Unfulfilled Promise as Social Contagion to Gain Foothold in a Network
Ello, a social media platform where creatives post their work, first marketed themselves as an ad-free version of Facebook to appeal to new users. This sort of promise attracted millions of users in just a few short months, gaining Ello attention and traction to deem themselves significant. However, users quickly became dissatisfied with the lackluster UI and the inability to connect with others, leading to the waning of the network traffic. Since then, a new CEO, Todd Berger, has instructed the company to stop marketing themselves as such and has redirected the company’s external face to be better representative of what it really is – a space where creatives can share their work with one another. The idea is to have ad agencies and others to leverage the service to find talent to employ or recruit. Since they’ve been more honest in the way they’ve been “cultivating a really niche and creative community,” although numbers are lower in comparison to the original number of sign ups, the company seems to be doing well.
The case with Ello discusses the topic of social contagions and the subsequent network effects quite well. Here, we can see how various network clusters adopted a technology due to a particular trigger (ad-free Facebook>>>). Although not explicitly discussed in this article, I could speculate that some of these clusters that quickly adopted this technology can be those who are disgruntled/uncomfortable/bothered by Facebook’s pervasive ads. A cluster is a group of people who meet a certain set of requirements, have similar values and/or have commonalities – be they cultural, societal, racial, socioeconomical, etc. Another cluster could early-adopters who like to jump early on opportunities of the next “big thing.” Despite these differences in network clusters, the underlying persuasive factor is the same – they were expecting an experience similar to Facebook – connecting with one another – without ads. At this point, Ello had gathered about 3 million community members in a few short months. Although there isn’t a price to sign up, let’s say that we define price for a user as price they pay in time / effort / opportunity-cost of using the service over spending time on other channels. We can apply the principal of tipping points here to indicate how Ello first gained enough traction to stay alive, but that unfulfilled promise brought them back down past the tipping point and into irrelevance.
The initial promise of “ad-free Facebook” gave Ello enough of a push to gain enough users who were willing to pay their price (equal to the tipping point, the price at which Ello gains enough users to stay relevant in a network). However, when Ello didn’t meet their users’ expectations, users were discouraged and stopped using the service. This triggered a significant decrease in active users, leading them back down below their tipping point. When you reach below the tipping point, this means that unless you do something drastic to turn your business model around and gain back users who are willing to pay that price, you will eventually die out and hit 0. This is indicated by the fact that many people believed Ello had disappeared or gone out of business, since they were underground and/or irrelevant in the tech landscape. This was when they hit 0. So, two problems – first, they gained users but the wrong clusters of users, and second, they didn’t fulfill user expectations which caused them to become unpopular.
Since, Ello has turned around and targeted the appropriate audience for their intended service – real creatives who need a platform to share their work and gain value from attention of other creatives, employers and ad agencies. Since they’ve reworked their platform to have useful/usable UI and an honest motto, Ello has gained a respectable, niche community of creatives – there are approximately 600,000 MAU’s at the current moment, and they seem to be growing.