A Mainstream Invasion

Mainstream media started to notice the engagement of their audiences with blogs and how they were used to chare information. One of the big breakthroughs in making blogs a mainstream news source came via the BBC News site in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina (New Orleans USA)

• The Guardian contains links to a ‘daily digest of blogs’

• ‘Microblogging’ - Twitter and Tumblr

• 2010 - 11% of bloggers say it is their main income

Zoella

• Real name is Zoe Sugg

• Started blogging as ‘Zoella’ in 2009, she was working as an apprentice at an interior design company when she created her first blog, the fashion, beauty, and lifestyle blog expanded into a YouTube channel in 2009, while she was working for British clothing retailer in New Look

• Named one of “Britain’s most influential Tweeters” by the Telegraph in 2013

• 2013 - named as one of the Nation Citizen Service’s ambassadors, helping to promote the newly launched youth service, in 2014, when she was named as the first “Digital Ambassador” for Mind, a mental health charity

• Featured on 2014 single “Do They Know It’s Christmas”

• Her main channel, Zoella, is mostly fashion, beauty, hauls, and ‘favourites’ videos (showing her favourite products of the previous month). Her second channel MoreZoella contains mostly vlogs where she shows her viewers what she does in her daily life and her family since having a child

• Zoella’s makeup range at Superdrug sold out on the first day

• HAs suffered with, and talks about anxiety

• Partner is Alfie Deyes - creator of PointlessBlog

Blogs

• Blogging (and later clogging) was originally called Weblog and the term started in 1999

• Blog - word of the year in 2004

• In 1999 only 23 blogs existed online, compared to 2024 where there are not over 600 million blogs

• The ability to monetise blogs came via a company called AdSense in 2003, and with this came the rise of bloggers writing about how to make money from blogging

• One of the first famous bloggers to do this goes by the username Problogger