Cast your mind back to 1994. Jeff Bezos had just founded Amazon, the first PlayStation was released in Japan and would go on to sell 100 million units, Justin Hall created the first blog post at Links.net, and The Lion King hits the big screen with box-office success. Now, one of these things isn’t like the others, and it isn’t all that accurate either.

You’ve probably guessed it by now, but Justin Hall didn’t create the first ‘blog’; instead, he referred to it as his personal homepage. A personal homepage that he has been updating with information since he first made it in 1994, and it is worth a quick look through if you have the time.

The word ‘blog’ didn’t get coined until 1999 by Peter Morholz. After more people followed Hall’s example and started to share their lives online, Jorn Barger coined the term ‘weblog’ in 1997 to describe these sites. This term reflected the process of ‘logging the web’ as he browsed. In 1999, the blogging platform Blogger was launched, which allowed the opportunity for even more people to start publishing online.

However, it wasn’t until 2002 when blogging really took off. With the founding of TheMommyBlog.com and the surge in ‘Mommy’ bloggers, just ten years later, there were more than 3.9 million mommy blogs in North America alone. Combine this with the launch of Blogads, which was the first broker of blog advertising, and you have a recipe for success. Or at least a popular trend.

After the launch of YouTube in 2005, video blogging or ‘vlogging’ became a legitimate force that it had been trying to become since 2003. A year later, the microblogging era began, with the launch of Twitter and continues into the next year with the launch of Tumblr. Though Tumblr arguably offered a more traditional type of blogging experience compared to Twitter. Microblogging refers to the sharing of stories, news and other content in the smallest format, which is 140 characters.

Blogging started to stagnate for a while until 2012. To push the envelope for blogging and news reporting, Medium, a brand new blogging platform, was founded. As well as LinkedIn’s influencer blogging platform Pulse. In 2016, WordPress rolled out the .blog domain, which allowed blogs to take advantage of the rapid increase of this media form.

And in the four years since then, blogging has continued to grow, and according to Statista, the number of bloggers is expected to reach 31.7 million this year.

That’s a lot of people.