rashbre central: All The Black Friday Bargain Codes In One Place

Friday 25 November 2016

All The Black Friday Bargain Codes In One Place


I've received plenty of those UK Black Friday adverts, which, for a country that doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, is a slightly strange thing. I've even made the site 'blacker' for a few days. Those old posts about tyres and of monochrome woodcuts have a whole new life now.

I believe Black Friday UK all started when Amazon began promoting the day after Thanksgiving in Europe, causing many UK retailers to copy the approach. There were a few black eye events too, when some cheap televisions and laptops caused scuffles.

This week in Oxford Street (Which now seems to have a Black Five-Day week) there were people doing reconnaissance visits to see what the goods were like before buying them on-line instead. My #BlackFiveDay contribution is below:

Now we get the warnings on telly about how many of the deals are real. Either trick pricing or in a few fraudulent cases non-existent goods.

What has also been quietly happening in the background is the stealthy increase of cookies per web-site viewed. I usually have Adblock switched on, but decided 'mute' it for a few hours to see what the sites normally look like and how many cookies they were installing, particularly with the retail frenzy.

A busy UK site like The Daily M**l instals 20 trackers when visited. The S*n adds 25. The Washington Post a mere 13. Even rashbre central installs 4, of which one is my own tracker to count visitors - I can understand Google and Google + being there, but how Doubleclick has slipped itself onto the site is a mystery.

Then, just for fun, I decided to find a site with an even higher number of trackers and randomly tried Time International. It was promising as a high count because it knew about Adblock and displayed a different version accordingly.

I could see that even in the 'muted' form, it was installing 23 trackers. Then I tried it with Adblock off and ker-blam it was right up to 38 trackers. All so that it could display to me a banner about Microsoft Cloud and an advert for Vodafone data SIMs.

Maybe I'll simply step away from the screen until tomorrow, although I have a sneaky feeling that Black Friday will last over the whole weekend.

1 comment:

Nikki - Notes of Life said...

I've been quite good this year! The only thing I've bought in the sales was a hoody which had a tenner off it a few days before Black Friday. I've already got said hoody, but it's so warm and comfortable so I thought I'd get another. Waiting paid off as it came down in price :)