Those of you who collect vintage watches have surely noticed the change. The shift in emphasis really started with Hodinkee’s move into preowned watches with its acquisition of Crown and Caliber. I regularly check vintage dealers’ websites or visit them in person and there was a strong shift into vintage Rolex at the outset of the pandemic. Now I see much more of an emphasis on preowned among these dealers as well.

What explains this phenomenon? I think it comes from a “follow the leader” mindset amongst dealers. Hodinkee is surely an 800 pound gorilla when it comes to being a tastemaker in the watch industry. It started out as one man’s blog about watches but now has acquired a large amount of financing from LVMH, John Mayar, and others. Professional investors don’t fork over tens of millions of dollars in order to produce meaningful content that they can enjoy at home with a magnum of Chateau Petrus 1959.

The truth is that monetizing a watch blog is hard. Ideally it would follow the magazine model of paid advertising but the function of a watch blog is report on watches. If you were a watch company, wouldn’t you rather spend money on research and development and design rather than advertising? If you make a watch that everyone loves, it will be reviewed well which is the best advertisement of all. Advertising ultimately only serves to blunt criticism if you make a clunker. The readership of watch blogs is a self-selected audience that’s probably going to be skeptical of ads

The Wall Street Journal reported last year that most of the revenue at Hodinkee comes from watch sales rather than advertising. Merchandise is the most efficient way to monetize a readership. Unfortunately for watch fans, the merchandise in this case is exactly what is being written about.