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.
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.
We just explored how fashion magazines are faring online against fashion blogs (they’re not failing, but the bloggers are doing pretty well on their own). Unsurprisingly, the magazines who are doing it (engaging an audience, that is) as well as bloggers are the ones who’ve been active in bringing bloggers into the fold through partnerships or special site sections.
So when we heard about Vogue’s 1000-strong “Influencer” network, we thought it was a smart move. Then we read more and wondered if we’d overlooked the benefit to the participating bloggers.
Bloggers.
Granted it’s the power blogs that consistently take the top spots in our ranking of influential fashion blogs; but using the exact same ranking criteria, bloggers are edging out magazines who (often) have larger staffs and larger budgets when it comes to influencing readers online.
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.
Refinery29, a multi-author professional fashion blog, disclosed revenue numbers that indicate the online advertising trend may be headed in the right direction for fashion blogs. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Philippe von Borries predicts that the site will do $8 million in revenue this year, based on first quarter earnings.
If you want attention for your new style blog, picking on an existing style blog in some way seems to be rule one in the Mean Girls Guide to Fashion handbook.
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