How the Internet Broke Gift Guides
Editors reveal the secrets of how they made those ubiquitous holiday gift guides.
I hear consistently from editors about how gift guides have gotten out of control. What originated in magazines as artful curation, tacitly influenced by advertisers, morphed into Herculean, SEO-fueled efforts to shill massive amounts of stuff from Amazon. (I realize this is not ALL titles today, but a great many.)
When I had a staff editor job in the 2010s, I remember gift guides starting as something that we just did to help our readers. Then, an SEO team came along. The perfectly lovely and competent emissaries from this department, which executives seemed to view as a gift to editors far and wide, materialized every so often to tell us which search terms to write articles against (“what time is the super bowl?” “best gifts for sisters” “best gifts for brothers” etc.). Throughout the year, these people assigned us headlines we could rank against. Meanwhile, a separate department would present us with a list of affiliate retailers who gave publishers the biggest cut of sales of those purchases. The idea was to write against the SEO terms, and then stuff those stories with items from the preferred affiliate partners.
As traffic from social media faded in the 2010s and ad revenue declined, search became the dominant traffic funnel and affiliate revenue became a bigger priority. Executives started emailing charts around to all the editors, showing what percentage of revenue came from affiliate, which was directly tied to SEO rankings. Generic shopping stories became terribly important. And gift guides were seen as the king of this content.
Pretty soon, we were publishing around 20 gift guides just for the holidays. Then, there were Valentine’s Day gift guides, Father’s Day gift guides, Mother’s Day gift guides… Gift guides became a year-long concern. Editors were being asked to sideline other stories — on politics, celebrities, health — in the interest of shilling for Amazon and Nordstrom.
In recent years, online gift guides from media brands have absolutely deluged the internet to the degree that, instead of curating loot, they feel like another bottomless repository of loot. If you have to sift through 50 gift recommendations in six gift guides to find something for your mom, have the gift guides helped at all?
However, this gift guide bubble seems to be bursting. Google traffic to publishers is declining. Editors say thoughtful content converts better than a slideshow of any old blankets. And many media people who have migrated to Substack have returned to thoughtful curation. My friend
, who writes A Concept Store here on Substack, just published “A Deliberately Idiosyncratic Gift Guide,” “Because I hated all the generic ones I used to have to write.” As I was writing this, Elizabeth Holmes of sent out an experiential gift guide. These are the future!To learn more about how we reached Peak Gift Guide, I talked to editors who have had to work on them over the years. Anonymity was granted to those who requested it to allow them to speak candidly about their past and current jobs. Here are their stories.
The Glory Days of Ye Olde Print
“I worked at Lucky and Self at Condé Nast in the 2000s. Gift guides used to be a huge production that everyone started working on in the summer. We would have a whole day booked out for a conference room where we would present to the editor-in-chief what should go into the gift guide, which had a bunch of pages in the print issue.
“We were chasing the ‘Oprah’s favorite things’ recipe with editor picks — Lucky editors were influencers before there were influencers. You were pulling product because it was pitched to you. It was a huge advertiser thing. We had a list of advertisers running the entire year, so editors knew which brands kept the lights on. We didn’t have Amazon yet.
“We liked the things that we picked, but did we really think that they would make good gifts? I’m not sure. And were people really going to buy those things? We had no way to track it.
“I’m at a legacy title and we do work on gift guides, but if all these outlets and competitors are churning out gift guides it’s a waste of resources. Honestly, it’s still a struggle for me to buy gifts.”
—Anonymous veteran women’s magazine editor
“I worked in legacy media (Vogue Australia and Harper's Bazaar Australia). Advertisers were included, but they couldn't pay to have their products included. There would be gentle encouragement from the advertising team to include what we could. Brands definitely could not pay to be included.
“I did enjoy putting gifts together. Editors always wanted a 'new spin,' like tapping some exciting new chef/interior designer/artist to make their picks. I wondered if the reader even cared or realized that we had gone to so much effort.
“I have done one gift guide for my newsletter this year so far. Since I'm not selling placements, it's all my personal picks. Honestly, they do very, very well, so I have been considering whether I should do another one or not. But there are a lot of gift guides out there, and I don't know if the world needs another one from me.”
—Zara Wong, author of
The Power of PR
“I worked in magazines in the U.K. for five years, and everything I ever put in a gift guide was chosen purely because I wanted to call it in to gift it to a family member/friend/boyfriend. [Publications] don’t pay enough to have legit gift guides. I needed the stuff! My mum still has the best collection of handbags in the little town I grew up in. I will never trust a gift guide ever again.”
