I think the process was: 1. blogging 2. paid blogging services 3. free blogging services (livejournal, xanga, later myspace) 4. wordpress as a next generation b

I think the process was: 1. blogging 2. paid blogging services 3. free blogging services (livejournal, xanga, later myspace) 4. wordpress as a next generation blogging service (invented by ex-livejournal employees) both free and paid 5. walled garden blogging platforms (Facebook had a "notes" feature for long format blogging) 6. product and data analyst managers realizing long format blogging wasn't accessible to mainstream and moving towards 2-3 sentence "posts" and later "microblogging" with twitter, vines, periscope etc Nowadays most blogs are commercial entities ("Websites") that cover a fairly narrow topics like EVs or Electric Scooters or Photography reviews but personal blogs and websites still exist they just don't fit into the microblogging narrative and aren't prioritized. People who want to be "influencers" are probably not going to start a blog as the immediate reach of a blog is measured in hundreds or low thousands of hits per month.