Black Friday for Affiliates: Are You Still Looking Forward to It?

Black Friday: a celebration or a test? For an Affiliate, it feels like a party and an exam at the same time.

A few days ago I wrote a post on X about Black Friday tool deals. Within 24 hours it got 100,000+ impressions and 500+ likes. But I soon deleted the post for reasons beyond my control, which gave me a thorough taste of Black Friday’s “power”.

Below is a screenshot of the stats at the time, for the record.

Back to the topic: Black Friday, are you still looking forward to it? Let me state my position first.

Usually I look forward to the tools I actually use (Trackers and Spy tools, for example) putting out deals during Black Friday; that really does save some money.

1. SaaS tools: subscription anxiety in the AI era

AI is moving fast now, and product iteration cycles keep getting compressed. Black Friday deals are mostly annual subscriptions, and if you plan to pay for a new AI tool a year up front, the risk is often not small.

It might be overtaken two months later, or simply eliminated by the market.

Have you subscribed to Claude Code too, only to feel that Codex or Cursor looked tastier once a new version came out? Or seen it on the forums: an annual tracker subscription bought on Black Friday, regretted a few months later?

Cases like these are everywhere.

2. Traffic costs: a variable that matters more than tool discounts

During Black Friday, traffic costs soar. In fact, looking at Q4 as a whole, costs generally refuse to come down, and it’s the same every year.

Some affiliates even pause ahead of Black Friday instead of blindly charging in. For example, CPMs for Facebook PH Slot have been absurdly high recently. Compared with ad spend, the money saved on tools is a drop in the bucket.

Save $200 on a tool? One bad ad test can burn that in a day. The volatility of traffic costs is the hardest part to control.

3. The Black Friday double-edged sword: opportunity and challenge side by side

Black Friday is without doubt a traffic peak.

On the good side, it means higher conversion rates; in peak season, users are strongly inclined to buy. On the bad side, it also means unusually fierce competition and sky-high CPMs.

Every advertiser wants a slice of this one day, which pushes the ad auction to a level of intensity never seen before. For me, Black Friday is more like a stress test.

It tests:

Your creative reserves

Budget management

Bidding strategy

Account health

And the hardest thing to control: your mindset

If you’re underprepared, you can easily pour in a big budget and come away with nothing.

4. My Black Friday habits: take part rationally, set up early

Facing Black Friday, this is what I usually do. It’s not a strategy, just lessons learned.

1) Test creatives a few weeks ahead

Before traffic costs explode, test all kinds of creatives thoroughly (images, videos, copy) and find the types with the most potential.

2) Don’t burn money blindly on Black Friday

Unless I’m very confident in the profitability of the creative or the product, I don’t invest at scale during Black Friday week.

I lean toward “run normal volume + watch the data” and avoid unnecessary losses.

3) Push volume back up after the event and scale

After Black Friday ends, traffic costs usually dip briefly. That’s when I use the good creatives I tested earlier to scale up again. Feel free to borrow the idea.

5. Black Friday is a full review of your media buying system

The whole Black Friday event is like a system “check-up”. It exposes whether your accounts are healthy, whether your creative pool is deep enough, whether your budget allocation makes sense, and how well you can handle market swings.

If you can pass this “stress test” and learn from it, you’re one step closer to becoming a more mature affiliate marketer.

Final words: stay rational, expect with caution

Rather than expecting Black Friday to bring windfall profits, treat it as a chance to level up your own abilities. Look at it rationally, and expect with caution.

Finally, I wish you all a Black Friday full of orders and off-the-charts conversion rates.