When Did Influencers Start?

It depends whether you mean paid endorsement, which is extremely old, or the independent creator with their own audience, which is roughly the blogging era onwards.

The useful marker is the point at which an audience stopped belonging to a publisher and started belonging to a person. That shift is what made the whole category behave differently.

Pinpointing when influencers started depends entirely on how narrowly you define the word, which is why the honest answer is a range rather than a year. If you mean the modern digital creator, the roots sit in the mid-to-late 2000s: personal blogs, early YouTube channels and forum personalities built the first audiences that trusted an individual voice.

Instagram in the early 2010s then gave the format its familiar shape and scale. If you mean the broader idea of a trusted person shaping what others buy, that is far older than any platform, running through celebrity endorsement and word of mouth for generations.

The precise start date matters less than the pattern, which is why chasing an exact year risks inventing precision that does not exist. For a brand, the useful version of this question is present-tense, because what counts is whether a creator holds real, authentic influence now. Verifying that live influence is where Flinque is actually built to help.