Black Friday 2024 and the Rise of Holiday Content (HBBIP #63)

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Over the past few weeks, you’ve probably received a ton of promotional messages from businesses of all kinds advertising sales, deals, and steals. Perhaps you’ve even clicked on these emails. Perhaps—not to go crazy, but you know what, I’m just gonna say it—you’ve even participated in some of those sales, and *gasp* bought something! Given that there are other holiday sales coming up soon, you might even be planning to buy more things through the end of the year.

I know, I know: it sounds like madness. But no, that comes in March. This is just good old fashioned Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Spring to Christmas shopping. It’s the best kind of controlled chaos—the kind where you end up with more stuff you want!

This holiday shopping season, I wanted to take a look at holiday shopping over the years. My perception is that brands are engaging in more holiday promotions than ever. When you combine that greater intensity with the fact that the holiday shopping season seems to be starting earlier and earlier, what do you get? At least in theory, significant and demonstrable growth for holiday-related creator content across key metrics over the last several years.

Do we see that growth? How will 2024 have to shape up in order to continue this momentum? And, most importantly, what are you buying for your favorite blog post writer this year?

Read on for the answers to these questions and more.

The Top Brand Activity of All Time (of the Week): the HBBIP Holiday (Shopping) Spectacular

So, first things first: answering the hypothetical question I raised in the intro section. Did we indeed see significant growth for holiday shopping content over the years?

You’re not going to believe this, but we did. It’s a non-denomonational holiday miracle!

It would have been a pretty short blog post otherwise. However, I’m happy to say that it’s not just in your imagination: creators really are talking about holiday shopping more often, and brands are reaping the benefits.

Our fearless data team took a look at an aggregated set of top U.S. retailers from 2020 to 2024, measuring both their holistic improvements across a range of metrics and their improvement across holiday shopping content, as seen from certain key tags and phrases. We found some pretty clear patterns, and made some pretty pretty graphs to go with it. Let’s summarize our key discoveries:

1. Generally, growth for top retailers’ holiday shopping content was roughly 2x the growth for top retailers’ content at large.

A lot to unpack there. What do I mean by this?

Basically, we averaged the 2020 - 2023 growth of our friends the top retailers across our five key metrics:

• Community Size
• Content Volume
• Engagement
• Earned Media Value (EMV)
• Impressions

And found that the growth of holiday shopping content was roughly 2x retailers’ overall growth in the same metrics. What does that look like in graph form, you ask?

Top Retailer Average Community Size Growth: 2020 - 2023

Well, something like that. Our top retailers saw a 70% expansion of their holiday shopping creator count from 2020 to 2023, compared to a 30% expansion of overall community size. And the hits keep coming:

Post count saw a similar 2:1 growth ratio in favor of the holidays (96% versus 45%):

Top Retailer Average Content Volume Growth: 2020 - 2023

While Engagements yielded a 160% versus 86% split:

Top Retailer Average Engagements Growth: 2020 - 2023

In case this is getting too predictable, one area where we saw a slightly more lopsided result in favor of holiday shopping content was Earned Media Value, where things broke down along a 261% versus 108% margin:

Top Retailer Average EMV Growth: 2020 - 2023

And stop me if you’ve seen this one before: it was another 2:1 decision in favor of the holidays with Impressions, which saw the largest jump of any stat so far, boasting a 322% to 160% improvement in favor of holiday shopping content.

Top Retailer Average Impressions Growth: 2020 - 2023

What can we conclude?

• Holiday shopping content is outpacing—and fueling—overall growth in these metrics for top retailers over the past several years.
• Growth across these metrics is cascading: it starts with a smaller boost to a specific creator community, which in turn yields a slightly larger bump to post counts, which then foments larger gains for engagement and Earned Media Value. But what really gets maximized are Impressions: the number of people who view this content overall.
• So yeah, holiday shopping content is everywhere.

When we delve into the data for individual retailers, and individual years, what do we see?

         2. Make sure you’re sitting down: Holiday Shopping Content spikes during…the Holidays!

I know, I know—I didn’t see it coming either. But it’s true. Let’s look at how this plays out year after year, because there are some less obvious, more interesting takeaways to glean as well:

Top Retailers Holiday Content: MoM EMV 2020

Looking at holiday shopping search terms for our top retailers in 2020, several things stand out:

• Yes, content spikes in November/December, but the holidays are a 12-month stretch, and the content mill is always on.
• Amazon skews the graph yet again, but don’t sleep on some of the other strong retailers in the mix.
• We’re at an $80M EMV scale in the year of the pandemic. (Keep in mind this is per-month, rather than an annual total.)

Top Retailers Holiday Content: MoM EMV 2021

In 2021, we crossed the $80M EMV threshold and approached $100M.

