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:
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 :)
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