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Blogging has never been more lucrative and fascinating from a business standpoint than it is today. Women's Wear Daily reports that Top style bloggers are joining the 1% and can earn up to $1 million a year. Bloggers have different streams of revenue such as brand collaboration, revenues from their blogs, commission from retailers for online customer referrals and appearance fees up to $15,000 by Luxury brands and retailers. Native advertising, which is defined as a form of online advertising that matches the form and function of the platform on which it appears, is the ideal way through which bloggers drive their revenue streams up.
Bloggers first start by displaying their outfits and accessories. They aim to show they have taste and style despite often having small budgets. They are most often students. A good blogger has flair and finds amazing pieces, he or she then associate with other pieces to display a specific look and fashion identity. Once the numbers of their followers reach significant levels, fashion brands and retailers start contacting bloggers to make business with them. The brands often start offer gifts and pay fees to the bloggers to wear and display their products on social media, as if they were their own. The blogger wears the accessories and/or clothes with her own and discretely mentions the brands in her/his post.
For famous bloggers such as Chiara Ferragni, who is very familial with that form of advertising, it is often very difficult to know if the blogger even chose those products herself of if they were just sent out to her for her to display. It is also difficult to distinguish between the clothes and accessories she bought herself and the one that she was paid to promote.
On the following picture for example, Chiara is showing her “outfit of the day”. She does not mention any band names in particular but along with her own shoes and jeans she wears a Celine leather jacket, which was offered to her a few days prior. She also carefully displays an Hermès Birkin bag, very trendy among bloggers and fashion enthusiast. Again, she does not mention the name of the brand she is advertising among her own clothes, but the iconic bag is easily recognizable by any fashion enthusiast.
However, the tendency is generally not to be as discrete as this. On other posts, Chiara will openly mention the brand, which she is advertising at the end of the post by tagging them, as seen on the following picture where she mentions Dior for her blue coat.
Overall, fashion blogger such as Chiara have really understood the essence of native advertising and have showed how successful that technique may be, especially online. Today’s customers do not want a particular product and its price bluntly advertised on a billboard or standing alone. They are looking to see the products discretely advertised within a related context and associated with other pieces of clothes, jewerly or accesories. That allows the customers to get ideas of how they would wear and accesorizes the products while using celebrity endorsement and the blogger's creativity to advertise in a smart way. It's a win-win for everyone.