When Heather Armstrong started running advertisements on her website in 2004, her wealth quickly began to increase. By 2009, she had $100,000 per year in her account.
On July 19, 1975, she was born in Memphis, Tennessee. She was well-known for being a Salt Lake City, Utah-based American blogger.
Because she struggled to rapidly spell “dude” in online interactions with her old coworkers, she wrote under the pen name Dooce.
After her coworkers learned that Heather Armstrong had been writing about them on her blog, which she established in 2001, she lost her job.
Nevertheless, she continued blogging after being fired, concentrating on her difficulties as a parent, and eventually began running advertisements in 2004.
After five years, Heather Armstrong’s income from banner ads on Dooce, where she had 8.5 million monthly readers and was earning over $100,000 yearly, began to rise.
Armstrong had an appearance on Oprah and was one of 30 honorees listed in Forbes magazine’s 2009 “The Most Influential Women In Media” list.
Due to the effects of social networking, Dooce’s viewership started to decline around the middle of 2010. After her divorce and online criticism of her and her blog, she stopped regularly blogging and struggled with melancholy.
After a test treatment was successful in 2017, she resumed her prior internet blogging in the same way, albeit to a much smaller audience, and started making money as an influencer.
Armstrong was raised as a Latter-day Saint and was a part of the church his entire life. She studied English as a major at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
She began to have doubts about the church and had a lot of depression while a student, particularly in Mormon Utah.
She left the church in 1997 after receiving her degree and moved to Los Angeles, where she found work as a web developer for companies during the dot-com boom.
When Armstrong, a graphic designer and web developer, purportedly lost her job as a result of posting satirical accounts of her time working at a dot-com startup on her personal blog website, dooce.com, in 2002, it sparked a heated controversy regarding privacy issues.
She coined the phrase “Dooced” during the discussion, which refers to “getting fired for something you’ve written on your website.” In her website’s FAQ, Armstrong mockingly rejected the phrase.
The application of this term was proven on December 10, 2009, on the television game show “Jeopardy!”, as was shown by a screenshot posted the next day on their website.
She continued posting even after being fired, too. Through a mutual friend, she connected with Utah-based web developer Jon Armstrong, another former Mormon.
After getting married, they moved back to their hometown to start a family.
After having their first child in 2004, Armstrong began focusing heavily on parenting on her blog, making her one of the earliest mommy bloggers.
Leta Elise and Marlo Iris, the couple’s two children, were born in 2004 and 2009, respectively.
In 2009, Armstrong published a biography titled “It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita.” She also managed her career on Instagram and through book sales.
She was on the Forbes list of the most powerful women in media that year and made an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in the same year.
She made the announcement that they were divorcing in 2012. Later that year, they got divorced. Nearly six years ago, she began dating Ashdown, a former candidate for the US Senate.
Her children and they shared a residence. Three of Ashdown’s children from a previous marriage also visited them occasionally.
Armstrong did not exercise restraint on Instagram or under the name Dooce, which she gave herself as a result of her inability to quickly pronounce “dude” in online conversations.
Her scathing and unforgiving articles on everything from breastfeeding to pregnancy to carpooling to homework were frequently peppered with expletives.
As her celebrity grew, so did the offences of her detractors, who accused her of poor parenting and other things.
Heather Armstrong, who shared on her website Dooce.com and on social media how difficult it was to be a mother and how she struggled with depression and alcoholism, died at the age of 47.
Jon Armstrong, her ex-husband and business partner, started Dooce in 2001 and turned it into a successful career. They had two children together.
Pete Ashdown, Heather Armstrong’s lover, told the media that on the evening of May 9, 2023, he discovered her in their Salt Lake City home.
When personal blogs were initially becoming popular, she was one of the first and most well-known mother bloggers, writing openly about her relationships, her children, and other challenges in her life.
According to Ashdown, Heather Armstrong’s suicide was the cause of death. He added that his girlfriend had recently relapsed after having been sober for more than 18 months.
In one of her entries on Dooce, she discussed overcoming drinking in the past.
Armstrong claimed that in October 2021, she privately celebrated six months of sobriety. She described how she felt like a wounded animal who just wanted to be left alone to die.
She added that no one in her immediate vicinity could possibly comprehend the significance of that triumph to her.
She confessed to having a lot of sadness before she passed away, and it was assumed that this was what ultimately led to her suicide.
However, her partner hasn’t yet revealed any information on Heather Armstrong’s obituary.
Before she passed away, Heather Armstrong’s estimated net worth was over $2 million, much of which came from her successful blogging career.
‘Dooce,’ her personal blog website, was claimed to make $100,000 a year in 2009.