Clarification from IGN:
"Hey! It's me! To clarify -
1. PS5 Preorder guide is the #1 article on IGN of the year in terms of pageviews. And it didn't eek out #1 - it's closing in on being 2X the #2 article. It was HUGE. It also broke records for the number of concurrent readers in an article. Pageviews aren't a metric that's massively important to us - we pay a lot of attention to engagement, etc.... but still.
2. Like a lot (almost all?) media companies we have an affiliate ecommerce business. When someone clicks on an Amazon or Best Buy or Newegg button and buys a game or piece of hardware we earn a commission on that. We are required by law to make sure that's disclosed, and we always do. And every day we link to retailers we don't have affiliate relationships with, as those Buy Links are a reader service first and foremost. It doesn't impact or touch core Editorial operations in any way, and our ecommerce team is run separately.
So when I say "we sold" PS5s I'm speaking in shorthand - it's a conversational podcast where we all speak extemporaneously.. IGN didn't sell them - but we can see in our reporting how many people clicked on merchant links and we can see in our reporting totals of what was purchased on those retail websites from people that clicked on our links.
So yeah - on PS5 preorder day, we sent about 5x as many clicks from IGN to various online retailers as we did on all of Black Friday. That's an accurate ballpark stat. That's the "headline" IMO."