We built the largest index of reviewed and categorized fashion and beauty blogs – more than 5000. These are the takeaways on what readers are engaging with when it comes to style content online.

Refinery29 is one of the largest fashion blogs to go after the content + commerce business model, and now TechCrunch is reporting that Refinery29 recently raised $3.5 million. We estimated Refinery29’s valuation at $20 million, based on other blog sales and 2011 revenue estimates of $8 million, but in 2012 the estimates were $20 million. […]

The Cut, one of the 99 most influential fashion blogs, will be launching an expanded version next week.

Vogue recently launched an “influencer network” that was light on influential bloggers, likely due to the fact that Vogue and its advertisers were the only ones to benefit in any meaningful way; but not every Conde Nast publication is so lopsided in their approach to working with fashion bloggers.

Lucky magazine recently launched the Lucky Style Collective, a network that will make a network of fashion and beauty bloggers true partners of the magazine.

After taking time to expand our starting index from 500 manually reviewed fashion blogs to more than 1000, we’ve published the results of our April/May 2011 ranking. What a difference a year makes: while almost none of the influential blogs from our April 2010 listing actually lost influence, there were quite a few that gained influence fast enough to shake up the top 99.

Here’s one… different fashion blog trend: turns out a lot of fashion blogger favorites aren’t that into most fashion blogs.

Despite their popularity, most fashion bloggers have insisted for a while now that they aren’t competing with fashion magazines. A quarterly report on magazine revenue suggests that it’s time to listen to them.

Though they’ve captured respectable fashion audiences, bloggers have yet to capture the advertisers.

If you think fashion bloggers have little to no power or clout in the industry, get this: one fashion blogger created enough buzz to cause the cancellation of M.A.C.’s expected Rodarte makeup line, which was to be launched September 15.

Another quarter marks another update to the Style99, our comprehensive fashion blog ranking of the world’s most influential style blogs. Our total index now includes more than 500 active blogs, up from 400 in the last ranking. The very top of the list hasn’t changed much, but past the top 5 blogs there’s definitely movement. Some of the changes come from newly included blogs, but most come from publishers in the January ranking making significant gains in multiple areas.