Piggybacking off of Cozy’s post (http://baboochka.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/a-simpler-social-network/) about Ello, the new social networking site, I think that it would be super cool to have a social networking site that doesn’t have anything to do with advertising. However, I’m not sure how effective that would actually be.
If you think about it, advertising fits right in with a social networking site. Advertisers upload content to these sites just like people do, trying to encourage others to view it and feel some sort of reaction to it. While ordinary social network users aren’t encouraging people to buy products and are often driven by motives other than money, advertising that we receive via social media can still be similar to the other kinds of information we receive on the sites.
That being said, I dislike ads on social media and think that it would be awesome not to have to deal with them anymore. I love Ello’s premise – take social media back to the people, keep it as a means for sharing just personal content.
It’s also been found that advertising on social networks is not necessarily very effective – according to an article on Forbes.com, http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviatemin/2013/12/03/dont-waste-money-make-your-social-media-advertising-smarter-more-original-more-effective/, only 20% of people have ever made a purchase because of a Facebook ad. And, as we’ve talked about in class, almost no one pays attention to banner ads or clicks on them purposefully.
So Ello’s got an idea here. Nobody likes ads, they’re not helpful, so why include them on their social media site? However, as Cozy suggested, it will be very difficult for Ello to sustain itself as a major social networking site without the payoff that comes from advertising. I want to believe in Ello and its future success, but I think we need to give it some more time to see if it can actually survive in the market without any kind of income.
Read more about Ello here: https://ello.co/manifesto
Tara O'Connor 