You might have noticed things look a little different around here.
TL;DR: WWR is now a newsletter. If you subscribe, you'll get all our hands-on reviews and a weekly news roundup delivered straight to your inbox. You can support us by subscribing for $5 a month or $50 a year—every bit helps us keep this going and make it even better.
As a special gift to you, our loyal supporters, we’re offering 20% off forever! Just visit this link to subscribe.
What Is Happening?
The WWR Blog, a site I started in 2004, is effectively dead. Back then, the blogosphere and RSS were the main tools for discovery. To reach thousands—if not millions—of readers, all you had to do was download WordPress, register a domain, and start writing.
SEO messed up that equation a bit, but for most of the 2000s, WWR worked fine as a blog. It let us share unbiased watch reviews on thousands of timepieces. We never took money from manufacturers, never went on junkets, and never compromised our ethics.
We also never made money—because I didn’t want to ruin the site.
By 2023, Google had started penalizing sites like ours simply for existing. Traffic was redirected to SEO-optimized pages with clickbait like “Top 10 Watches for Left-Handed Midwestern Dads With Jeeps,” while our real reviews and news got buried. As traffic fell, so did ad revenue.
To keep the lights on, we moved to Ezoic—an ad network that filled the site with interstitials and junk ads (“Doctors say NEVER eat this food!”). On top of that, the cost of hosting on a professional WordPress service forced us to switch to a self-hosted setup. It worked, briefly.
But the old WWR site became unmanageable. Posting anything was a chore. The site slowed to a crawl. In trying to save pennies, we sacrificed usability, comfort, and readability. As a writer, I hate that.
So I’ve decided to do what many journalists are doing: move to a paid newsletter. This new version of WWR is missing thousands of old posts, which sucks—but putting our content in a format that reaches you directly feels like a better model for journalism, at least for now. I wish we could’ve saved it all, but them's the breaks.
WWR has always been a labor of love. Patrick has kept it alive single-handedly for years, and neither of us has made any real money from it. I believe in sharing news, reviews, and opinions freely, and this site is an extension of that.
That said, if you plan to keep reading, please subscribe—and consider paying. Once we have enough revenue, we’ll do more: video, podcasts, maybe even events. Until then, we’ll keep writing, and we hope you’ll keep reading.
Thank you for your support over the years. Here’s to the next 20 years of WWR.