Ello

History [edit]

Two weeks in September

Paul Budnitz and Todd Berger built Ello in March 2014 as a private network for seven artists and programmers, then opened it publicly with a manifesto. It promised no advertising and no sale of user data, in a line that spread further than the site did: "You Are Not a Product."

In September 2014 Facebook began enforcing its real-name policy, which fell hardest on drag performers in San Francisco. A significant part of the LGBTQ community left, and a great many of them arrived at Ello. At the peak it was processing more than 30,000 signup requests an hour, and invitations were being resold, as they always are.

Roughly 20 percent of those signups were still active a week later. The rush was over almost as quickly as it began.

The contradiction

In October 2014 Ello reorganised as a public benefit corporation, which legally bound it never to run advertising, and in the same month raised $5.5 million in venture capital. Both things were reported the same week, and the criticism was immediate. A benefit corporation cannot be made to advertise, but venture capital still expects a return, and the ways left to produce one were limited.

What Ello did with the next several years was actually rather good. It stopped trying to be a Facebook replacement and became a network for artists, illustrators and designers, with commissioning briefs and a genuine community. It launched an iPhone app in 2015 and was written about in Wired in 2016 as a place where artists were doing real work.

Gone in a weekend

Ello was acquired by Talenthouse, a creative-brief platform. In February 2023 The Observer reported that Talenthouse was withholding payments from artists who had won its briefs. In March The Guardian reported the parent company was close to failure with most subsidiaries closed and staff laid off. In May the company described its own position as a critical financial situation.

Ello started returning 500 errors on every page for days at a time in June 2023. On 18 July it went down and did not come back. There was no announcement and no message to users. On 9 August the web application was apparently deleted, leaving a bare Heroku error page.

A network built on a promise about how it would treat its users ended by not telling them anything at all.

The domain today

ello.co now redirects to an online casino affiliate site with no connection to Ello, its founders or its artists. The link in the fact box is kept because it is where the service lived, not because there is anything there worth visiting.