tied to your social-media activity across twitter and facebook (later instagram and linkedin). other users could buy or sell shares in you. share prices moved with your actual social-media activity, and the platform paid virtual dividends in a currency called eaves.

the underlying idea was an influence score with a price discovery mechanism layered on top. anyway, klout had the score-only version and would launch a few months later. empire avenue's pitch was that scores meant more if you could actually trade them. for whatever reason by mid-2011 the platform was getting press coverage from techcrunch and the venture community, framed as the gamified influence economy.

the post-2013 decline followed the same curve as klout. influence-scoring as a category lost cultural relevance once the twitter-marketing era cooled and the social-media-marketing world moved to followers-and-engagement metrics that lived inside the platforms themselves. peoplebrowsr acquired empire avenue in 2015 and rebranded it to empire.kred on september 9 of that year, dropping the avenue name. the rebranded site limped on until november 10 of 2024.

~ the case file ~

~ the ticker ~

anyway, the actual interface was a stock-ticker styled dashboard. you had a portfolio of other users on one side and a market overview showing trending shares on the other. each user was an asset with a price chart. the price moved up when that person was active on social media, down when they went quiet.

in those days the eaves currency was the friction layer. you earned eaves by being held by other users, by being active, by completing missions on the platform. you spent eaves to buy shares, to run promotional missions, to feature your posts on the empire avenue feed. for whatever reason the gamification was dense. for users who liked numbers going up, it was the kind of thing you opened daily.

~ the rebrand ~

this part you had to be in the influence-marketing world to actually follow. peoplebrowsr bought empire avenue in 2015. that company had built a twitter analytics platform and was looking for a complementary social-engagement product. the rebrand on september 9 of '15 moved the domain from empireavenue.com to empire.kred and shortened the name. for whatever reason the press treated it as a relaunch rather than a sale.

the relaunch was thin. anyway by 2016 the user base was already smaller than it had been at peak. the rebranded empire.kred shipped a few new features through 2017 to 2019 and added integrations with instagram and linkedin. but the active community was already in slow drift. the eaves economy kept running. the missions kept being posted. it just had fewer people each year.

~ the long tail ~

the actual shutdown announcement came in late 2024. on november 10 of '24 the empire.kred team posted the end-game notice. anyway the platform had run for fifteen years total across the two brand names. for whatever reason the obit duleepa posted on the empire.kred blog framed it as a community ending rather than a product failure.

in those days empire avenue lived in a small category of social-media-influence products that never quite found a business model. klout was the score-only sibling, empire avenue the gamified-market take. peerindex had taken the b2b angle. all of those are gone now. anyway, the underlying premise that online influence could be measured and traded as an asset survived. it just lives inside the platforms themselves now, as ad targeting and creator-fund payouts.

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