The Cost of Truth in Watch Media
A response to aBlogtoWatch and Remontoir on media funding, incentive structures, and why the fragmented mess we have might be the best we can do.
A couple of days ago I read two essays about watch media. The first was Ariel Adams’ piece on aBlogtoWatch, “The Cost of Truth: The Case for Institutional Guardianship in Watch Media.” The second was a reaction to Ariel’s essay by Remontoir, “Stop Complaining About the Death of Watch Media - And Do Something About It!” If you’ve been reading SDC for a long time, you’ll know that this whole media/journalism topic comes up at least once or twice a year… this is one of those times. Both these articles contain things I agree with, and both contain things I think are, quite frankly, a bit unrealistic.
Let’s begin.
Estimated reading time: ~15 minutes
What Ariel is saying
If you strip it down, I think Adams’ essay boils down to three claims. First, that the watch industry has shifted from rewarding merit and truth to purchasing influence - brands fear honest feedback and prefer transactional positivity. Second, that independent media (like aBlogtoWatch) exists primarily to protect consumers from wasting money on expensive, complicated products they don’t understand. Third, that major brands benefit enormously from the archives, storytelling, and hype generated by independent media, but they contribute nothing to maintain it.
His proposed solution is “Institutional Guardianship” (his words not mine) - the idea here is that watch brands should collectively fund independent media as infrastructure. So, just like electricity or water, it will be ‘always on in the background’, and producing honest coverage - regardless of whether any individual brand likes what is being said.
It’s a very romantic notion, I’ll give him that. It also contains a kernel of truth about the whole Free Rider problem. Swatch Group, LVMH, and Richemont are pretty shite at documenting their own histories, and they perhaps (over)rely on external media to serve as unpaid archivists. When these outlets die, maybe the industry loses that part of its collective memory.
The problem is that this solution is economically incoherent. You simply cannot be a “Guardian of Truth” while you’re on the payroll of the subject you are, at times, guarding against. If Omega underwrites your operating costs, you are no longer independent media - you are a content marketing department. No company will voluntarily pay for negative coverage, so to suggest they should “for the good of the industry” fundamentally misunderstands fiduciary duty.
Again, to be fair, companies do spend money on things without immediate measurable ROI all the time - prestige sponsorships, corporate philanthropy, vanity projects, you name it. If watch media functions as useful industry infrastructure, you could construct an argument that funding it serves long-term brand health. But the problem with that perspective is that the benefits of a healthy media ecosystem are spread across all brands and all consumers - while the costs are concentrated (i.e. whoever writes the cheque). This is a classic collective action problem; every brand would benefit if someone funded independent media, but no individual brand has sufficient incentive to actually be that someone. It’s not that funding media is legally impossible under fiduciary duty, all I am saying is that the incentive structure makes it individually irrational even when it’s collectively beneficial.
Adams also singles out Rolex for not advertising in watch media anymore; he frames this as Rolex abandoning its responsibility to the ecosystem. Now from Rolex’s perspective, this seems entirely rational. They don’t need reviews! They do however, need presence. They spend money on F1, tennis, and the Oscars - places where their customers exist. Paying a blog to review a Submariner when you have a multi-year waiting list is, amongst other things, just bad capital allocation.
Now, the obvious counter-argument is that Rolex’s mile-long waiting list exists partly because of decades of media coverage that built the brand’s mystique in the first place. They undoubtedly benefited from the ecosystem, extracted maximum value from it, and are now free-riding on accumulated brand equity while contributing nothing to maintain the system that helped create it. This is perhaps Adams’ strongest point, and it’s not wrong, but historical debt doesn’t create present obligation. Back then, Rolex paid for advertising, and they owe watch media nothing in the same way that Apple owes nothing to the tech journalists who hyped the iPhone in 2007. You can think this is unfair but it’s worth also recognising that “unfair” and “irrational” are different things. Rolex is optimising for Rolex, because that’s what companies do.
I’ve tried to engage with Adams’ argument on its merits rather than dismiss it outright. The Free Rider problem is real, the collective action problem is real, and the archival value of independent media is less relevant, but I’ll give him that too. That said, identifying a problem and proposing a workable solution are different things, and Institutional Guardianship fails on the second count for reasons I’ve outlined above. It’s also worth noting that this argument happens to serve the interests of someone whose business model is failing. That doesn’t make it wrong - but it does mean we should hold it to a higher standard of scrutiny than we might otherwise.