Top Retailers Holiday Content: MoM EMV 2022

In 2022, the $100M barrier was absolutely obliterated, with Amazon surging past $150M EMV. No points for guessing what happened in 2023…

Top Retailers Holiday Content: MoM EMV 2022

Ho-hum, $200M EMV. We do see something here that we haven’t seen in previous years: a flattening, or even a decline, between November and December, indicating that Black Friday/Cyber Monday might have made an even bigger splash than ever before. (Also, if you’ve been hyping Christmas since after Halloween, maybe there’s less left in the tank for December?)

As our 2024 holiday seasons data comes in, we’ll be sure to update these trends and see how things shake out.

        3. Zooming in on Amazon: a case study.

So far we’ve been talking about top retailers in the aggregate. Since Amazon is at the tippity top, as shown from these graphs, what do the numbers reveal?

Essentially, they confirm what we’ve seen so far—holiday shopping is bigger than ever—while also providing more insight into which metrics are growing faster than others, and what that means.

Creator Count by Year

Starting once again with creator count, we see Amazon’s annual number of creators from 2020 to 2023, as well as those creators who mentioned holiday shopping language in their posts. On the bottom row, we see the percentage of holiday shopping creators relative to Amazon’s total creators. Finally, we have the growth from 2020 to 2023 for each category. So here we have a healthy 40% proportion in 2023, up from 32% in 2020. The creator count for holiday shopping content has grown 125%, outpacing Amazon’s 78% growth in overall creator count.

We see something similar for content volume, though with an even greater discrepancy between holiday shopping growth and overall brand growth (again, there’s that exponential factor):

Post Count

No metric, however, sees a greater discrepancy between these categories, or a greater surge in percentage of Amazon’s total, than EMV:

EMV

Unlike the top retailers in aggregate, we don’t see quite as large a growth for Amazon’s Impressions specifically, though it’s still nothing to sneeze at. It’s also worth noting that we saw no growth in holiday shopping content’s part-of-whole percentage between 2022 and 2023:

Impressions

But apropos to the metric’s name, it’s Engagement that presents the most interesting case:

Engagements

With by far the closest margin between whole-brand and holiday content growth, and just a 3% change in part-of-whole proportion (this number even went down between 2022 and 2023!), a possible trend may be emerging, at least for Amazon. You can post a ton of holiday shopping content, and people will see it, but relative to the other content about you, it might not garner significantly more likes, comments, shares, and other factors that contribute to Engagement.

          4. That’s all well and good, but what does it mean for 2024’s Holiday Shopping Content?

You don’t have to be an astute reader—though if you’ve made it this far, you are one—to notice that I haven’t commented on holiday shopping data in the current year. Nor do you have to be a particularly astute Understander of Time to know that this lack of mention is likely because some of those holidays haven’t happened yet. December tends to be a fairly sizable month for holiday content, believe it or not, and so without that info, we’re best drawing a direct comparison between the 2024 Black Friday/Cyber Monday data that’s hot off the presses and previous years.

• Black Friday 2024 (Generally) Brought Greater EMV than 2023 for Top Retailers
  • The rise of Black Friday continues! Generally. For 13 of the 17 top U.S. retailers we tracked as part of this investigation, November 2024 brought more EMV than November 2023. This indicates that Black Friday remains an engaging topic for retailer consumers, with further room to grow—especially for retailers beyond the Amazons of the world.
  • In fact, Amazon was one of the four retailers who saw less EMV in November 2024 than November 2023, perhaps indicating that holiday spirit has a limit even for the world’s largest companies. (That said, December was Amazon’s top month last year, meaning that the retail giant has an opportunity to make up ground in the last month of 2024.)
• TikTok is Dominating Top EMV-Generating Posts.
  • 12 of 15 top EMV-driving pieces of Black Friday content across all of our top retailer friends originated on TikTok, reinforcing the platform’s central role in spreading holiday cheer (and getting people to buy things).
•  Black Friday is More Than a Day
  • Ecommerce peaks came at different times for different retailers. Going day-to-day during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday stretch, we found that EMV didn’t just cluster around Black Friday itself:
    • Sephora peaked on November 25, the Monday before Thanksgiving.
    • Walmart favored November 26
    • Ulta’s most potent day was November 28—Thanksgiving itself. Nothing like some makeup in the morning and turkey in the afternoon.
    • Amazon, as some might guess, did in fact achieve its greatest single-day total on November 29, the actual Black Friday.

So that’s where things stand for Black Friday 2024. These stats are promising, and set up a strong conclusion to the end of the year. But let’s consider the holiday season as a whole, and the growth of holiday content over the last several years. Our retailers have a tall task ahead of them if they want to continue growing.

In order to outpace the average YoY growth from our top retailers between 2020 and 2023, here are the numbers that the same set would have to post in 2024:

• 15% YoY, Content Volume
• 16% YoY, Community Size
• 32% YoY, Earned Media Value
• 53% YoY, Engagements
• 74% YoY, Impressions

It’s not impossible, but it’ll require plenty of holiday spirit. Clap if you believe! In the meantime, we’ll be sure to report back on how these retailers fare in our end-of-year content.

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