Ownership and funding

Watch content is unusually easy to corrupt, because the products are expensive and the people who sell them have a great deal to gain from being written about kindly. So this page is specific.

Who publishes this site

Timeless Ticks is an independently owned publication, self-funded by its owner. It is not owned by, invested in by, or operated on behalf of any watch brand, retailer, marketplace, auction house, service center or industry body, and no such organization holds any stake in it or any editorial influence over it.

We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any watch manufacturer. Where brand names appear on this site, they appear descriptively, as examples of a technique or a specification, and remain the property of their owners.

What we are not telling you, and why. We publish under the name of the site and the names of its desks rather than under a person's name, and we do not publish a mailing address. That is a small operation protecting a home address, not a company hiding behind a shell. It is also, we accept, the weakest line on this page, and we would rather name it than let you notice it on your own.

Two things follow, and both are commitments rather than sentiments. The responsible individual can be reached at editors@timelessticks.com, which is monitored and answered, and will identify themselves in writing to anyone with a legitimate reason to ask: a regulator, a data protection authority, a legal claimant, or a reader pursuing a complaint that needs a name attached. And if this ever becomes a registered company, or takes on staff, or takes outside investment, the legal entity, the country it is registered in and its registered address will be printed on this page.

How the site is funded

The publisher pays for it, and that is the whole list. Timeless Ticks is self-funded by its owner. No money comes into it from the watch industry, and nobody outside the publication has bought a say in what it publishes or a hearing before it does.

That is easier to sustain than it sounds, because the site costs very little to run. It is a set of static files, so the standing bill is a domain name and hosting for a few megabytes of text. The expensive part is the hours: reading the standards, tracing every figure back to the document it came from, and re-reading pages that were already published. The owner absorbs those hours rather than selling them to anyone with an interest in the answer.

Nobody can buy coverage here

There is no price list, because there is nothing to sell. No mention, no kind adjective, no link, no placement in a comparison, no sight of a page before publication and no removal of anything after it. There is no version of a payment we would take for any of them, and no brand has ever paid for a word on this site. In table form, because people do ask:

The practical consequences are worth spelling out:

• No company has advance sight of editorial content, and none has any right of review, approval or veto over anything.
• No commercial relationship affects what we cover, what we conclude, or the order in which anything appears, because there are no commercial relationships to affect it.
• Nothing on this site is styled to look like editorial when it is not. Every page here was written for the reader, and no part of one was written because somebody outside this desk wanted it there.
• Every request to buy a mention, a link, a guest post or a "content partnership" is declined. Asking again after being declined does not change the answer.
• No outside party gets access to anything about our readers, because there is no outside party in the arrangement to hand it to. What the site does with data, and what you can control yourself, are set out in the privacy policy and on the cookies page.

Gifts, loans and hospitality

Nobody on the desk accepts payment, product loans, review units, free servicing, discounts, event invitations, travel, hospitality or gifts from any watch brand, dealer, marketplace, auction house or repairer. Watches referred to on this site are not supplied to us by anyone with an interest in how we describe them.

This is a simple rule rather than a nuanced one, because nuanced rules about gifts are how publications end up captured. If something arrives unsolicited, it is returned or, where return is impractical, donated, and it is not written about.

Conflicts of interest

Members of the desk may personally own watches. That is unavoidable in this subject and, frankly, desirable. What we do about it: no page recommends a purchase, no page is written to support a resale market, and nobody on the desk trades watches commercially.

We hold no position, financial or otherwise, that would benefit from any brand's price moving in either direction. We publish no investment advice and no price forecasts. To be exact rather than sweeping: where a guide describes what a market has already done, that is historical description, sourced like anything else, and you will not find a page here telling you what a watch will be worth or suggesting you buy one because of it.

If any of this changes

Any change to who owns this site, who funds it, or what can be bought here, including the introduction of anything marked "No" in the table above, will be posted on this page with a date before it takes effect, not after. If ownership changes hands, this page says so and says to whom. The page carries a review date at the top so you can see when it was last confirmed.

Related

Our editorial standards set out the rules that follow from this, how we research explains the method, and contact is where to send anything you think we have got wrong.