Search Here ….

Tags

affect AI AI slop AI STORIES alumni Blogging book care ChatGPT conferences cultural bias data analysis electronic literature ELMCIP ephemerality exhibition fascism Gephi history journalister lip-syncing LLMs machine vision network analysis norsk open access presentation publication publications R representation research science fiction self-representation selfies Snapchat social media Surveillance talks teaching trip report twitter UiB visualisation workshop
Uncategorised

swedish teenager making millions off her blog?

Jill3 Comments

A journalist from Bergens Tidende called me this morning to talk about blogs, and in particular, fashion blogs and the money they can make off advertising. It seems there’s a Swedish blogger who makes “millions” of kroner off her blog. At least, Dagens NÊringsliv thinks she makes millions. She won’t actually say what she makes, but admits to spending “10,000 kroner a month shopping”.

Anyway, the blog, which is apparently one of the most popular in Sweden, is called Blondinbella (blonde bella) and is written by Isabella Lˆwengrip, a seventeen year old high school student who started blogging to recruit members to the political party Moderatarne – but she discovered readers were far more interested in reading about what she was wearing. According to Dagens NÊringsliv, the larger part of her income is not from the advertisements from big brandnames, but from covert product placement – she’s paid to write positive reviews about products. And she doesn’t mention this to her readers – nor does she think it’s dishonest. That’s not likely to go down too well – remember the debates about PayPerPost that led to their requiring bloggers to disclose that they were being paid?

The “earning millions” on her blog may be more a journalist’s over-hasty hype than reality. An article in Expressen that appears to be the source states that the blogging business was “valued as worth millions” by an accountant, thus allowing them to create an aksjeselskap (a stock based company) without having the required 100,000 kroner in cash. (En revisor v‰rderade bloggen till flera miljoner, och det r‰ckte som s‰kerhet.) Johan Kinnander, a board member of Lˆwengrip’s blog company previously with Swedish Google, states in the interview that he doubts that the blog is really worth that much. Since then, a journalist estimated that she makes five million kroner a year on ads. She does have 200,000 readers a week, apparently – and that’s the same as some newspaper sites, which must terrify the newspapers. Regardless, the blog does appear to be one of the most popular in Sweden. According to Lˆwengrip herself, that’s because she “cares about her readers and doesn’t scare them away with a site that looks like a homepage from the 1990s”, and because she’s open and shares stories and photos from her life – unlike Swedish politicians.

Discover more from Jill Walker Rettberg

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

3 thoughts on “swedish teenager making millions off her blog?”

  1. Parker Mason

    Blonde young swedish teenagers making millions off of illegal blog advertising? http://is.gd/Hj0 and http://is.gd/Hj1I gotta get in there..

  2. Shapla

    Thanks for sharing, makes me conclude on the basic…”Blog what are you good at”

  3. Barbara Dieu

    @dancohen then maybe Lilia Efimova: http://t.co/BuowiD9 and Jill Retberg http://t.co/G7emrTF will be of interest to you

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

Screenshot of a paragraph from a New York Times article published May 12, 2026. Text reads: "The price of tomatoes -tart bursts of flavor in salads and sandwiches — surged nearly 40 percent in April from a year ago on a combination of bad weather, high tariffs and climbing transportation costs."
AI STORIES

Genre glitches and unexpected promotional phrases as a sign of AI writing

A genre glitch is a characteristic of LLM-assisted writing where the text suddenly switches genre, typically inserting a short promotional phrase full of sensory details into an informational text. Genre glitches occur when a word in the generated text is heavily associated with a genre or context that is markedly […]

Top of a ransom note from Shinyhunters hacking group. Text reads: "SHINYHUNTERS rooting your systems since '19 ;) ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again). Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some "security patches"."
Networked Politics University politics

UiB self-hosts the open source version of Canvas, so wasn’t affected by the breach

On May 1st Canvas announced a security breach, and then yesterday the system was hacked. The login page was replaced by a ransom note: if universities don’t pay up by 12 May, student data will be released. Here’s what the login page looked like yesterday: Way back in 2015, when […]

AI and algorithmic culture Networked Politics

AI-generated images, fascist aesthetics: Dieselbrølet and Heimatstrom

My German is pretty dodgy, so when I first saw Heimatstrom on Bluesky, shared by Roland Meyer, a professor of visual culture at Universität Zürich’s Digital Society Initiative, I misinterpreted it and thought it was a far-right campaign. But no, Heimatstrom is a group of left-wing environmentalists using fascist AI […]

Photo of a billboard ad at Oslo S train station showing a smiliing conductor and the text "Du må ikke sove. Joda, bare sov du."
AI STORIES

“Du må ikke sove”: a floating motif detached from its meaning (or: LLMs can write Norwegian but miss cultural references)

There’s a new ad for the train between Stavanger and Oslo in Norway that uses a line from Arnulf Øverland’s famous anti-fascist poem Du må ikke sove (“You must not sleep”). Du må ikke sove, you must not sleep, the ad says. And then it flips it, jovially, joda, bare […]

AI and algorithmic culture University politics

Academics in Norway: Sign this petition asking for research-based discussions of how to use AI in universities

I just signed a petition calling for Norwegian universities to use research expertise on AI when deciding how to implement it, rather than having decisions be made mostly administratively. ,  If you are a researcher in Norway, please read it and sign it if you agree – and share with anyone else who might be interested. The petition was written by three researchers at UiT: Maria Danielsen (a philosopher who completed her PhD in 2025 on AI and ethics, including discussions of art and working life), Knut Ørke (Norwegian as a second language), and Holger Pötzsch (a professor of media studies with many years of research on digital media, video games, disruption, and working life, among other topics).  This is not about preventing researchers from exploring AI methods in their research. It is about not uncritically accepting the hype that everyone must use AI everywhere without critical reflection. It is about not introducing Copilot as the default option in word processors, or training PhD candidates to believe they will fall behind if they do not use AI when writing articles, without proper academic discussion. Changes like these should be knowledge-based and discussed academically, not merely decided administratively, because they alter the epistemological foundations of research. Maria wrote to me a couple of months ago because she had read my opinion piece in Aftenposten in which I called for a strong brake on the use of language models in knowledge work. She was part of a committee tasked with developing UiT’s AI strategy and was concerned because there was so much hype and so few members of the committee with actual expertise in AI. I fully support the petition. There are probably some good uses for AI in research, but the uncritical, hype-driven insistence that we must simply adopt it everywhere is highly risky. There are many researchers in Norway with strong expertise in AI, language, ethics, working life, and culture. We must make use of this expertise. This is also partly about respect for research in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and law. Introducing AI at universities and university colleges is not merely a technical issue, and perhaps not even primarily a technical one. It concerns much more: philosophy of science, methodological reflection, epistemology, writing, publishing, the working environment, and more. […]

screenshot of Grammarly - main text in the middle, names of experts on the left with reccomendations and on the right more info about the expert review feature
AI and algorithmic culture Teaching

Grammarly generated fake expert reviews “by” real scholars

Grammarly is a full on AI plagiarism machine now, generating text, citations (often irrelevant), “humanizing” the text to avoid AI checkers and so on. If you’re an author or scholar, they also have been impersonating and offering “feedback” in your name. Until yesterday, when they discontinued the Expert Review feature due to a class action lawsuit. Here are screenshots of how it worked.