Interest in Ello, the ad-free social network posited as a rival to Facebook, seems to be collapsing, according to data from Google Trends.



A graph of searches in the past 30 days on “Ello” shows that after an early peak on 26 September, followed by a higher one on 30 September, the number of searches has now declined to a level almost as low as on 23 September, when the network was just starting to grow.

Search volume for Ello through Google in the 30 days up to 14 October 2014. Photograph: Guardian

Ello describes itself as “simple, beautiful and ad-free”, and aimed to attract a more disparate group of people than Facebook - from which a number of its early users fled after the giant social network began to impose a “real names” requirement on users, which was particularly upsetting to some drag artists.

Ello opened to the public on 7 August with 90 users on an invite-only basis. By early October it could claim more than 1 million users and to be receiving up to 100,000 invite requests per day.

The site says that it will not use advertising, unlike Facebook - though that has raised the question of how it would generate enough revenues to support the cost of running the service. One suggestion made by co-founder Paul Budnitz is that users could “buy” extra features, rather like purchasing an app for a device.

Interest in Ello, measured in terms of web searches, seems to have peaked at about one-tenth that of Twitter - a relatively high measure, but miniscule compared to Facebook, which garners 95% of searches relating to the three companies over the period, while Twitter gets between 4% and the remaining 5%.

Comparative search volume for Ello (blue) and Twitter (red) through Google in the 30 days up to 14 October 2014. Photograph: Guardian

Comparative search volume through Google for Ello, Twitter and Facebook over the 30 days up to 14 October 2014. Photograph: Guardian

Searches for a network’s name aren’t necessarily synonymous with its usage, but trends in searches can offer an insight into the general direction of interest in a topic or site.