10 'Digital' Gifts That Are Still Thoughtful

If you know someone in a parasocial relationship with a famous person, make it all the more real through the gift of a Cameo! This service lets you commission actors, musicians, YouTubers, and scientists (ok, probably not scientists) to create personalized video messages they’ll send to your friend (or to you—I don’t judge). Maybe your pal needs a pep talk from the Cryptkeeper? Maybe you want Winnie Cooper to finally say “I love you?” to you? Maybe you want the Insane Clown Posse to roast your friend Gary? All of this and more can be yours for a potentially reasonable price—rates vary from $1 messages from “influencers” you’ve never heard of to $1,500 videos from more elevated famous people. You can even send a message from Santa itself.

If there’s a budding guitarist or bassist in your life, consider the gift of Fender Play. The online music instruction system from the people who brought us the Telecaster features bite-size videos from guitar heroes teaching all the technique you need to learn to rock and/or roll. Lessons range from “never picked up a guitar before” basics to more advanced skills for grizzled veterans of the rock wars. Gift cards are available for six month or one year subscriptions.

If there’s a PC gamer in your life, they want a Steam Gift Card. That Minecraft lamp you found is nice and all, but it would be nicer if it was Steam money. You can get all fancy with the presentation if you want—wrap a little card up in a huge box or something—but they want the Steam bucks. You don’t have to bother with the physical card. You can just drop however much cash you’d like into your loved ones Steam wallet. They might even look up long enough to grunt something that could be “thank you.”

If you have a console gamer in your life, they don’t want a Steam gift card. They want money put toward the online game store for their console of choice. So give your Xbox gamer an Microsoft gift card, your PlayStation player a PlayStation card, and your Nintendog a Nintendo gift card. Maybe you even know someone who uses a Meta Quest? There’s a card for that too.

I love the idea of giving Airbnb gift cards. If you know anyone who travels, these cards will take some of the sting out of renting someone’s house for the weekend. You could pick up a physical card at a local store, or just buy the digital version online, where you can choose however much you’d like the pay. Once the card is entered into their account, the gift never expires, and it can be used for any stay or experience that Airbnb offers.

Whether your giftee likes to go to rock shows, ball games, or symphonies, chances are very good you can buy the tickets from StubHub. A Stubhub gift card doesn’t expire, and it’s way better than picking out tickets to some future event that may prove an inconvenience.

Everyone has a special food that they just can’t get where they live—for me, it’s sandwiches from the White House Sub Shop in Atlantic City. Through Goldbelly, you can have your personal favorite shipped to you, even if you blew the dust of your hometown off your shoes a long time ago. With a Goldbelly gift card, you can let your loved one pick what they’d like, so you don’t even have to know that they think the #19 from Langer’s Deli is the single greatest sandwich on planet earth. (It’s worth $120, I swear.)

If you’re giving a gift to someone who likes wine, a curated wine flight from In Good Taste will make you the hit of Hanukkah, the King of Christmas, or the Queen of Kwanzaa. It’s a little more elaborate than just gifting them a wine subscription—they have to fill out a questionnaire on the site—so I’m including it here on a technicality.

You know those people who like to “learn things” and “better themselves through education”? Annoying, right? But at least they’re easy to shop for: Just get them a subscription to Masterclass and they can spend all day learning about chess or philosophy or whatever the fuck they’re always on about. Masterclass cover a huge variety of subjects, from FBI profiling to cooking, and the short video lessons are taught by leaders in various fields, from ex-presidents like Bill Clinton, to actors like Samuel L. Jackson, musicians like Christina Aguilera, and writers like Margaret Atwood. This is more edutainment than education, but it’s only $15 a month, and you don’t have read a bunch of books or sit in a class listening to someone who isn’t even famous.

There’s something troubling about the popularity of people checking their genetic makeup through massive databases of human DNA like 23andMe, but at least it’s convenient! Plus, if we’re going to live in a post-privacy dystopia anyway, let’s embrace it. Think of what your loved one might discover. Maybe their dad is actually their mom’s fertility doctor? Or their second cousin is a serial killer? Or maybe they have relatives they didn’t know about (and they’re incredibly wealthy!), a genetic disease they can watch out for, or they’re not exactly the race they thought they were. 23andMe is even offering a holiday special this year so you can get one for yourself. You can gift an genetic test and one-year subscription to the 23andMe Ancestry service for $158.