Is Ello The Future of Social Media?

Lily Rugo ’18 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer

New site Ello sets out to change social media as we know it. Popular social media feeds bombard users with advertisements, and the new independently run website Ello intends to change that with their new method: no ads.

Started by a handful of artists and computer programmers as their private social network, the demand from others to use the website spawned the public version currently in its beta testing stages. Right now, the site is invitation only, and invites come from either a sign-up list through the Ello website, or given by someone already using Ello. Ello opened to the public in the spring of 2014, but only started to gain mass popularity after Facebook’s crackdown on user’s creating profiles with their real names

Currently, the website offers basic social media activities like friends, comments, sharing photos and links, and usernames based on an @ handle similarly to Twitter. As more features debut everyday, Ello is quickly becoming the hipster epitome of social media website. In fact, Ello’s lack of corporate advertising has become a point of pride for the Ello website.

“Your social network is owned by advertisers,” the Ello manifesto (yes, they have a manifesto) says, “Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold. We believe there is a better way.”

Touting their independence from advertisers or third-party information buyers, Ello assures users it will never sell ads or user information. Instead, Ello will support itself through optional for-purchase features, like in-app purchases in common phone apps, yet to be revealed. However, that doesn’t mean Ello will be completely ad-free for all users. Ello will allow anyone to join the website, including advertisers. But, unlike Facebook and Twitter, Ello makes these pages optional for users to follow, and can even separate company pages from friend’s profiles into two different feeds: FRIENDS and NOISE.

Users may view two feeds on the site. The “FRIENDS” feed shows posts from other users that one deems to be worth seeing. Other users’ posts are separated into the “NOISE” feed. This sorting is all up to individual users’ discretion.

If Ello sounds confusing, pretentious and slightly too hipster for its own good, a few beta users and journalists agree. USA Today reporter Jon Swartz said he found the website sparse and said “the site is buggy — it’s hard to search for people you know — and suffered an outage last weekend, which it blamed on a DDoS attack.” Because Ello is still in its newest stages, some bug and crashes are to be expected and forgiven, but the emptiness of a user’s homepage shouldn’t be so when, as Swartz reported, “…Ello is adding some 40,000 new members per hour, while some invites to the social network are for sale on eBay for as much as $5,000.”

Although the ad-free experience sounds enticing to many social media users, Ello’s ongoing development and invite-only status keep a majority of Internet citizens away. As of right now, they haven’t announced an open date for the public to sign up, and recently, Ello’s popularity has peaked since its September spike. As of now, Ello’s future has yet to be determined.