Good question and one we’ve heard before!
We at gauk even publish some free info. Indeed, if an auctioneer has set their Bid Online listings live then gauk is totally free to use (if your favourite auctioneer hasn’t set Bid Online live, tell them you wish to use gauk to bid on and pay for lots) …
However, it takes a large team of data input staff, a number of technical guys and a rather large budget to keep gauk running. gauk databases took over TEN years to compile and thousands of hours to maintain. It’s also comforting to know that we aim to reinvest up to 30% of subscription fees into improving gauk; indeed the next 12 months of upgrades are now scheduled.
You simply cannot find the gauk information anywhere else for free and you are paying for the convenience of having all of it at your fingertips. Take auctioneers – gauk list nearly 2,000, list some 8,000 auctions a month and hundreds of thousands of items … put this into context: Yellow pages list some 100 auctioneers and NO other information at all!
Why we don’t sell ads
These days companies know literally everything about you, your friends, your interests, and they use it all to sell ads.
gauk has evolved over many years but from the outset we wanted to make something that wasn’t just another ad clearinghouse. We wanted to spend our time building a service people wanted to use because it worked and saved them money and made their lives better in a small way. We knew that we could charge people directly if we could do all those things. We knew we could do what most people aim to do every day: avoid ads.
No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow.
Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.
Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.
At gauk, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable auction search to the world. That’s our product and that’s our passion. Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.
When people ask us why we charge, we say “Have you considered the alternative?”
We try to keep running costs down and pass on savings where we can but ultimately, we think gauk represents excellent value, especially when you consider some printed catalogues can cost upwards of £5 each! We hope you’ll agree.