Help me reconstruct Ariana Grande's early internet/fandom history
I'm researching Ariana Grande's career, but I'm particularly interested in something that's surprisingly difficult to reconstruct: how her audience formed and evolved before and during her early rise to fame.
I'm especially looking for evidence from roughly 2008–2013, including the period before Instagram became central.
I'm looking for things like:
- old screenshots of Ariana's socialmedia profiles or follower counts
- early fan accounts / fan pages
- Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, MySpace, forums, etc.
- contemporary posts mentioning follower milestones
- old fan sites and archived pages
- YouTube channels/videos connected to the early fandom
- anything showing when people were discovering her and how they found her
- obscure photos, posts, screenshots or archives that aren't easily searchable anymore
I'm not just looking for anecdotes like “I remember following her back then.” Original evidence is especially valuable—screenshots, archived links, dates, usernames, old posts, etc.
I'm basically trying to reconstruct the missing parts of the dataset and understand the transition from:
child/TV audience → early online fandom → pop audience → massive global fandom.
If you were around the Ariana/Victorious fandom in those years, or have old material saved somewhere, I'd genuinely love to see it.
Even seemingly insignificant screenshots could be useful because I'm trying to establish a timeline.
And yes, I've already tried the Wayback Machine. 😭