Another year, another Black Friday and Cyber Monday has come and gone.
Overall, the amount of traffic we handled over Black Friday 2024 was about double what we did in 2023. 2023 had about 886 million requests in total, and 2024 had 1.73 billion.
And while the 2023 comparison is interesting, we found a comparison to 2021 even more fascinating. In 2021, ecommerce was really booming, and we handled about 223 million requests and thought it might be one of the biggest single days we would ever have. This Black Friday, we did nearly 8 times as much, and even the quietest days this year had us doing at least twice as much as Black Friday 2021.
There is still a lot of growth potential in ecommerce even if the market as a whole is no longer growing at 2021 levels.
Having Said All This, Is Cyber Monday Dying a Slow Death?
For the fourth year in a row, we saw Black Friday traffic significantly bigger and more dynamic than Cyber Monday, and the difference between Cyber Monday traffic and the days around it gets smaller.
To put it into perspective:
- Over Black Friday, we handled a total of 1.73 billion requests, peaking at ~34,000 requests per second.
- On Cyber Monday, we handled just 1.39 billion requests with the maximum traffic throughout the day peaking at ~22,000 requests per second.
Especially interestingly, and this is more anecdotal than anything, we’ve heard fewer of our customers speaking about the two in the same breath than in previous years as well. The acronym “BFCM” is still used plenty often, but this year we were much more likely to hear someone talking about preparing for “Black Friday” than for “Black Friday and Cyber Monday.”
It used to be the case five years ago for us that Cyber Monday was our biggest day of the year traffic-wise, but the trend makes us wonder how long the phrase “Cyber Monday” will even be used in the coming years.
If Black Friday is just as important for ecommerce as for Brick and Mortar, and if people continue to do more and more of their shopping online in general, how long will Cyber Monday continue to deserve a place in the vocabulary of shoppers?