Interest in Ello, the ad-free social network posited as a rival to Facebook, seems to be collapsing, according to data from Google Trends.
A graph of searches in the past 30 days on “Ello” shows that after an early peak on 26 September, followed by a higher one on 30 September, the number of searches has now declined to a level almost as low as on 23 September, when the network was just starting to grow.
Ello describes itself as “simple, beautiful and ad-free”, and aimed to attract a more disparate group of people than Facebook - from which a number of its early users fled after the giant social network began to impose a “real names” requirement on users, which was particularly upsetting to some drag artists.
Ello opened to the public on 7 August with 90 users on an invite-only basis. By early October it could claim more than 1 million users and to be receiving up to 100,000 invite requests per day.
The site says that it will not use advertising, unlike Facebook - though that has raised the question of how it would generate enough revenues to support the cost of running the service. One suggestion made by co-founder Paul Budnitz is that users could “buy” extra features, rather like purchasing an app for a device.
Interest in Ello, measured in terms of web searches, seems to have peaked at about one-tenth that of Twitter - a relatively high measure, but miniscule compared to Facebook, which garners 95% of searches relating to the three companies over the period, while Twitter gets between 4% and the remaining 5%.
Searches for a network’s name aren’t necessarily synonymous with its usage, but trends in searches can offer an insight into the general direction of interest in a topic or site.
