FB's use of social engineering to induce personal disclosure, and their abuse of personal content for marketing, has sensitized a proportion of their customer base who want social media but don't want to be advertised at: the sort of folks who paid for the ad-free premium version of Livejournal, back before LJ gave up on the anglophone web and turned into a Russo-centric system. Ello looks like positioning as a logical sanctuary for privacy-savvy social media users. I suspect their long term plan is that they will start charging, eventually ... but not until they have enough users to be cash-flow viable.

The reality is that for most users this isn't a big issue - they don't understand it or don't care. Of course people don't want to be advertised at but by and large they're not willing to pay what it costs not to be advertised at so they put up with it.

Has it? I rather thought their growth curve had peaked and in some countries FB usage is falling. In particular, at least here in the UK, kids are allegedly abandoning FB for other messaging systems because their parents have finally figured out how to use it to keep tabs on them.

(And I for one no longer update my FB, precisely because their attitude towards monetization is so obnoxious. Meanwhile, I do continue to use a paid-for-with-real-money accounts on two other social networks that have rather more respect for their users.)

I don't know about falling usage, but facebook demographics are changing. They're losing "eyeballs" that don't have much money and are picking up eyeballs that do. I suspect that they're willing to make that trade.