Perez Hilton Dishes On Early Days Of His Controversial 20-Year Career

If you've followed any celebrity news or gossip in the past 20 years, you know the name Perez Hilton.

And while you may have formed an opinion about Hilton and his style of reporting entertainment news, you may not know how he got his start and what he's accomplished in 20 years.

He recently sat down with The Blast to reminisce about his past 20 years in the business, sharing intriguing stories from his days as a not-so-liked blogger to now and everything in between.

It's quite a milestone to be celebrating 20 years in entertainment, and Hilton is obviously stoked about it!

He recently chatted with The Blast to share how he got started in the business 20 years ago.  He credits timing and "curiosity" for how things kicked off for him.

"I started 20 years ago now, which is crazy; that’s a child that wasn’t even born that’s now in college. I started really as a hobby because, in 2004, it was the year that social media was birthed really. It was only MySpace at the time. Facebook launched in 2004 and I never could imagine everything that’s happened because none of it existed," he told The Blast exclusively.

"It was just curiosity that led me to blogging, and timing, because had it been five years later, I might have been a YouTuber in 2009. If I started five years after that, I might have been an Instagram influencer. Had I started five years after that, I might have been a TikTok creator."

Hilton said at the time he got started, there was really nobody else doing what he was doing, making it a "less crowded field." Regardless, it wasn't an easy road to travel, but eventually, his journey started breaking barriers for other entertainment reporters.

"I began and was successful for over a year before TMZ even launched and I was told that it was the success of my website that inspired the birth of TMZ and others like that in the wake of me," he shared.

"If you remember back in 2004, the celebrity magazines weren’t even using their websites to break celebrity news. If you went to PEOPLE.com in 2004, all that you would experience there was a placeholder. It was a sign-up page to subscribe to the print magazine, and they were all like that, they were just portals to get your information to sign up for the magazine."

It didn't take long before Hilton really began shaking things up in entertainment and celebrity reporting. Within a few months of launching his website, he had tons of online traffic reading his "little blog."

"I got on TV and I got on TV again and celebrities started talking about me, and it really blew up," he told The Blast. "I'd never be so bold to say I changed things, but I was a part in changing how both people consumed media and their expectations around celebrity news, and also how we talked about them."

Prior to Hilton hitting the internet and captivating celebrity watchers with his blogging style, he said the norm was more the PEOPLE magazine model in the United States. In the U.K., it was a bit different because of their tabloids, but in the U.S., celebrities and royals were considered "untouchable" for the most part.

"And also at the same time, on the print side of things, you had Bonnie Fuller posting photos of celebrities taking the trash out in US Weekly. It was like celebrities are just like us. So there was a big cultural shift happening and it also coincided with the big boom of paparazzi culture in Los Angeles because of my website and the others that came in the wake of it."

Hilton said that during his earlier days in the business, there was an "insatiable appetite for celebrity news" and because social media was still so new, it felt like the "wild, wild west" which gave an "intoxicating" feeling.

"It was intoxicating and that can be dangerous. Intoxication can also be deadly. And it can be fun if you don't get too intoxicated," he explained.

"You had the wild starlets that would, some of them, go out and party and purposely not wear underwear because they wanted those crotch shots. They were getting off on the attention and pushing limits and doing things on the internet they couldn't do in print media."

And he said it wasn't only "intoxicating" for him, but also for the celebrities he was talking about.

Falling headfirst into the entertainment industry wasn't too much of a shock for Hilton who was always interested in the life of celebrities from a young age. Plus, he said gossiping was the norm in his household.

"It's something I grew up around. Latinos are far more gossipy than Anglo-Americans and it's not as frowned upon in Latino culture," he explained. "Everybody does it in the Latino community, like your grandmother and your mom and your aunt all gossip about everybody."

The blogger said his mom is the "biggest gossip I know." She always knew everything about everyone - from neighbors to family members to other parents at school.

"She was so informed, and she would also get subscriptions to these Spanish-language celebrity magazines. So that's actually where my royal obsession began too because I've been a royal watcher, not just the British royal family but royals everywhere, way before I even began working in celebrity media," he said.

"I have my mom and being Latino to thank in those formative years to help me where I am today."

While it's been a roller coaster of a journey for Hilton, he's still standing and said he's currently in his "icon era."

"I’m still around and so grateful but I’m not an ‘It Girl’ like I was back in the day. And neither is Paris Hilton or any of the other former ‘It Girls.’ I’m in a different era. I’m in my icon era," he told The Blast exclusively. "I’ve outlasted so many celebrities that I used to talk about when I started blogging. I don’t talk about them anymore, nobody is."

Not long after Hilton got his start, he got an email from the TV show, "The Insider" asking if he was okay with being included in a segment about Hollywood's most hated websites and being named number one.

"I thought, wow, I don't know, if people are reading my website I think they're enjoying it, but if you're gonna put me on TV let's do it, and if I'm gonna be on this list, I'd rather be number one than number two," he shared.

"And then I just ran with that branding for the longest time and I called myself that. Underneath my banner on the website, it would say ‘PerezHilton.com, Hollywood’s Most Hated Website.’ And when that segment ran on the air, it crashed my website. That was the moment I knew people were actually paying attention to what I said, people were actually reading my little blog, this little hobby that I didn’t think anyone would ever read, not even my friends, got me on television and it helped me so much that opportunity because it’s really what kept me going. It’s really what pushed me to work so hard."

This story is part one in a multi-part series about Perez Hilton and his 20-year career. Stay tuned for more stories that cover his regrets, what he hopes the future holds, and more!