About
What Minute Hand is, and what it is not.
Minute Hand reads the RSS feeds of 17 specialist watch publications every morning, groups articles that cover the same watch into a single entry, and counts how many outlets ran each story.
That count is the point. Watch media runs largely on press releases, so one brand announcement gets rewritten by ten outlets within hours. Every other aggregator lists those as ten stories. Minute Hand lists them as one, and records that it was covered ten times.
Why the count
A release covered by six outlets on a single morning is the industry saying it considers that watch important. A release covered by one is either overlooked or genuinely obscure. Both are useful to know, and neither is visible in a flat list of headlines.
Those counts are recorded every day and never revised. Over time they become the Attention Index: a measure of what the watch press is paying attention to, and how that is shifting.
What this is not
It is not a price index. It does not track secondary market values, auction results, or what anything is worth. Press attention and market value are related but separate signals, and Minute Hand only measures the first.
It does not publish original reporting. Every story links out to the publication that wrote it. The work here is in the reading, grouping and counting, not the writing.
How it is made
Minute Hand is fully automated. Feeds are read, stories are grouped, and the site rebuilds itself each morning without anyone touching it. The one-line notes under the lead stories are written by a language model working from the source article, and are there to surface a concrete detail such as a case size or a price. Where the model has nothing specific to say, it stays quiet.
No brand can buy a place in these counts, a better position in them, or coverage that did not happen. Nothing that appears here, and nothing about the order it appears in, is for sale. That is the whole basis on which the numbers are worth reading.
Minute Hand may carry advertising, and may licence its data. Neither touches what is counted or how it ranks: an advertiser buys space beside the brief, never a place inside it, and anything paid for will be marked as such. If you would rather support it directly you can do so at ko-fi.com/minutehand, and that changes nothing about what gets published either.
Who makes it
Minute Hand is built and run independently by one person in Singapore. It started because reading fifteen watch sites every morning to find the four stories worth the time seemed like something a machine should do.
Corrections
If a count looks wrong, a story is grouped with the wrong watch, or an outlet is credited that should not be, write to hello@minutehand.io and it will be looked at. Fixes to the way stories are grouped apply from that day forward. The counts already recorded are never rewritten, because a number that gets revised after the fact is worth nothing.