Black Friday is getting louder, and earlier: three years of headlines and our first readings

Black Friday 2026 falls on 27 November. If the last three years are a guide, most of what Europe reads about it will be published before then, and a growing share of it will be about one thing: deals that do not wait for the day.

This is our first long read. It combines two things we collect every morning: press coverage of promotional events in 11 markets, which our news radar has gathered back to 2023, and our own readings of retailer storefronts, which started in earnest on 31 October 2026.

The press wave arrives six weeks out

In the seven weeks around Black Friday 2025, our radar logged 3,954 articles about it across the 11 markets, up from 2,728 in 2024 and 1,865 in 2023.

The shape of the wave matters as much as its size. Coverage builds from early November, jumps when Black Week starts, and peaks on the day itself, with 424 articles on 28 November 2025. But 72% of the year's coverage ran before the day, and half of it was out by 20 November 2025, eight days ahead, on the eve of Black Week.

Half of all Black Friday coverage was already out eight days before the day itself.

A caveat on the growth: we collected all three years from the Google News archive in October 2026, and older articles can drop out of it over time. Part of the rise may be the archive forgetting, not the press getting louder. The shape of each year's wave does not depend on that, and it is remarkably stable.

"Starting early" is now the story

The radar classifies each article. Stories about promotions starting before the official date more than doubled, from 75 in 2023 to 165 in 2025. Articles about retailers' own plans for the event grew from 235 to 485.

For retailers this is the real competitive pressure: the event is no longer a day or a week, it is a season that someone else starts. Our Early Bird Index will measure it directly this year, retailer by retailer, from the first day we see a Black Friday promotion go live.

Where the press is loudest

In 2025, France, Germany and the Netherlands generated the most Black Friday coverage, each with more than 450 articles. The biggest change is Germany, from 81 articles in 2023 to 466 in 2025. Ireland, the most covered market in 2023, barely grew (294 to 303 articles), and the UK grew by about a third.

Singles Day nearly doubled

Singles Day, 11.11, is ten days away. Its European press coverage was flat between 2023 and 2024, then nearly doubled in 2025 to 3,064 articles. Stories about retailers' plans for it rose from 350 to 624. For a date with Chinese origins, that is a sign it has become part of the European retail calendar, not just a marketplace event.

What the storefronts showed on 31 October

Our daily readings put Promo Heat for Europe at 59.1 out of 100 on 31 October, with 136 live promotions recorded. Poland was the hottest market at 80: almost four in five Polish retailers we read had a promotion live, with an average headline discount of 40%, the deepest of any market with a solid sample.

Read the ranking with its sample sizes. Spain's 72.5 rests on three promotions, and Ireland and Portugal on one each, because many of the retailers we list there block automated visits or are not yet covered, and we never get round a block. Poland, Italy, France, the UK and Sweden, each with at least 16 promotions, are the readings to trust today. Our Marketplace Pressure Index, the share of promotional voice taken by global marketplaces, read 31.1 out of 100: a floor until Amazon and eBay data join.

What history says about November

For Germany we can go further back: we have reconstructed its storefronts from public archive captures since 2024. In both years, Promo Heat rose sharply from October to November, by 8.5 points in 2024 and 14.7 points in 2025, and the Black Friday window itself read about 75.

The two years differ after that. In 2024 activity stayed high into January sales; in 2025 it peaked in December at 74.7 and fell back. One autumn is not a law, but it is the baseline this year's readings will be judged against.

What we will watch

• Singles Day, 11 November: whether storefronts follow the press, market by market.
• Black Week, from 20 November in Sweden, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland and the UK: who starts before it.
• The Early Bird reading for Black Friday 2026, the first measured one.
• Real discounts: whether advertised reductions start from the lowest price of the previous 30 days, as EU law requires. Our price check builds the history it needs through November.

We publish every reading on the Live Monitor each morning. The next long read will compare Singles Day 2026 with this baseline.