When is Prime Day?
The answer is, we don't know! Amazon's seasonal sales event doesn't have a fixed date. It used to be held in July, was held in November last year, and this year "sources" have told Recode, a Vox Media product, that it will likely transpire in June.
And yet, click here and you can see that at least once a week some news organization poses the question of when, exactly, Prime Day will be. All of these articles are as insightful as the paragraph above. Until Recode published their piece, information in these Prime Day articles was purely speculative.
It's clickbait. Since these organizations get ad revenue merely from people clicking on the link, these publications don't actually need to have any insider knowledge concerning Prime Day. They just need a headline that can grab readers. They know that consumers would like to partake in Prime Day deals, and so they will idly Google when the next Prime Day will be. These articles cost little to write, little to host, and the publishers only need to trick a few people into clicking on these links to make their money back. They show the saddest cynicisms of our age, at once reflecting our addiction to sales, the power that the Seattle-based superstore has to invent a shopping holiday from thin air, the new data-driven modalities of journalism that allow media companies to identify every single view of every single article and thusly every single morsel of ad revenue from these clicks and thusly identify the click as their most important KPI which thusly necessitates these search-engine optimized means of attracting viewer attention and thusly requires them to hype up a fake shopping holiday that no one knows the date of. It's so fine-tuned as to be boring, another cyclical rhythm, background noise.
There's nothing more to say about this genre of non-journalism. It's just worth pointing out, in case you haven't noticed it.