—Natasha Friscoe Daniels, author of the mystery brunette
Celeb Influence
“The celeb-curated ones at People were celebs all plugging the products they were paid to promote, or their own lines. They would throw one or two of their friends’ products in, too. It was considered prestigious to have celebs curate them and showed the power of the brand.”
—Anonymous veteran entertainment editor
Digital Changes the Game
“Everything we did at Cosmo was based off of search — ‘gifts for your mom,’ ‘gifts for your boyfriend’ — and following search terms takes the thoughtfulness out of gift giving. No SEO writer is going to know what your mom wants, you know what your mom wants.
“From a logistical standpoint, no full-time editor is going to be able to comb every aisle and every site. Gift guides took so much time while doing your other work, reporting on daily news, that it ended up being things that landed on your desk that year. So the art of curation was lost. It’s which brands have the most money to gift, so it’s returning favors.”
“It was very freeing for my new Substack to write from a place of ‘what do my kids like and what do i see them personally play with?’”
—Elizabeth Narins, author of More Than Mom
“Gift guides became a big focus in the late 2010s. When Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain died in the same week, people started doing these gross SEO roundups like ‘who’s in their family?’ Everyone was beginning to chase the same terms. It was not sustainable.
“We didn’t only only create new gift guides every year, we would mostly update stories that already ranked in Google. We did this throughout the year. Someone from the SEO team would tell us which product stories to update — fall trends, Valentine’s Day dresses, etc. We’d replace products that had sold out and she’d give us other ways to boost the stories. But it was still editorially driven — all stuff we knew our readers bought.
“I’d look every day at Skimlinks [an affiliate platform] and see what the top-selling stories were from the day before. There were different incentives from retailers, like Walmart. We would see exactly what Nordstrom was paying us, Sephora, Ulta. The first port of call was always Amazon, because you got a cut of somebody’s entire cart. I think even if they purchased within a certain time frame, we would still get a cut of it. So if they bought $10 mascara on Amazon but they had $100 pair of shoes, we’d get the cut of $110.
“I doubled our affiliate revenue every year. In 2018 we did half a million in profit. In 2019 we were pacing toward a million.
“Now, Google is deprioritizing publishers and making their own shopping carousels so you never leave Google.”
—Anonymous veteran editor
‘It’s a Lot of Landfill’
“In the late 2010s, everyone started chasing page-one results on Google, because that’s where you make money. We had a department where we tested everything, and executives wanted to shut it down. We said, ‘What would make you not shut us down?’ And we were told earning eight figures in affiliate revenue. We grew it to tens of millions of dollars. Affiliate commerce saved lifestyle media. We weren’t earning that from advertising.
“We had an edge in Google because we had been doing product reviews for decades. We had experts who did real testing. But one of the best practices became: look at the top three results in Google and copy whatever they’re doing, including the products they’re recommending. There’s no room for independent brands, there’s no room for differentiation. I‘m sure every single lifestyle media brand is going to have ‘best gifts under $50 on Amazon,’ and they’re all going to be the same lists, created by people who haven’t touched the product. A friend of mine calls a lot of this stuff ‘landfill.’ It’s a lot of landfill.
“We had phenomenal growth, but it’s fallen off a cliff this year. Black Friday was not good.”
—Anonymous veteran editor with expertise in product testing
The Career Commerce Editor
“I’ve been doing gift guides for a decade. Everyone’s doing gift guides and commissions seems to be the priority more so than ‘this is something I genuinely think is a good gift.’ In the last seven years, gift guides have not performed for traffic, conversions, engagement. But you can’t NOT do a gift guide even though they’re not performing.
“Some sites do ‘here’s 30 random products on Amazon,’ and they’re not researching them, they’re just looking at the top-rated thing. Maybe that’s why some are pivoting to having AI generate these. But if you’re not actually going to put an editor’s voice behind something, why would anyone trust it?
“Readers are savvy and understand these outlets are making money from affiliate revenue, but they also might not understand what’s a genuine recommendation or sponsored. Brands do pay for placements — that is a newer thing. At the Daily Beast, we don’t do it very often, but it’s clearly marked. The good thing about the Daily Beast is I can say no. One time, there was a performance-enhancing pill for men, and I was like, ‘I’d never put that in a gift guide, no one will give this as a gift.’ And they understood. But I think influencers genuinely don’t know that they have to disclose paid placements, and I’ve seen a lot that are suspicious.