What Remontoir is saying
The response piece takes a different tack - instead of pointing fingers at brands, it points fingers at collectors. If you want honest criticism, you have to pay for it yourself. Subscriptions, Patreon, whatever. The argument is logically consistent, in that whoever pays the piper can call the tune. If brands pay, reviews will be polite at best and sycophantic at worst. If collectors pay, they purportedly get honesty. Fine - and I will spare you the massive tangent on human motivations and biases for now.
His views are perhaps morally correct - but they are commercially fragile.
Most watch enthusiasts are wealthy enough to buy a £5,000+ watch but too cheap to pay £7.50 a month for a subscription. The internet has trained everyone to expect high-quality content for free, and AI made the situation even worse. And even when people do subscribe, the revenues rarely cover the overhead of what you might call “Institutional Journalism” - be it photography gear, podcasting equipment, the trips to various events around the world, the insurance on loaner watches, you name it…
Subscriptions are good enough to fund opinions from a person in their study. They don’t fund “industry authority” reporting. What this leaves us with is a fragmented landscape of tiny, niche voices - not a robust Fourth Estate that can hold powerful global brands accountable.
The middle ground
If you look at other industries (automotive, tech, gaming) the pattern is somewhat clearer. The era of large, independent, ad-supported media is all but over. Banner ads don’t work when brands can pay an influencer to wear the product and generate ten times the views at half the price. Access journalism is more of a norm as far as I can tell. If you write a negative review of a Ferrari you stop getting invited to drive Ferraris. The watch world is no different. “Truth” has been replaced by “Access.”
I’ll give you ONE guess to figure out what this leaves us with…
A bifurcation, that’s what! On one side, and this is ~90% of content, you have the shills - lifestyle media and influencers who are essentially unpaid or indirectly-paid PR arms for brands. Free trips, loaner products, glowing coverage, you know the drill. On the other side, maybe 10%, you have the critics - user-funded individuals who are honest but definitely lack access. They’ll rarely, if ever, get an exclusive CEO interview, and they probably buy many of the watches they review.
Adams is right when he says that the industry is cannibalising its own ecosystem, but he’s wrong to think brands will save it. Remontoir is right that consumers hold the power, but I think he overestimates how many will ever exercise it. Some do; I mean, SDC has paying subscribers, and so do Jack Forster, Chris Hall, and others mentioned in his post. The model works at a certain scale, but “enough collectors to fund one person’s newsletter” is very different from “enough collectors to fund institutional journalism that can hold global brands accountable.” The former exists, clearly. The latter probably doesn’t, and I say all this with a few years of data via SDC.
The view from the other side
Before I started SDC, I had zero paid subscriptions to other writers. I always figured I could find the same information elsewhere, and that no single person’s perspective was ever going to be so unique and special that I must pay money to access it. In fact, I think it even felt a bit oppressive. Who did these people think they were, daring to charge me to read their writing? I was already taking time out of my day to read their stuff, and time is money, so surely that’s payment enough?
Well, then I started writing myself. 😂
When you’re on the other side, you come to realise that readers take many things for granted. Nobody knows how much time goes into something that takes five minutes to read. It often involves multiple rewrites, random epiphanies at 2am, scrapped drafts, and the slow accumulation of ideas over weeks before anything coherent comes together. The finished product may look effortless and simple, but that’s precisely because you can’t see the effort.
And yes, as demonstrated by all the writers I now pay for, there are some people out there whose work can legitimately impact your life; new ways of seeing things, frameworks that stick with you, ideas you return to many months later... It’s all good stuff, valuable stuff…. So what’s the big deal with paying them a few bucks?
So yeah, now I get it, and yes, I am biased the other way. No sh1t.
I’ve already mentioned how all the little “few bucks” add up quickly to “a lot of bucks” - but for me, I see it as the cost of running SDC. I can’t reasonably sit in a cave-mindset, isolated from everyone else’s thinking, and expect to come up with new ideas twice a week. That’s not how creativity works; you need inputs to generate outputs. So I have to dig deep, dig everywhere, and make sure my filters are screening all the best sources for only the highest quality signals, and so these subscriptions are the price of admission to that information flow.
