Before Influencers, There Were Bloggers

Nostalgia is a strange drug.

Free, easily accessible, and highly addictive.

Lately, I’ve found myself taking a few hits of it.

Back in the summer of 2008, I started blogging. When I launched my blog, I had absolutely no direction. It was just an online extension of me, a messy little corner of the internet where anything went. Music I was loving, makeup I’d just bought, photography experiments, ramblings about mental health, snippets of daily life.

Would we call that a “lifestyle blog” now? Probably.

At the time, it was just... blogging.

Like many bloggers of that era, I deleted and restarted more times than I can count. New layouts, new names, new ideas about what the blog *should* be. Rinse and repeat. Eventually though, I settled into what became my long-term online home.

In those early days there weren’t many UK bloggers around - at least not that I could easily find. Most of the blogs I discovered were based in the US. But geography didn’t matter much then. Neither did content category, gender, or lifestyle.

We supported each other.

We followed each other’s blogs, regardless of the category, if you had an interest in it, you supported, left thoughtful comments, shared posts, and genuinely cheered one another on. When Twitter arrived — the new “IT girl” on the internet block, it became another way to connect. Another place to hype each other up.

Real cheerleaders.

Maybe I’m romanticising it, but it felt like a simpler time. Influencing wasn’t really a thing yet. People shared products because they loved them... or because they hated them. Either way, it felt honest. There was effort in posts — real effort — not just quick snippets written to keep an algorithm happy.

Slowly, blogs began to change. They started looking more like digital magazines, and shorter, faster content became the trend.

Companies noticed.

They saw everyday people building communities and talking about the products they genuinely used. Sometimes those products had been bought with our own money. Sometimes they came from swaps with bloggers across the world.

I still remember a beauty blogger friend from the US shipping me THE **Urban Decay Naked palette** before it even launched in the UK — just one beauty lover sending something exciting to another.

Not PR.

Not a campaign.

Just community.

Then PR companies started taking chances on bloggers.

And that’s when the first big wave began.

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Bloggers started embedding YouTube videos into their posts. Video was becoming the next frontier. I tried it too, briefly, but I always felt like I got in my own way. I never quite found my space there.

For a while things still felt genuine. But when something grows, when it becomes more visible, more lucrative — the dynamics shift.

Cliques form.

Community changes.

What once felt like a group of people sharing a passion slowly started to resemble something closer to a pyramid. Everyone climbing, everyone trying to reach the top.

Somewhere along the way, I stepped back.

From around 2018 I became sporadic. I started living more offline. The last time I blogged before this year was in 2022.

Which is strange, because for years I never left my blog — even during the hardest periods of my life. It was always there. An outlet. A place to process things when I didn’t know how else to.

Coming back now, one of the biggest things I’ve noticed is the cost.

Everything has a price now; both figuratively and literally.

Keeping a blog alive isn’t cheap. Domains, hosting, email services. Editing software. Platforms that help schedule and share content across social media. Tools that used to make things easier now come with monthly subscriptions attached.

And then there’s the other cost: how much of yourself you choose to share.

How visible do you become?

How much do you turn your life into content?

Writing this probably sounds odd considering I’m still teetering on the edge of the influencer space. But I’ve always struggled with the idea that everything has to be glowing praise.

Because realistically, how many times can you say *“this is the best product I’ve ever used”* when you’ve tried five similar ones in the past three months?

Maybe what I’m really feeling is grief for what blogging used to be.

Nostalgia again.

I’ve spent nearly twenty years in this space. Long enough to watch the shift from bloggers to influencers. Long enough to see community turn into industry.

And maybe that’s why I’m still here.

Because somewhere between the algorithms, the brand deals, and the endless content cycles… there’s still a small piece of that original internet left.

The one where someone, somewhere, is writing a post simply because they want to share something they love.

Maybe this is my way of holding onto that piece.