The rise of the gift-guide industrial complex

We’ve now firmly entered a sprawling, gatekeeper-free era where EVERYONE publishes some flavor of holiday gift recommendation

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If you’re reading this edition in your inbox, try a little experiment for me: Scroll on up to your search bar, type “gift guide,” and hit the enter key. In my inbox, this unassuming search turns up dozens of unexpected and improbable results — from nail polish brands, from my mortgage lender, from newspapers and wine stores and seed catalogs. One Substack author promises me a guide to obliterate all other comers. Another teases options guaranteed to impress “pyromaniacs,” “graphic design husbands” and — intriguingly, eerily — “recently bereaved sisters.”

Gift guides are hardly a new phenomenon; their history dates back decades in the U.S. But this year marks the high point of a new phase, I’d argue — the crest of a definitive third wave for the gift-guide industrial complex. If the first wave was pioneered by old-school women’s media, and the second wave by online publishing upstarts, then we’ve now firmly entered a sprawling, gatekeeper-free era where virtually every person and company with even a semi-professional online presence publishes some kind of seasonal gift recommendation.

It’s hard to quantify this spread, exactly, except to say you know it when you see it. Gift guides have metastasized across so many platforms and mediums that there’s no single metric that captures them. Last year, for instance, The New York Times reported that a Google search for the term “gift guide” returned more than 255 million English-language results; that figure is in constant algorithmic flux, however, and misses all the gift guides pinging around your Instagram stories and inbox. eMarketer predicts that affiliate marketing — the lifeblood of the gift-guide ecosystem — will cross $10 billion for the first time this year, though that perhaps fails to capture all the recommenders crafting their guides for other, non-fiscal reasons.

On Wednesday, as I was editing a draft of this newsletter, two other culture Substacks that I love and follow closely — as well as, tellingly, Substack itself — published their own essays on the new ubiquity of holiday gift guides, which initially made me feel pretty shitty about my timing … but also validated my observation that these things are suddenly, undeniably and absolutely everywhere. I’d argue, in fact, that online commerce as a whole is moving in an ever-more-gift-guidey direction, where everyone is simultaneously encouraged to (a) influence the consumption of their peers and (b) forced to navigate a dizzying retail sphere with the help of variably incentivized recommendations.

In other words, gift guides aren’t just an accessory to shopping anymore, and they’re not a year-end trend. They are increasingly the interface and the cipher through which we interact with a vertiginous commercial internet.

The democratization of gift guides

In that regard, this third-wave of holiday gift guides has a lot in common with its stuffier, glossier, century-old forebears. American women’s magazines, in particular, have a long, proud history of publishing both product reviews and holiday gift recommendations — often in the form of items you could sew, cook or craft.

But as the 21st century wore on, and as a booming post-war economy introduced a stunning array of new products, appliances and consumer goods to the American middle class, more and more magazines published guides and reviews designed to help shoppers navigate the market. Good Housekeeping, which began testing and recommending products in 1900, launched that program in response to the invention of electric motors and lights and the bevy of new appliances that occasioned. Consumer Reports grew its readership from 55,000 to 700,000 between 1944 and 1954, as higher wages and plentiful jobs ushered in the so-called “Golden Age of Capitalism.”

Browsing holiday issues from this era — from the whole latter half of the 1900s — reinforces the notion that the format and conventions of gift guides have always been closely entwined with the economic model of contemporary media. In 1961, Esquire published its Christmas gift catalog as a gorgeous six-page editorial spread, all hand-drawn illustrations and quirky, mismatched typefaces. (At the time, the magazine mailed to almost 900,000 paid subscribers.) In 1970, Woman’s Day not only ran its own list of nearly 200 gift recommendations — a portable phonograph! an electric typewriter! — but also included a hefty paid insert from a board-game maker. Department stores routinely paid to run their own gift guides in print newspapers and magazines, or published them as glossy mailed catalogs.