For people who don’t need that sort of ‘industrial-scale’ input, the approach can be much simpler. Just set a monthly budget you’re prepared to spend on ‘watch knowledge’ and allocate it across a few sources. Try things out for a month or two before you commit to an annual subscription, or simply stick to monthly. See what actually resonates versus what you thought would resonate… if it helps, you can think about it as buying a good book every 2 months, and reading a chapter a week.
Look, where I agree completely with Remontoir is that you can’t sit around whining about shitty watch media and biased opinions when you aren’t actually prepared to pay for what you want. If you want independent voices, you have to fund independent voices. If you want honesty, you have to pay for honesty. The market doesn’t owe you anything just because you think it should exist, them’s the rules… don’t shoot the messenger.
Where does that leave us?
Remontoir asked me in his comments, what I find value in. What makes me open my wallet for media subscriptions instead of just scrolling for free. Honestly, I’m probably spending over a grand a year on subscriptions at this point, which is pretty ridiculous, and I struggle to keep up with all of it. When I think carefully about what actually makes me pay, it comes down to three things.
First, the writing itself. A lot of watch content repeats the same information in the same way. Press releases rewritten with slight enthusiasm or whatever. However, some writers have a specific voice - elaborate word choices, funny turns of phrase, some real personality in their prose. Even when the underlying content overlaps with what everyone else is saying, the how of the telling makes it worth reading. Entertainment value is still value all the same.
Second, original thinking. Insights that make me go “oh, that’s a great perspective” or new ideas I hadn’t considered. Oh, and connections between watches and something else entirely. The moment I feel like I’m learning something new rather than being served microwave dinner takes, that’s worth paying money for.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, is people who cover things that make me think about my own world differently. Rory Sutherland is a marketing guy, not a watch person, but I follow his stuff religiously because it feeds my own creativity for writing. The best subscriptions are to people whose thinking enriches how I see everything, not just watches.
What I really don’t find value in, is completionism; reading everything, being fully “informed”… fvck that. Life is too short to read content that doesn’t interest you, just because it exists.
General remarks
I left a comment on Remontoir’s piece saying his post calls for my “annual note on watch media.” That was partly a joke, but here we are. I’ve been ranting about this subject since I started substacking. The Omega auction scandal, the state of watch journalism, the question of who pays for what - these topics keep coming back around because they’re unresolved, and likely never will be resolved.
But actually, maybe they are resolved, and we just don’t like the resolution.
The economics here aren’t complicated after all. Brands have no incentive to fund criticism - their job is to sell watches, not to subsidise people who might tell customers those watches aren’t worth the money. Collectors have no incentive to pay when free content exists everywhere - and even the ones who complain loudest about biased coverage will still click on the biased coverage rather than spend on something honest. Writers have no incentive to be critical when access depends on being nice - one negative review and suddenly you’re not invited to brand events anymore.
Every actor seems to be behaving rationally given their constraints. The outcome we have (fragmented, compromised, chaotic) is really just the Nash equilibrium and no party can unilaterally change it. Brands won’t start funding hostile coverage out of civic duty… I mean, wtf?! Collectors certainly won’t suddenly develop a collective action mindset and coordinate mass subscriptions. And I can assure you, writers don’t tend to sacrifice access for principles when principles don’t pay the rent…1
Now, the obvious response is: “Fine, you’ve described why things are broken - but I’m trying to change the incentive structure, not just accept it.” Fair enough.. So let’s take that seriously. What mechanisms might work?
Industry associations pooling funds? The watch industry barely coordinates on anything! Look at W&W… Look at GPHG… All fragmented. Getting Swatch Group, LVMH, Richemont, Rolex, Patek, and the independents to agree on collective media funding would require a level of cooperation that doesn’t exist and probably can’t exist given competitive dynamics. Endowment models like ProPublica? Those require wealthy benefactors who care about watch journalism as a public good. I’m not aware of a queue of billionaires eager to fund critical coverage of Patek. Direct brand-to-media payments with editorial independence guaranteed by contract? We’ve already covered why that’s a contradiction in terms - the moment you depend on someone’s money, your independence is compromised regardless of what the contract says.
