An ode to Black Friday journalism

It is the Monday after American Thanksgiving, or what God and the post-digital shopping internet has dubbed Cyber Monday. Consumers likely spent today sweatily comparing the prices of phones, computer parts, and televisions; or otherwise hoovering up “insane markdowns” on all manner of digital media. Cyber Monday is nothing more than an extension of Black Friday’s shadow for a particular market segment, and it’s loathed by online journalists everywhere. Call it a necessary evil or eating your vegetables—I call it half the reason Rascal and its peers exist.

For many writers, the stretch between Thursday and Monday is a muddy churn of posts titled “Best deals on X” and “Where to find lowest prices on Y” applied to a dizzying carousel of products. Some you can draft in advance, while others require scrubbing Amazon and other retail titans’ websites for the exact amount of dollars shaved off board games, LEGO sets, peripherals, and pop culture detritus. For most corporate-owned media outlets, filling the front page of your website with blunt commerce journalism is a necessity. You don’t just leave free money on the table.

Digital journalism broadly relies on advertising, but that doesn’t always look like banner ads above and below a story constricting everything into what Never Post’s Mike Rugnetta calls “the content slit”. In fact, marketing has adapted rapidly to how people use the internet and businesses have subsequently evolved the methods by which they market products and services to us. Banner ads have become kludgy, sharpened rocks in a world of lasers. Native advertising, video inserts, and—perhaps most pernicious—the rise of influencers have all transformed the landscape. But digital journalism largely revolves around a few key methods of earning brands’ spare pocket change, and from Black Friday through Cyber Monday none are more important  than the affiliate link.