A little over four and a half years ago, I marked the occasion of the one millionth page view of this blog, which at that time fell more or less coincident with the eighth anniversary of the first post.  Since then, I have added about fifty further posts and accumulated an additional one million page views, taking the total to 2 million.

Any number ending in -illion has an impressive weight to it, but the sobering reality is that 2 million page views barely registers in the modern internet age, particularly given the extended period of time over which those views have accumulated.  Nevertheless, I think the occasion is still worth noting, not least because it provides me with cause to reflect on successes and failures but also to think about how the blog may develop in the future.

Let’s start by reviewing the ten most popular posts since the blog registered its one millionth page view back in March 2020.  In reverse order:

10.  A Kind of Blue: the Seiko 6119-8083

In 2020, this post from June 2015 was riding high at number 6 and I didn’t understand at the time why it was so popular.  I speculated that it might just be that it was the title that was tickling the fancy of the Google search algorithm but clearly whatever appeal it held is being sustained, albeit against some strong recent competition.

9.  And now for something completely different: the Seiko Elnix Electronic Watch

This new entry into the top 10 provides an insight into the surprising popularity of posts on watches powered not by mechanical potential energy but by the electromotive force derived from circulating electrons.  The horological blind alley that was the electronic balance-driven electric watch seems somehow to have captured a zeitgeist, although I am not sure if it is the zeitgeist of the early 1970’s or of an emerging recognition now of the technological achievements of that period. An accompanying short video on my YouTube channel is my third most popular video at just shy of 16,000 views.

8.  WATER150mRESIST: A Seiko 7548-7000 from June 1982

Three of the top 10 posts back in 2020 were on diver’s watches, and this post on the classic early 1980’s Seiko 150m quartz diver’s watch was sitting pretty then at number 9.  This is only one of three posts that featured then to have risen in the charts, a testament perhaps to the popularity of this particular model but also by the fact that it is powered by electrons!

7.  Twin Quartz:  A Seiko Grand Quartz 9943-8000 from June 1978

At number 7, this post from 2021 is one that is showing accelerating growth in its popularity and I would not be surprised if that growth finds it at or very close the summit in a few years time.  The twin quartz technology of the late 1970s seems, genuinely, to have piqued more than a little interest amongst the regular readers of the blog as well as folk who have found themselves passing through.  The rather bland title of this post suggests that all the traffic has been generated by an interest in the properly gob-smacking ingenuity that was being exercised during the early years of the quartz revolution.

6.  A Grand Seiko in all but name: the Seikomatic 6216-9000

This 2017 post describes a pretender to the Grand Seiko throne and reflects on the tension between absolute quality and branding.  Whatever the appeal of the Grand Seiko name, to my eyes, this is one of the most beautiful automatic watches that Seiko have ever produced and therefore more desirable than its blue-blooded twin, the Grand Seiko 6245-9000.

5.  A pair of kings: The King Seiko Hi-Beat Automatic Part I

Another new entry, this is one of two posts in the top ten featuring the 56-series automatic movement.  In fact, the 56 movement is the only one to appear more than once in this list.  These two high-beat King Seikos are beautiful watches, the earlier of the two arguably the one with the more compelling case for proper iconic status but both lovely examples of some of the finest output of Seiko in its pomp.

4.  A technical tour de force: Seikomatic-P

In at number 4, this post from 2016 is significant, not least because it documents the de- and re-construction of one of Seiko’s most complex automatic movements.  However, it is also significant in the development of the blog because it marked the start of my experimentation with pairs of speedlights to light the photographs that accompany each post.  The photos in this post are not perfect by any stretch but up to this point I had been struggling to achieve sensible white balance with continuous light sources.  By the way, I love this watch.

3.  A Seiko King Quartz 0853-8025 from December 1976

Rocketing into the top 3, this new entry harks from June 2020 and is another example of the somewhat perplexing popularity of mid-70s Japanese quartz technology.  The 0853 was a mid-tier movement in terms of its positioning but the complexity of its engineering was at another level.  Among its charms, a secret function which seems to have tweaked the trigger fingers of YouTube surfers:  the accompanying video on my Youtube channel is comfortably the most-viewed of all of my YouTube content with just over 29,000 views at the time of writing.

2.  Rise and Fall: The King Seiko 4502-7001

This was a tale of ups and downs, of resurrection and catastrophe.  Probably the most notorious post on my blog and one of only three of the top 10 in 2020 to have climbed further up the hit parade.  Arguably the 45-series hand wind high-beat calibre is the most magnificent of all of Seiko’s vintage movements.  This post dates from January 2016 and it wasn’t until 2022 that I found myself working on another 45, that one strapped into a Grand Seiko.  Nothing to do with the trauma of the first experience of course.

1.  Flawed genius: A Seiko Lord Matic 5606-8010

By a very comfortable margin, the number 2 post from 2020 finds its itself topping the charts this time around with just under twice as many page views as the next most popular post (see above).  I am at a loss to account for its popularity although I do recognise that it is a good post.  But then there are plenty of other posts that I hold in higher regard, but which fail to attract anything like the same attention.  It wouldn’t surprise me, if this blog survives long enough to reach three million page views, to see this post retaining its crown.  But you never know:  the two quartz posts at numbers 3 and 7 are showing upwards trajectories whereas this one may be starting to converge to an asymptote (see below).

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Let’s look at which of the popular posts at the previous landmark in 2020 have gone off the boil. 

The most conspicuous is the number 1 post from 2020: Face-off: Rolex vs. Grand Seiko. 

In the list compiled for today’s post, that entry does not feature in the top 30 but it is still holding its own at number 3 in the all-time list, based on the very large number of page views it received between 2016 and 2019.