I’m truly open to being wrong here… If someone has a funding mechanism that solves the collective action problem without compromising editorial independence, I’d love to hear it… But “brands should just fund media because it’s good for everyone” isn’t a workable mechanism.
What could work?
So I wrote everything outside of this section last night and decided to sleep on it (as I do with most posts). This morning it occurred to me that all I was doing was blasting others’ thoughts but not actually bringing any new value or insight to readers. In the spirit of fixing this shortcoming, I thought about it some more - that’s what this section is about.
If brand funding is a contradiction, if industry coordination is a bit of a fantasy, and if billionaire endowments aren’t materialising, what’s left to do? How could we solve this conundrum? Here’s a starter for five…
Hybrid hustlers. Most surviving independent media doesn’t typically rely on one revenue stream - it cobbles together subscriptions, limited advertising from non-competing brands, affiliate commissions, events, consulting, selling watch straps and whatever else pays. Hodinkee kinda did this before it imploded under its own ambition. It’s somewhat unglamorous and requires constant hustling, but it works at a certain scale, and then hits a glass ceiling. The tradeoff is that you’re always slightly compromised in multiple directions rather than fully compromised in one, and whether that’s better or worse depends on your tolerance for complexity.
Anti-access. If access corrupts, could we make independence the product? If you buy your own watches, skip the press trips, and never depend on a brand for anything, it’s guaranteed that your coverage will be slower, your photography probably worse, and your industry relationships relatively sparse - but your credibility would hopefully be unimpeachable. This is essentially the SDC model, and it mostly only works because it’s a hobby not a business. The tradeoff is that you can’t do investigative journalism about Rolex’s internal politics if nobody at Rolex will talk to you… so you basically trade both depth and breadth, for independence.
Events and experiences. Forget content monetisation entirely… Just give away the writing, and charge for gatherings… which includes collector meetups, watch trips, educational experiences and so on. The content becomes marketing for the real business, which is community. This actually might work because people will more easily pay for experiences even if they won’t pay for articles. The tradeoff is that your incentives shift toward covering things that generate event attendance and not so much the things that perhaps matter. You become an entertainment company that also happens to write about watches.
A patron saint? Find a wealthy person who cares about watch journalism as a public good and convince them to fund it indefinitely with no editorial strings attached. This sounds ridiculous until you remember that ProPublica exists, and so does The Marshall Project, and so does a surprising amount of (supposedly) independent, but quality journalism. The tradeoff is that you’re dependent on one person’s (or group’s) continued interest for your financial stability. When they get bored or go broke, you’re done.
NPR model2. This is somewhat tangential to the ‘anti-access’ in that it requires lots of small donations from lots of readers who believe in the mission, but it’s supplemented by foundation grants and maybe some corporate underwriting that’s clearly labelled and doesn’t influence coverage. Public radio has made this work for decades, but the tradeoff is that you need massive scale to generate meaningful revenue from small donations - and watch collecting is but a tiny niche. I’d guess there probably aren’t enough people who care about independent watch journalism to fund it at NPR levels to make it actually work.
Which brings me to the bottom line, which is that all of these “work”, but none of them produce the thing Adams seems to want i.e. a well-funded, fully independent, institutionally authoritative voice that can hold major brands accountable while also having full access to those brands. That particular combination of criteria seems close to impossible. The closest analogue in other industries is something like Consumer Reports, which takes no advertising and buys all its own products. Consumer Reports is a nonprofit with $238 million in annual revenue (2024)… Let’s be serious - the watch industry is not going to produce that3.
What the watch world can produce (and arguably has produced) is a fragmented ecosystem of partially compromised voices with their different compromises pointing in different directions. My gut leans towards saying that’s actually fine… If you read enough of them, the biases might cancel out and something resembling truth could emerge from the aggregate4. It’s not elegant or consistent, but given the constraints, it isn’t entirely bad either.
Concluding thoughts
Adams is asking brands to act against their interests, and Remontoir is asking collectors to act against theirs. Both seem to be making moral arguments in a system which is primarily governed by incentives - and you need not guess how that tends to work out.
