Your social network is owned by advertisers. Every post you share, every friend you make, and every link you follow is tracked, recorded, and converted into data. ~ Ello Manifesto

Two weeks ago almost no one had heard of Ello. But that was two weeks ago. September 24th, BetaBeat referred to Ello as “the mysterious social network”. September 25th, TechCrunch declared that Ello was “blowing up”. September 26th, The Daily Beast said “the service’s problems far outweigh the benefits”. September 28th, Ello experienced its first DDoS attack. September 29th, The Washington Post called Ello “hopelessly, irredeemably naive”.

We were curious how much truth lay in all the hype. But other than claims that Ello was adding 3,000-4,000 new users per hour , there wasn’t much data about the rising star. So we decided to get our own. To conduct this research, we pulled Ello directly from the site — all post, follower, and following data is publicly available to all users — and collected a sample size of nearly 160,000 Ello users. Next, we loaded the raw data into RJMetrics for analysis.

Here are a few highlights:

• 37% of Ello users are female
• 36% of Ello users have never posted
• 27% of Ello users have posted more than three times
• 6 days after signup, 25% of users are still active

On its own, the raw data reveals some interesting tidbits, but how does its performance stack up against older, more well-established social networks? Using analysis that we’ve done in the past we compared Ello’s performance against two of our most-loved platforms, Twitter and Instagram; and a brand new app that launched earlier this year, Jelly.

Here’s what we learned: