Most of the users profiles I have clicked on seem pretty boring. I fail to see what is so attractive about it.
I definitely am taking the owners claim of "31,000 requests an hour" with a grain of salt.
Honestly, does the average person even care about being advertised to, or having their data mined? I have never heard anyone outside of tech circles even talk about it.
1. It's beautiful, which they had to add because they knew just saying "we won't sell your data" would not go far enough. They needed that extra edge. In my humble opinion, it's actually quite ugly, so I find it pretty funny they are advertising this as a selling point.
2. They don't sell your data. We all know this is flawed because there is no promise this won't happen in the future, and to boot MOST normal people do not care about this.
Their initial launch had the right elements that allowed it to go viral and non-technical people started signing up. I would LOVE to see some stats from the Ello team around retention, as I am willing to bet a large sum of money that stat is really bad.
As for what's attractive about it: it's not Facebook. People are ready for something different. I noticed more and more people talking about time spent on Facebook the way they talk about time watching bad TV or eating junk food ... plus, in my experience, most people really do find Facebook's ads irritating. Plus for a chunk of people, the "real names" issue is a big deal; and this follows the stuff about Facebook's emotional manipulation experiments.
Of course that doesn't mean that Ello's the answer to what people are hoping for; it's too early to tell how successful it will be. But I certainly believe they were getting 31,000 requests for invites an hour. Even if they were at level for 3 days straight at that level is only 2 million people -- a tiny portion of Facebook's english-speaking population.
A lot of bits are breaking, falling off, getting fixed, and getting added, so it's rather much in flux.
The clue factor is high, though one of my first observations is that one of the adventures of new discussion sites is rediscovering all the people you'd found annoying elsewhere and blocked.
It shines in some areas, lacks in others, the privacy, ads, and funding questions are very much open, but I think it's got a good start.
Just have a look at Google+, millions of people gave that a try but in the end only a very limited number of those formed enough connections to justify primarily sharing things on there.
The question then really is, if there is enough of these niche groups that will provide enough user retention to make the economics work. There has been plenty of things written regarding app development and the difficulties in supporting recurring costs with one time fees. I suspect you would need a pretty significant userbase to support even a small team on cheap one time feature purchases.
This was a pretty connected set of early adopters moving at once. Would things have been different if Google had quickly relented and said "okay, sure, if you wanna be Fuzzybutt Wolftaur on G+, go for it"? I dunno. But chasing them away, along with all the other people with scarier reasons to want to avoid using their real name, sure didn't help.
But I do know a bunch of people who value their privacy. They just don't know what they can do about it.
It's a nice idea but no for-profit has figured it out yet. Diaspora accomplishes it but lacks the most valuable asset a social network could have, which is a large userbase.