It isn't like this idea is unique: there are tons of people who have built "clean and ad-free" just-barely-enough social networking services. It isn't like this idea is better: most reviews have stated it is derivative at best (complaints of essentially just cloning other services and not offering anything terribly unique) and awkward at worst (with very little "polish" to the UI). It isn't like this idea is even particularly timely: right now the big news items are about data theft in the cloud (due to "the fappening", which is a problem this service doesn't address), not intrusive data collection from advertisements (an idea that is "so two years ago": last year the focus shifted to governments before now shifting to security).
The articles I read just now to figure out "what is Ello, anyway" talk about it like it has been unavoidable: that the author's Facebook news feed was full of talk of this service, and that certainly this was true for readers as well; in fact, I only seem to know one person who knew of it, they only learned of it because they follow Andy on Twitter (and thereby read this piece), and was quite negative about the idea that Ello would be successful or even exist for very long.
Yet, there really are tons of articles about this service, in major newspapers and serious business weblogs. If anyone is "in the know" on what they did to get this much press this quickly--and again, to cause someone like Andy to spend their time writing such a response to their platform (as opposed to just ignoring it like any other expected failure)--I would seriously love to understand (and mean that seriously, as something very interesting has happened here that I imagine would be very useful to understand).