“SEO is increasingly complicated. I would never do something with the most search volume. I go to Reddit and see what no publication is covering, like ‘Lululemon Wonder Under versus Align [leggings].’ People want product recommendations that are supported by an editor trying it. I feel like that’s the path forward. I feel so burned out and so disenfranchised by the whole gift guide thing. I did one where there nothing was commissionable in it, but they were really good gifts by small brands.
“I was listening to a podcast with Lauren Santo Domingo, and she said something like, ‘If you give someone a candle, it’s the best way to say, I don’t care.’ Our job as editors is to think of things that aren’t candles.”
—Mia Maguire, editor of the Daily Beast’s Scouted
The Old-School Luxury Guide
“We never get paid for print placements and we don’t do any e-commerce online. I try to keep our advertisers in mind. But in the luxury space, it’s very hard to do a guide that feels surprising or useful. It’s always a lot of watches and jewelry.
“We don’t have a huge staff to do the Wire Cutter-type research and Strategist-type polling to find a million gifts. Ours is much more based on taste, style, and things that will shoot beautifully on a page. If you are not being comprehensive, you want to play it relatively safe so the gifts apply to a lot of people.
“It’s very fun but it’s super-annoying logistically. Now, brands want you to do editorial shoots JUST about their brand, like the cover of Vogue about Zac Posen’s Gap. But we are not asked to do that. The funny thing about doing an old-school gift guide like we do is that the brands you are so annoyed to have to include are the ones that are the biggest pain in the ass to deal with.
“Like Harry Winston. Every couple of years we’ll be like, ‘Fine, we will shoot one of their boring diamond necklaces.’ And it’s ten guards and it can only be there for 37 minutes — and wait, they have to switch necklaces at the last minute. Whereas another brand will send something totally cool over in the pocket of the junior publicist’s coat.”
—Anonymous veteran news and luxury editor
Loose Threads
What is up with Vogue’s new digital cover? It’s basically an ad for Gap, now designed by Zac Posen. I’ll have more to say about it in a story next week but people are confused by the headline (“Fashion Gets Real”), the Gap of it all, the image itself, the dated-looking type, the gray. There’s a thread going in the Back Row chat about it, if you want to join the discussion.
Lots of movement for designers recently — and I’ll also have more on this next week — but Matthieu Blazy is leaving Bottega Veneta to lead Chanel! Louise Trotter will leave Carven in late January to replace him. Blazy feels like a very safe choice.
John Galliano is leaving Margiela after ten years, and the articles about it were painstaking in their effort to explain THEY ARE STILL FRIENDS.
Galliano said on Instagram the realization that he needs to move on began “[a]t a Halloween family gathering in Tokyo, all in festive make-up under the silent, slow-motion gaze of the full moon…” Regarding his next move, he added, “When the time is right, all will be revealed.” I recommend reading his statement in full as other creative directors don’t seem to give us this sort of thing these days.
Julian Klausner has been appointed to lead Dries Van Noten following Van Noten’s retirement. Klausner, who is 33, joined in 2018 and ran the brand’s women’s studio.
Veteran beauty editor and author of address a question from a reader about whether or not you should pony up for cosmetic procedures at a doctor’s office over a medi spa. “I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a ‘small’ Botox treatment, as injecting a toxin into your face is never a small thing!” Monroe writes. “…[I]s the confidence you feel at the doctor's office worth the extra $200? (It would be for me...)”
What Paid Subscribers Are Reading
So interesting! Gift guides used to be useful 15 years ago. I didn't initially equate them with Oprah's favourite things, but it totally makes sense now. Back then, obscure, original, creative items would make her list and it was interesting. But I don't need a gift guide to produce what I can get from Amazon search.
I love a gift guide, don't want to potentially miss a thing BUT there's a different between my Pure Wow and Rank and Style gift guides (If I see that Bissell green steam cleaner again ...) and my real fashion/beauty Substack newsletter gift guides. I'm looking for more unique ideas from them.
Here's an example: Andrea Linnett put a Versace trinket tray and a Saint Laurent canvas tote bag (both under $100) in hers. I bought the Saint Laurent tote for my mother, who carries a Lululemon 'schlep' bag, as an upgrade. I also let Saint Laurent know that I purchased it because of her. I told a girlfriend, who ordered several for gifts (I insisted she order from Andrea's newsletter). My husband suggested it to several female work friends because if my friend and I liked it, maybe they would too. They did.
I assume Andrea gets commission, and it's deserved because I wouldn't have known about it if it wasn't for her. Did you know Saint Laurent has free express shipping and gift boxes? I do now!