Bloglovin'

» see bloglovin.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Bloglovin' was where the fashion blogs went to be followed, and that was not my corner of the internet. i read blogs in those years, plenty of them, but the ones i followed were about hardware and code, and i tracked them with a plain reader and later with Google Reader. Bloglovin' lived in the other half of the blog world, the one made of outfit posts and recipe photography, and its readers were mostly women who had built a daily round of sites they did not want to lose.

so what follows is the outside view, checked against the record. It started in Sweden in 2007 under the name Blogkoll, a small tool with one honest purpose, to let you keep track of the blogs you cared about without opening a browser tab for each one. You followed a blog, it landed in your feed, and you read down the list. That was the whole thing, and in the years when personal blogs were the beating center of the web, that was enough to matter.

Its big moment came from someone else's funeral. When Google shut Reader in the summer of 2013, millions of people lost the pipe that fed them their blogs overnight, and a lot of them washed up at Bloglovin'. It ended up the number-one reader for the fashion crowd, with a user count reported around twenty-five million at its height. For a few years it was the closest thing that world had to a shared front page.

Then the ground it stood on eroded. Blogging itself was draining into Instagram, and the people who used to write long outfit posts were becoming feeds you scrolled instead of sites you followed. IAC bought Bloglovin' in 2016, and over the spring of 2018 decided to shut the reader down, pointing at conflicts with its other holdings. In April 2018 the company came back rebranded as Activate, no longer a place to read blogs but a marketplace for pairing brands with influencers. The reader was gone, and the thing wearing its skin sold reach.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

Underneath, Bloglovin' was an RSS reader with the technical parts hidden and a soft, magazine-shaped face on top. That was the trick that made it work for a non-technical audience. Google Reader looked like an inbox and assumed you knew what a feed was. Bloglovin' looked like a wall of pretty thumbnails and never made you say the word RSS out loud. It carried the same plumbing as the readers a developer used, and dressed it for a reader who only wanted the blogs.

~ what really happened ~

There was no dramatic shutdown notice, no server going dark on a fixed date. The reader was simply walked away from and the company pointed itself at a different business, which is the quieter and more common way these things die. Activate limped on as an influencer platform, got bought by a partnership-marketing company called Impact in 2020, and by the early 2020s looked abandoned. What actually ended in 2018 was not a startup, it was a habit. A whole audience lost the single page where the blogs they loved used to gather, right as those blogs were dying anyway.

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