Holiday Niches or How to Make Annual Salary in One Month

When we talk about “niche” affiliates, we normally refer to marketers that focus on a product vertical.

A number of affiliates have gone beyond verticals only, and realized that there’s also an array of amazing opportunities from holiday shopping to shipping. Today I’d like to briefly look at the demand for the holiday shopping websites.

Yesterday, Shop.org’s executive director Scott Silverman tweeted:

So I decided to have a look at the CyberMonday.com‘s (owned by the National Retail Federation just as Shop.org) recent stats as shown on Alexa and Compete.com. Here’s what I see:

Wow! With an average January-September 2009 traffic of some 13,000 visitors, they have seen a jump to 95,000 in October, and a huge spike to over 2,000,000 visitors in November. December isn’t over yet, but last year they registered a twofold increase in traffic between November and December. This year (judging by the Alexa graph) it may not be quite the same way, but the idea of centering a whole website around one popular day is obviously yielding its results.

Here’s another beautiful chart where the traffic of such Black Friday related websites as BFads.net, BlackFriday.info, Black-Friday.net, theBlackFriday.com, and BlackFriday.com is compared:

Don’t you love those traffic jumps from 300-700k to 3,240,000-4,360,000 unique visitors that most of the above five websites have registered?

What other holidays have we had in the recent past? Of course, Halloween. Let’s look at the statistics of five affiliate websites that focus primarily on this holiday:

On obvious reasons I cannot disclose the exact URLs of these websites (so we’ll have to work with a legend-less chart here). But looking at the above-reflected traffic stats, assuming at least a 3% conversion, knowing that an AOV in the costumes niche is around $50, and average commission is about 10% (but affiliates like the ones above will always be on a private commission level), one can easily calculate the above affiliates’ earnings during the month of November. In the majority of the above cases, one month’s commission payout will exceed a median annual salary in the USA.

The same calculations can be made for any of the above-quoted holiday-specific websites. While some of the above “niches” may already be crowded, there’s still plenty of room in others. So, is building a website devoted just to the Mother’s Day, Halloween or Easter worth it? I’ll just leave this question in a rhetorical mode.