The third most popular post in 2020 was The Seiko 6139B deconstructed, one of the very earliest entries in the blog, dating from 2012.

That post had a fantastically consistent run from about 2014 to 2020 but then started to slide in the popularity stakes.  It still sits at number 6 in the all-time ranking but in the past year it has slipped out of the top 50.

The 8^th and 10^th positions were previously occupied by posts on the two classic 1970s Seiko 150m diver’s watches: the 6105-8110 and 6309-7040.  Both have more or less tracked each other as they have moved down the rankings, but not out of sight:  the 6309 post sits at #22 and the 6105 at #24 in the tally from between 2020 and 2024.

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What about the up and comers?  As I mentioned earlier, it seems that it’s some of the early electronic and quartz watches that have been gathering momentum.  The bar chart below shows a comparison of the performance of the all-time #1 post (Flawed Genius) with posts on the Twin Quartz 9943, the King Quartz 0853 and the Seiko Elnix.  The y-axis represents a measure of the page views normalised against the total traffic in each year, to eliminate the effect of fluctuations in the latter on relative page view numbers.

You should be able to see the decline in the performance of the Flawed Genius post, albeit from a very high starting point, set against the gathering popularity of the posts on the Twin Quartz and King Quartz 0853.  It is also worth noting the very consistent performance of the Elnix post.

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I started this blog twelve and a half years ago purely and simply as an outlet to document what at that point had become my principal spare-time preoccupation and gathering obsession.  I had been writing about my adventures in periodic posts on watch forums but I wanted to take greater ownership over what were becoming increasingly detailed pieces of documentary writing.  I have never sought to commercialise the blog and indeed I pay a higher subscription to WordPress to avoid the annoyance to the readership of advertising.  Similarly, I have not spent a great deal of effort trying to promote the blog and so it has grown under its own steam since 2012 to an extent that the prospect of page views well into seven figures seems to have become a reality.

You will see from this histogram that the blog grew steadily until 2020 but seems to have plateaued since then, with some signs that it may even be in a bit of a decline.  The stalling in its growth may be that it’s simply reached a saturation point, given the demographic of the readership, the nature of the posts and the layout and structure of the site.  It probably doesn’t help that the url contains 32 characters not including the .com or the https://

In spite of my claims of a somewhat laid-back approach to self-promotion, I have expanded beyond the blog into Instagram and Youtube and I also maintain a Pinterest page and a Facebook page.  The last of these I have neglected for some time and is essentially dormant now.  I post photos on Pinterest when I remember to do so and since about 2017 I have posted videos reasonably regularly on YouTube, with some developing intent on that front manifesting in 2019.  It is fair to say that my interest in maintaining the YouTube channel is on the fizzle – it is simply far too much work, I’m not very good at it and most importantly, the demands of filming completely annihilates the pleasure I take from the actual process of working on my watches.  I will probably still occasionally upload the odd video but I have no appetite to use that outlet to document projects.

Consequently, Instagram remains the only properly active supporting channel to document the results of my hobby.  Ironically, Pinterest is comfortably the source of the largest number of referrals outside WordPress, followed by Facebook.  This tells me that it is the photographs that accompany my posts that drive a great deal of the traffic and that there must be a significant degree of chatter in parts of Facebook about which I am ignorant that direct readers to my blog.  Reddit, Youtube, Instagram, assorted watch forums also feature in the top 20 external referrers as well as independent watch-related sites such as mizeni.com, ablogtowatch.com, richardperrett.com, kingseiko.info and fratellowatches.com.  Thanks to all these folk and others for taking an interest and taking the trouble to mention me in dispatches!

According to worldometers.info, there are 195 countries in the world today.  These include 193 countries that are member states of the United Nations plus two non-member observer states.  In addition, there are a number of countries of more limited recognition as well as territories and colonies that are sometimes referred to as countries.  It is rather gratifying to see that my readership includes people living in 219 countries, territories and colonies which, depending on how you look at it, may represent something approaching a clean sweep.  Naturally, the largest readership comes from English-speaking territories (USA, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand) but there are also lots of readers from mainland Europe (including in significant numbers from Germany, Italy, France, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Norway and others) and the Asia-Pacific region, including Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Hong Kong SAR China, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan et al.  Probably the most under-represented countries in terms of their potential are India and China with just 13724 page views from the former and 7158 from the latter.  Roll up, roll up!

In 2023 I started selling a few watches through the blog.  In the past, when the numbers of completed projects have assumed unmanageable proportions, I have sold the occasional watch through a watch forum and sometimes through eBay.  However, I thought I’d give the blog a try and this seems to have worked quite well.  I should emphasise however, that the selling of watches is not the means to the end and I don’t and have never wanted the blog to be a shop front.  The truth of that should be evident in the fact that the most recent update to the For Sale page is 16^th May 2023!

In late 2023, I was approached by a company who asked if I would be interested in reviewing their products on the blog.  I wasn’t but I did agree to construct a self-build project using their components and wrote a blog post documenting that experience.  In retrospect, I worry a little that that slightly tainted the purity up to that point of the underlying ethos of the blog.  I would be interested to hear if that has been the perception.

What about the future?  Well a small number of you may know that my day job is as a University academic in a Science Department in North Yorkshire and in a couple of months, I will be taking early retirement.  It is my hope that this will free up a considerable amount of time for me to make some inroads into the (hundreds?) of watches that wait patiently in the stockpile.  I have some other ideas about how I might broaden my web presence, perhaps a site focussing more on watch photography that links to the blog.  Maybe I will have time to take on the odd project from other people.  We’ll see.

In the meantime, I would like to thank everyone who reads the content posted here, whether you are a subscriber or regular follower, or an occasional dipper inner, or an accidental tourist, finding yourself here by route of Pinterest or Google image search engines.

Watch this space.