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Interesting Facts about Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Posted 4 years ago by Skimlinks

Here’s some cool facts you may not know about Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

  1. “Black Friday” was first used to describe the post-Thanksgiving shopping frenzy in the 1960s by newspapers in Philadelphia. At the time, the newspapers felt the massive crowds in stores and insanity in the aisles were comparable to the original “Black Friday”: a stock-market panic that followed the collapse of the price of gold on September 24, 1864.
  2. Cyber Monday on the other hand was a pure marketing term coined in 2005. “Cyber Monday” was designed to encourage a digital counterpart to the physical shopping frenzy Black Friday. Though claims of its success were overstated at the time, it has rapidly become the biggest ecommerce event in the US. A record breaking $7.9 billion was spent last year. 
  3. The traditional distinction between the two is that Black Friday is a physical event and Cyber Monday is digital. However, things are changing and in the US Black Friday has rapidly become an ecommerce event in its own right: Online sales jumped to over $6 billion last year. 
  4. Holiday shopping has concentrated around the Black Friday weekend but there are other opportunities in the season for publishers that want to write commerce content. For starters, Thanksgiving is a great opportunity: We had an 8% conversion rate on that day last year. Likewise “Silent” Saturday and Sunday – the days sandwiched between Black Friday and Cyber Monday – are often wrongly overlooked. They’re a fantastic opportunity to keep promoting commerce content. 
  5. Google Trends data shows interest in Black Friday picks up from September each year and last year interest in the event reached an all time high. Publishers have varied when they publish content for Black Friday: In 2016 content was published as early as August, whereas in 2017, 24 of the top 25 articles were published in November. Last year the major traffic spike came immediately prior to and during Black Friday, but publishers employ a variety of approaches to covering the event. 
  6. The National Retail Federation reports US online holiday spending grew 2.9% to over $700m last year. That made 2018 another consecutive year of holiday spending growth, although growth was slower than expected. Mobile overtook desktop as the main traffic driving channel in our network last year, and thanks to our AMP solution, publishers will now be able to capture even more sales through articles they optimize for mobile using Google AMP. 

Black Friday 2019 takes place on November 29 this year. If you’re a publisher that would like to get rewarded for content you write about products this year, you can sign up for Skimlinks and start a conversation about how to monetize your content to seize the season now! 

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