What Is Ello?
Group of Friends
Ello was originally made by a group of artists and designers who wanted to create their own kind of social network, one that was different than Facebook or Google+. At first, it was only for them, but soon more and more people wanted to join, and they began to open the network to the public.
No Ads
The first thing you’ll notice when you sign into Ello is the minimalist, simple design. What you won’t notice is ads. That’s because Ello doesn’t have any, and they never will. Ello was founded with the idea of never having ads and never data-mining profiles, practices which many other social networks use.
In fact, they’re so committed to this that they organized into a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) on October 20th, 2014, while the site was still in beta. These corporations are built around trying to benefit society as a whole instead of profits. They are legally obligated to look at the impact any of their decisions will have on society, including their own social network. The result is a company that doesn’t have ads now, and has made it hard to ever have ads in the future.
But How Will They Make Money?
Like other social networks, Ello is free for members to use. Since most other social networks make revenue by selling ads, it raises the question of how the company hopes to every make money. The answer is in additional features.
Over time, Ello will roll out special features. Members will be able to still access their core features and the basic profiles for free, and are under no obligation to add these extra features. However, if they want to add these features, then they’d have to pay a small fee.
This same business model is actually popular with many video games. These are known as “freemium” games, and are popular on mobile devices as well as existing social networks like Facebook.
Invite-Only
A big that makes Ello stand out is their “Invite-Only” policy. The idea is that the social network will grow organically. Every member gets a certain number of invites which they an issue to others, so only people who already know someone in Ello can join. That being said, you can request an invite through their network, and the invite-only status may change in the future. As of this writing, the network is still in public beta with no end date announced, so the invite-only policy may stand for some time.