Adams mourns a Golden Age that may never have existed in the form he remembers. Remontoir is more optimistic, as he asserts we’re on the cusp of something better. I’m not sure either is right! Print magazines were always dependent on advertising, and Hodinkee was commercially entangled from fairly early on. The idea of some pristine era when watch media was independent, well-funded, and truthful, feels to me like nostalgia for something that never really was.
What’s probably more accurate is that watch media was always compromised - we just didn’t notice because the compromises were less visible. When we moved on from a print-as-primary-source world, the internet essentially made corruption harder to hide - the corruption didn’t start with the internet!
Tl;dr - what we have now is what watch media looks like when everyone optimises for their own position, i.e. a fragmented mess of competing biases that, if you’re lucky and read widely enough, might approximate something like truth.
Not ideal, but perhaps not fixable either… but hey, prove me wrong… subscribe now! 😂
Don’t forget to hit the 💗 before you go. Happy weekend✌️
Of course, this isn’t my day job, so my warehouse of fvcks to give remains empty for now. If that ever changes, I expect you will unsubscribe instantly, so the incentives seem to be aligned properly.
But hey, everything started from scratch at some point, so I am not stating this is IMPOSSIBLE… just highly improbable!
“Biases cancel out” is of course just my assertion. It is entirely possible that they may not cancel out because 90% shills drown out the 10% legit critics… and of course there’s the problem where some readers can’t distinguish between them, so yes… I appreciate this isn’t fool proof… but none of this, is!
Never not a fascinating read. I think one among many relevant points you make is that conflict-of-interest-free consumer journalism never existed in the first place. I used to work in advertising and even back in the days when print was king, advertisers and publications were joined at the hip – I remember one camera journalist who said that when he started his first job at a photography magazine, he was told, "We have one big rule here: no one says anything bad about Leica." You have the power to be critically sharp in consumer journalism to the extent that there are no negative repercussions – even in the pre-internet print days, major advertisers could and did threaten to pull advertising if they didn't feel they were treated respectfully. The power media had historically to be honest, was that the big publications had big audiences and absent the Internet, they had tremendous power in terms of how brands looked to consumers. There was never a golden age when objectivity was ubiquitous. I love reading snarky restaurant reviews – AA Gill is just one example of a restaurant critic who was a master of of the form – but the truth is, a single restaurant has almost no leverage in terms of pushing back against a negative review.
Oh, man, this is exactly the sort of thing that makes me cough up a little bit of my savings for a subscription!
To a great extent, the answer to the questions asked here depends on what the reader is seeking. If they're looking for nothing more than a series of "introducing the new [x] limited edition" or whatever, then places like Hodinkee or ABTW are sufficient; anyone older than age four knows those "articles" are lightly edited press releases. They're also okay if you're looking for occasional interviews with WatchWorld bigwigs, and are willing to live with the fact that every word those bigwigs speak has been carefully massaged by a battalion of PR minions. (Okay, with the occasional but delicious exception of a certain Mr. Stern, whose uncensored eruptions provide morbidly fascinating glimpses into the mindset of the mega-wealthy class: Let the peons wear Tissot!) And, of course, if you're looking for thoughtful, insightful essays from people who care deeply about watches and are highly knowledgeable about WatchWorld and its wares, there are sites like this one, and Mr. Forster's.
But what I would love to see, even though I agree with you that it's probably impossible, is a sort of Consumer Reports for watches. Not to critique the design or style of the case or dial or bracelet; those things, in all but rarefied cases, can very easily be assessed in person by an interested potential buyer. But instead to point out real problems, in a credible, systemic manner that's more reliable than the anecdotal stuff that comes out on Reddit etc. Things like the hand-setting problems with Oris's early in-house movement run. Or the problems with the co-axial escapement early on in Omega's incorporation of it. Or the apparent reliability issues that (maybe) plagued early UN Freaks and many of the HYT movements. The one thing that all of those problems have in common is that I didn't read about them anywhere I consider reliable until months or even years after they occurred. At which point they're useless except as retrospective "damn, I sure am glad I didn't buy one of those" moments.
And the only thing that makes this lacuna tolerable is that for the most part, watches work as they should, right out of the box, and keep on working that way year after year. Over all my years, I've only had two that were problems that way, which is an acceptably low percentage.