The Highlights Will Ello unseat Facebook? Only time will tell. But the early signs indicate that Ello has a good shot at carving out its own niche on the social network landscape. ●  37% of Ello users are female, 63% are male ●  36% of Ello users have never posted ●  27% of Ello users have posted more than three times ●  6 days after signup, about 20% of users remain active

33% posts containing

images

2% posts mentioning

Facebook

14% posts mentioning

Ello

8.3 average posts per

Active user

What is Ello? “Ello is a simple, beautiful, and ad-free social network created by a small group of artists and designers.”

And it seems to be everywhere Over the past week, Ello has been covered by TechCrunch, Mashable, and Harvard Business Review. It’s been called everything from the end of Facebook to just another stupid social network. So, which is it?

But what does the data say? This is the question we set out to answer. To conduct this research, we pulled Ello data directly from the site—all post, follower, and following data is publicly available to all users. Our sample size includes nearly 160,000 Ello users. Next, we loaded the raw data into RJMetrics for analysis. If you’d like to run this kind of analysis for your own business, sign up for a free trial of RJMetrics today.

The Rise of Ello Ello has been around since March, but growth was slow until the end of September 2014. Starting September 23rd, Ello began experiencing a huge surge in growth. TechCrunch covered Ello at peak hype, September 25th. After this point, new user acquisition began tapering off.

A Force to be Reckoned With But don’t let this fool you into thinking Ello isn’t a force to be reckoned with. New user acquisition isn’t as high as it was last week, but it’s significantly higher than it was last month. In addition, the number of active users on Ello is still 100x higher than it was before September 21st.

A Place in the Social Network Landscape Cohort analysis is the best way to see how user engagement is shifting over time. We zoomed in on Ello’s period of hyper- growth to see what we could learn. We were impressed to learn that about 20% of Ello users were active every day, 4, 5, and 6 days after account creation. We wanted to look back at another analysis we did in the early days of Twitter for comparison…

Twitter vs. Ello Back in 2009, when Twitter had been around for about three years, we analyzed its user engagement. We found that about 20+% of Twitter users were returning over the course of a given week. This closely matches what we’re seeing with Ello.

Jelly App vs. Ello Remember Jelly? When it launched earlier this year we analyzed active user cohorts by day as well. By Day 6, even the best-performing cohorts only had 10% of users still active. Ello’s user engagement numbers look much closer to Twitter’s than they do Jelly’s—a very good sign for the future.

Breakdown of User Activity Ello is doing a solid job retaining active users, but just how active are they? We segmented Ello’s entire population of users by how many times they have posted. 36% have never posted, and 18% have only posted once.

Instagram vs. Ello In periods of exponential growth, user activity on a new social network can be extremely volatile. Ello claims to be adding 3-4k new users per hour, 73% of which haven’t updated more than three times. But compare this to Instagram. Back in 2011, Instagram was adding 130,000 new users per week (~800 / hour) and 65% of all users had not uploaded more than three pictures. Again, Ello is holding its own.

The Future of Ello Breaking into the social landscape is harder today than it was two, three, or five years ago, but the initial data for Ello looks promising. Users are interested, trying out the app, and enough of them are sticking around to give Ello some staying power. We can’t predict the future, but early indicators in the data say that Ello has a real shot.

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