My mantra is: You gain respect the more you know about the backstory. This is true for people but also for watches. I do what I do, I love what I do because I want to share my passion and let everybody understand these little mechanical objects not through specs but the story behind each individual timepiece as well as the era of their conception. Thus, we're drawing an interim conclusion on how well I did the last year or so. What gets the watch enthusiasts going and how can improve our perception of th vintage watch world?
September 11, 2024
My Third Anniversary as Semi-Professional Watch-Nerd
Marcus Siems @siemswatches
Collector, Author, Data Analyst
Is it three years already? On August 31st 2021 I uploaded the first article to our website. Including this one right here we are at 130 vintage watch related discussions - from nerd-level beginner to "who comes up with this?". How haven't I run out of topics yet? And why is everyone still reading my analyses, opinions, guides and musings... That's Ridiculous(ly cool)!
If you didn't know yet, this is the author at Goldammer. This is me. This is also the third time within the first paragraph that this picture came up... Thank you all for the ride so far!
First and foremost this is a time to say Thank You to each and everyone reading this or any other lines of my writing. Thank you to all the collectors, dealers and enthusiasts for sharing their insights and opinions with me. Thank you to Marc and the entire team at Goldammer! Because it means I'm working in an environment that fuels and enables my passion for vintage watches. Giving me access to this magical world and expose me to all the little details and many facets of everything that defines the allure to these small anachronistic time-machines is the foundation of everything you read and enrichens every piece of content.
1) The Numbers
But enough for the sentiments. This is still about new input, information and some crunched data. I thought this anniversary would also be a great opportunity to let all the readers peek behind the curtain again... I have done a similar analysis for the first anniversary back in 2022 (see [here]) and I thought it would be great to 1) see how far we've come, and 2) see what interests you - my dear readers - the most. In other words, I gathered all the website insights from the last 13+ months* and will go bezerk on the data analysis. Buckle up!
Figure 1. Weekly website views (blog) from July 2023 to September 2024.
Over the 60 week period Analytics counted over 185,000 unique website views from almost 110,000 users! This is a crowd that's already half the size of our hometown and base Rostock. These users spent an average of 1:04 minutes on each post, which amasses to 198,585 minutes or 3,310 hours or 138 days of viewing time. It's mind boggling as we had 'only' 27 days of annual view time two years ago - this is a 4x to 5x increase.
I know you guys don't only want to see the straight numbers but you also come for the eye-candy ... so to stop you from scrolling here's a stunning 1970s Patek Philippe ref. 3878 with Lapis Lazuli bezel that's still lurking around in our shop. Photo Goldammer Shop.
Broken down this means we got an average view count of 3,100 per week. But as you can already see from the figure above it hasn't been a smooth year with only going up and up but rather a bit of a rollercoaster. What becomes quite evident is that there has been a plunge in viewership around September 2023. We know what happened but still don't understand why: A massive increase in the so-called "bounce rate"** happening exactly on the September 13th 2023:
Figure 2. Critical Bounce Rate period in September 2023.
As you can see we've always had a quite good bounce rate somewhere between 30%-40% up until the 12th of September 2023. And overnight doubled that to somewhere between 70%-85% - a level that's been stable ever since. Interestingly, we didn't change anything during that period. And everything we've tried to explain (and correct) this behavior lead to nothing... The silver lining is we're not only back to our old glory but actually had our strongest readership just this last month!
I of course don't want to keep you hanging dry from only seeing some numbers so here's one of my favorite watches sold recently ... and of course some articles I've written about these pieces [here] & [here]. Photo Goldammer Archives.
This is in part to an increased social media presence and people spilling over from Instagram and our other channels but also to a revitalized Google traffic (see orange line Figure 1). Over these last 60 weeks over 70,000 user found our blog posts via Google search which led to over 115,000 views. Thus, on average 63% of our readership finds the way to our information without necessarily knowing us beforehand. To me it stays highly relevant to keep this number as high as possible as we want to spread the love of vintage watches to more enthusiasts and a growing audience of new collectors.
2) Your Favorite Articles
Well, of course none of you is randomly clicking on whatever we or any search engine coughs up. Some articles, some guides, some analyses, some opinions just resonate more with you than others. So I compiled the list of the top articles that you guys enjoyed over the last couple of months the most:
Figure 3. Top 16 Most Read Articles on our website from July 2023 to September 2024.
There are two posts that stick out the most: The Omega Constellation Pie-Pan dial guide and the quantitative guide on vintage watch brands with over 15,000 views each. If we look a little closer and also more into the past we can actually see that since the upload two years ago over 20,000 users read my guide on the Constellation Pie-Pan! That's more than a boat load and the size of a small village. Considering in what niche we're working I consider this a lot!
The pieces on historic Rolex retail prices and the dial color guide each topple the 8,000 views mark while the pieces on the Constellation C-Shape, IWC Ingenieur SL, as well as the Ellipse Origin story come in at over 3,500 views - all of these are thus viewed between 10 to 25 times per day!
No wonder these pieces - and the story behind them - produce so much heat! My personal favorite is this early 1990s IWC Ingenieur 9238... Ooooooweee, still on my mind. Photo Goldammer Archives.
What we should honor as well is that five articles were just uploaded within the analyzed period - The Ellipse Origin story, the Tantalum Royal Oak, the Bumper Automatic, Geneva Case Maker & the Vacheron Constantin Teardrop Lugs - which makes us underestimate their contribution to some extent.
3) Conclusion
When all the numbers are recapitulated we need to look into the future. As long as I find new information, new insights and new angles on the past there's a reason for me to keep doing this. And if it is up to me I would go for another 30 years publishing hundreds and hundreds more articles, hopefully a book or two and increase my and everybody's understanding of vintage watches. My rationale is that I want vintage watches to become not just 'cool' but normal. People shouldn't back off vintage pieces because they appear foreign... A broader understanding will bring them to life. It'll make watches talk to the enthusiasts through the language of appreciation.
For watches it is just the same as with people: You gain respect the more you know about the backstory. And as long as there are interesting stories to tell, fascinating timepieces to adore, you gotta let me do my thing or carry me out of this office... I'm not done!
* As Google Analytics updated in July 2023 I unfortunately don't have access to (compatible) data from before that time.
** The bounce-rate defines the number of views/sessions in which there has been no interaction with the article or a too short retention period on the site - this leads Analytics to not counting the view when calculating internal hierarchies of pages (in a nutshell). An increase in bounce-rate will thus lead to a drop in users finding an article via search engines.
All rights on text and graphics reserved to the Author.