That economic model has since collapsed, of course — as have many of the magazines it once supported. But in the late aughts and early 2010s, the rise of affiliate revenue programs made product reviews and recommendations profitable once again. Affiliate marketing programs, like those run by Amazon, Walmart, Target and other large retailers, kick a portion of sales back to the sites that refer shoppers to them. Between 2011 and 2016, at least half a dozen new product review and recommendation sites sprung up, including present-day behemoths like Wirecutter and The Strategist. At the same time, a generation of bloggers, proto-influencers and smaller independent or general-interest sites also gained the ability to monetize their recommendations via platforms like Skimlinks (2007) and LTK (2011).

Today, influencers and creators make billions of dollars from product guides and recommendations.¹ In the past year alone, LTK — an affiliate-marketing tool popular with fashion and lifestyle creators — generated $5 billion in retail sales. Call it the democratization of gift guide publishing or call it the third wave: In the span of 15 years, gift guides ventured out from glossy magazines and corporate ad departments to colonize your inbox and For Your Page.

‘Listen, I know what this is’

But today’s online, affiliate-linked gift guides differ from the originals in a few notable respects. I teach magazine journalism, so earlier this year I had to confront that disparity first hand.² This counts as journalism, I told my students, scrolling through a rigorously sourced and researched Wirecutter round-up. But this is not journalism, I added, of an affiliate-linked product dump. Many modern gift guides are purely “content,” in its most primeval form: stuff about stuff, filler on filler. Gift guides have proliferated not only because they’re profitable, but because — in their shallower iterations — they’re also cheap and easy to produce, rather like the shit they’re designed to sell to eager shoppers.

Importantly, in the new era of gift guides, authors also aren’t solely (or even primarily) selling consumer goods. Product recommendations have always expressed the ethos or aesthetic of a brand, of course, but today’s influencer- or creator-authored guides must capture and commoditize the personality of an individual. They demonstrate taste, class, curatorial skill, politics and erudition.³ “The modern gift guide is unique, as the author is both merchant and consumer, seller and buyer,” Brendon Holder argued last week. Read between the lines (... or the attractively collaged product photos) and you’ll see how the guide’s author hopes to be perceived.

Some writers are even explicit about this: They preface their inevitable list of recommendations with some self-aware meta-commentary. “Listen, I know what this is,” Eliza McLamb wrote, in the introduction to her recent guide. “I know that the gift guide is a thinly-veiled attempt to show everyone what excellent taste you have.” Meanwhile, Metalabel, a creative collective of sorts, opened their holiday gift guide with a glancing critique of late-stage capitalism.

To me, these sorts of disclaimers suggest we’ve grown uncomfortable, or at least uncomfortably aware, of the gift guide’s insidious creep⁴ … to say nothing of the unchecked, unsustainable consumption that creep embodies. Simply put, we’ve never had so much stuff. It’s like electricity and the post-war boom, combined and amped up to 11. Between 2016 and 2023, the number of third-party products on Amazon alone grew from 341 to 588 million.

Alas, that trend shows no sign of deceleration. Quite the opposite, in fact. Marketers, retailers and social platforms are already looking forward to a dystopian fourth wave of product recommendations — a hyper-commercialized, commoditized era where everyone, no matter the size of their following, doubles as an online salesperson. TikTok hopes to make social shopping as massive here as it is in Asia. A crop of new ecommerce apps strive to “let anyone cosplay as a [shopping] influencer.” Already, powerful incentive programs on platforms like Amazon, Sephora and Shein reward consumers who buy new stuff and review it in public.

Next year, when I search my inbox for gift guides, I expect to find even more contenders. Hell, who knows — by 2025, I might capitulate and write one myself.⁵

Further reading

• “Possessions as Persona: How Gifts Guide Our Identity,” by Brendon Holder for

  LOOSEY

• “What Happens When You Buy from Gift Guides,” by Amanda Mull for The Atlantic

• “What Makes a Good Gift Guide?” by Jessica Roy for The New York Times

• “Under Review,” by Will Tavlin for Columbia Journalism Review

• “The Rise of the Recommendation Site,” by Eliza Brooke for Vox

• “The Banality of Online Recommendation Culture,” by Kyle Chayka for The New Yorker