Member Avatar for Dani

Does Black Friday have a web-based cousin? How are advertising sales in December for everyone?

  • 4 Contributors
  • 8 Replies
  • 196 Views
  • 1 Month Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by Dani

Dani AI

Generated

Brief primer and an operational checklist that follows the points made by , , and : the post-Thanksgiving online surge is real for merchants and can be material for publishers that sell ad space to retailers, but its impact varies strongly by vertical. The useful question is not whether the "web cousin" exists, but how to treat that window as a planned campaign period rather than a surprise spike.

Recommended pre-holiday checklist for publishers and ad ops:

  • Sales & inventory: pre-sell premium placements and reserve programmatic deals (PMPs). Set holiday CPM floors and clearly label holiday impressions so buys don’t cannibalize regular inventory. Use dayparting and frequency caps for high-value creatives.
  • Tag and partner hygiene: validate all third-party tags and creatives on a staging mirror. Defer or lazy-load nonessential scripts (analytics, widgets) to protect core render.
  • Measurement: create dedicated UTM_campaign values and server-side conversion endpoints to reduce attribution loss from blockers. Log ad requests and revenue by segment (device, geo, referrer) for quick comparison.
  • Merchandising: surface holiday landing pages, shipping cutoffs and promo codes in templates so editorial and ad teams can coordinate.

Operational and technical items for merchants and platform engineers:

  • Run a smoke test or load test; ensure autoscaling, DB read replicas and job queues are healthy. Harden checkout paths and minimize third-party dependencies there.
  • Pre-warm caches for key pages (product, checkout, homepage) to reduce cold-start latency:
# simple cache pre-warm (run from a machine with good bandwidth)
while read url; do
  curl -s -o /dev/null "$url"
done < urls.txt

Monitoring, measurement and post‑mortem guidance:

  • Create alerts for 5xx rate, page latency, cart-abandonment spikes and CTR anomalies. Track conversion rate, average order value and revenue per session in hourly buckets during the window. Because ad revenue is often spiky (as noted) and vertical-dependent (as observed), segment analysis and a short daily post-mortem will turn surprise days into repeatable wins.
Member Avatar for clarinetalex

Does Black Friday have a web-based cousin? How are advertising sales in December for everyone?

The monday after black friday is apparently "web monday" or some other gimmicky sounding term.

I'm of the opinion that shopping on Black Friday is so popular merely because of the hype.

Member Avatar for Dani

Black Monday perhaps? The whole key to the word "black" is that it marks the day when retail stores get out of the red and into the black - so you see, the word black has to be a part of it some way or another :)

Member Avatar for clarinetalex

Black Monday perhaps? The whole key to the word "black" is that it marks the day when retail stores get out of the red and into the black - so you see, the word black has to be a part of it some way or another :)

Its actually called "cyber monday": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_Monday

Well, its kind of ironic since black followed by a day usually refers to something bad happening ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_friday )

here are some more days:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Tuesday
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Thursday

Although anyone can edit wikipedia so maybe they're a bunch of hoax articles

Member Avatar for Slashdoc

Well, "Black Friday" was an above average day for me. The next Monday, Dec. 5th, however, was the best day EVER, revenues up more then 100%! (although that might have been the day I was mentioned in a very popular blog, I don't remeber).

The rest of the month was pretty mediocre, and actually almost dead from Dec. 15- Jan 3.

I think, in general, web advertising is very unpredictable. It's possible that one day nobody will click on anything and then next day some guy comes along and clicks on a "mesotheloma" ad on your site. lol. Then you try to make sense of that happened. :)

Member Avatar for clarinetalex

I'm going to add that cyber monday might refer to dollars spent shopping online, not ad revenue.

Member Avatar for Slashdoc

I'm going to add that cyber monday might refer to dollars spent shopping online, not ad revenue.

Well, in theory (and probably in practice as well) it would translate to more ad revenue - more people willing to buy things online, therefore more likely to click on the ads. Not to mention the fact that retailers will raise their payout per click.

Member Avatar for ergorest

I did not notice much of a drop over that period at all.

I guess it all depends on your site topic?
My site kind of lends itself to the holidays as I sell products that people buy for people for Christmas/Birthdays :)

Member Avatar for Dani

Black Monday really refers to ecommerce related sites ... online purchases for the holidays. :) Doesn't really apply to content sites that generate revenue via advertising ... unless you're a site who sells advertising to ecommerce sites, in which case many of them might splurge on ad campaigns.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.