Social media has become insanely popular in the past few years, with Facebook leading the pack. Facebook has over one million active monthly users, making it the most popular social media platform in use currently.
As Facebook has progressed, the platform has changed in a variety of ways. It has become more user friendly, and recently, messages have changed. But the most noticeable change was the appearance of ads on the site.
Advertisements first appeared on Facebook around 2007 and were clearly advertisements. They became more and more prevalent on the site and now advertisements can be found in the newsfeed as sponsored stories. The amount of advertisements has created quite a stir and caused some people to jump off the Facebook bandwagon.
In the wake of the decline in Facebook’s popularity among some people, different social media platforms have popped up. The most recent site to do so, and with quite a big splash, is Ello.
Created by a Vermont Bike Shop owner, Ello recently opened up to the public on August 7th. Currently, Ello is invite only. And apparently people are requesting invites at an alarming rate.
What is the big deal with Ello? Ello has been called the “anti-facebook” network because its founder has pledged to not advertise on the site, or sell user data — two things for which Facebook comes under critique.
The site has come under critique since its release because, despite its popularity, it has been buggy and not user friendly. Yet people are still excited about it because it is advertisement-free social media!
It’s amazing that people flock to a product like Ello quickly: Facebook, despite its flaws, has been popular and in high demand since its inception. The public craves social media more and more, despite the wide availability of multiple types of social media platforms.
The beauty of the world wide web makes networking on these sites easy and readily available — and, apparently, prone to advertisements.
Ello has promised users an advertisement-free social network, and I guess we’ll have to wait and see if they can hold true to this promise. I doubt that any young entrepreneur foresees selling out on their original vision for advertisements and sponsored networking. Only time will tell if this wonderful utopian social media site will continue to be all it’s cracked up to be.