Every new social media site wants to be the next Facebook. Only they want to be different. They want to do Facebook better. Think Diaspora, think Friendster, think iTunes Ping, think MySpace. These shops are either closed or floundering and there are hundreds more. Heck even Google+ is struggling to be relevant, despite its seemingly limitless resources.
Enter Ello. Created as a private site by several artists and programmers, their website says peer pressure made them expand to a public site, currently in beta testing by invitation only. When they do bring the site completely live, they promise to be different than Facebook and others by going 100% ad free. Here is part of their pledge:
Ad Free
Ello doesn’t sell ads. Nor do we sell data about you to third parties.
Virtually every other social network is run by advertisers. Behind the scenes they employ armies of ad salesmen and data miners to record every move you make. Data about you is then auctioned off to advertisers and data brokers. You’re the product that’s being bought and sold.
Collecting and selling your personal data, reading your posts to your friends, and mapping your social connections for profit is both creepy and unethical. Under the guise of offering a “free” service, users pay a high price in intrusive advertising and lack of privacy.
We also think ads are tacky, that they insult our intelligence and that we’re better without them.
Read more about our no-ad policy here.
Ello will be free and ad free forever. So, what’s the catch? How will they make money and stay afloat? They say they will occasionally have special features you can pay to use. That’s it. Since most people don’t want to pay to use a social media site, the paid features may not be overwhelmingly popular for personal use. Small businesses may not have the time or resources to experiment with and develop a new social media platform, but if it catches on, they may need to adjust their priorities. And at some point Ello will need a more substantial revenue stream and business users will have to have a presence with them in some form or they will not survive.
The look of the site is clean, non-cluttery and compared to Facebook, kinda… bland or let’s say artsy. But, lots of black and white makes it a good platform to post pictures.
So, it remains to be seen if users are tired of the ads, the newsfeed algorithms and the privacy issues with Facebook and are ready for something new or if they are able to ignore the things they don’t like for the comfort and wide-spread familiarity of an old friend.
Stay tuned.
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