Ello, Goodbye? Widely-Hyped Social Network Suffers Massive User Dropoff Six Months After Peak

Less than 6 months ago, Ello was widely-touted across the tech blogosphere as a great alternative to Facebook, for its lack of ads or anything like Facebook's "real names only" policy. Since then, however, the social network has seen a massive dropoff in usage, according to Similar Web: From a peak of 30 million visits in October, to just 9 million last month. Since social networks depend on highly active usage, I'd estimate these visits translating to Ello having about 1 million active users. Which is not nothing, but also quite niche -- for instance, that's about the number of active Second Life users still extant. Which is ironic, because Ello was also widely touted by some Second Life users angry at Facebook for prohibiting SL avatar names as accounts. 

"Disaffected Facebook users are abandoning ship," one SLer told me last September, "led by the LGBT crowd, in particular the Drag Queens who Facebook gave the ultimatum to this week. Second Life avatars have the same issues with the Drag Queens and so they are finding Ello an attractive, nonjudgmental alternative." 

Since then, however, a well-known drag queen is directly working with Facebook to help LGBT users with pseudonyms on Facebook, and the official Second Life fan page on Facebook has grown to nearly 380K members. Maybe Ello has suffered some technical/funding setbacks that a Google news search doesn't immediately reveal, and it's too early to count Ello out. (And there's nothing at all wrong with a social network being a niche, if you don't mind a niche, that is.) But so far, the proposition that the market is clamoring for a new social network with no ads or real names required... that's not quite panning out.

Google Trends, by the way, tells a similar sad story about Ello -- huge spike of interest last September, followed by a hella painful dive. If anything, this lack of growth is a great case study for why real names are so important to social network growth: If your old high school buddies or second cousin can't find you on Ello, they'll probably go back to looking for you... on Facebook.

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Comments

[Kitty Revolver]

Nathan Jurgenson, the co-founder of Theorizing the Web and a researcher for Snapchat, wrote a piece on ello in december on just this. Also the blog, Cyborgology, is a good place for academic commentary on digital media and its various intersections with life.

http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2014/12/31/what-was-ello/

[melponeme_k]

The reasons why Facebook still stands as the foremost social platform are the reasons why WOW is still the MMORPG and Second Life is still the first VR.

People have built things and made connections that they don't want to lose. That is the stickiness. It is also the reason why there is no innovation and everything becomes frozen in place.

Jaren Lanier wrote about this problem in his books.

[tollzrtrollz]

Avatars left Facebook and tried Ello and Google+. G+ worked better. You can find large avatar communities there. Anyone with an avatar identity on Facebook will eventually find their social life shut down. Move while you can. Get your friends to move too.

[Aliasi Stonebender]

Is this related to NWN's continual hangup on 'real names'? The failure of a social network to take down the million pound gorilla that is Facebook isn't really a solid thing for or against that point.