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BrickDb for retailers, networks and rights holders
This page exists because the people who decide whether to work with a site usually have to guess what it is from a one-line channel description. Everything below is what BrickDb actually does, stated plainly enough that you can check it against the site itself.
What BrickDb is
An independent, fan-made catalogue and collection manager for LEGO® sets, minifigures and parts. It is free, it needs no account to browse, and it is built and operated by ThreeB IT GmbH, a small software company in Germany. The LEGO Group neither produces nor endorses it, and it has no official relationship with the LEGO Group.
It runs on one domain per country: www.brickdb.de for Germany, www.brickdb.at for Austria, www.brickdb.co.uk for the United Kingdom and so on, www.brickdb.eu for the rest of Europe and www.brickdb.net for the rest of the world. Each is a full site rather than a redirect, each page is canonical on its own host, and the hosts are declared to search engines as one document per country, each in that country's main language.
Who reads it
Adult LEGO® collectors, primarily German-speaking, who arrive with a specific set number, a handful of minifigure bags to identify, or a shelf they would like valued. The catalogue runs to more than 28,000 sets, 17,000 minifigures and 64,000 parts, and that depth is what brings somebody holding a set discontinued fifteen years ago to a page at all.
No audience figure is printed on this page, and that is a choice rather than coyness: a rounded number in a media kit is worth less to both of us than one taken from the server logs with the method attached. Ask, and that is what you will get.
How it pays for itself
Affiliate commission, and voluntary support from people who use it. BrickDb takes part in affiliate programmes through the usual publisher networks: where a shop link earns a commission, BrickDb may be paid if somebody buys through it, and the visitor pays no more for it than they otherwise would.
The networks and programmes today: Awin, Rakuten Advertising, Tradedoubler, Amazon Associates. Rakuten Advertising carries the affiliate programme of LEGO's own shops – LEGO® Shop (US), LEGO® Shop (FR); taking part in it is an ordinary publisher agreement, not an endorsement.
Through Rakuten Advertising, BrickDb also links to the LEGO gift card at Giftcards.com, for visitors in the US – a link labelled as advertising, with no price.
The display cases offered on set pages come from iDisplayit, through Awin. They are advertising, labelled as such beside every link, and never a price of the set.
Every paid link is labelled as advertising in the page itself and carries rel=“sponsored”. A link that earns nothing is never labelled that way, because marking an unpaid reference as an advertisement is its own kind of untrue. The labelling is a property of the source rather than of the page, so a merchant approved next month inherits it without anybody having to remember.
Where the data comes from
Licensed interfaces and published product feeds — never a crawl. A survey of every candidate price source found each one closed to us by its robots.txt, by its terms, or by both, and that result was accepted rather than worked around. What BrickDb reads instead is Rebrickable's published catalogue, BrickLink's price-guide interface, Brickset's interface for recommended retail prices, eBay's Browse interface, and the product feeds of affiliate programmes it has been approved for.
One practical consequence for a merchant: a feed you already publish is a feed BrickDb can already ingest. Prices are stored as dated observations carrying their currency and tax basis, and are served from our own records — a price page never passes a visitor's query through to your systems in real time.
If you are the LEGO Group
BrickDb is an independent fan project with no official relationship to the LEGO Group, and it claims none. LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group; it appears here only to say what the sets in the catalogue are. The full disclaimer follows, and it stands in the foot of every page, beside the link to the imprint.
LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies. The LEGO Group does not sponsor, authorise or endorse this application.
BrickDb takes part in LEGO's affiliate programme through Rakuten Advertising and earns a commission on qualifying purchases; that is not sponsorship, authorisation or endorsement by the LEGO Group.
Imagery is either a collector's own photograph or a render we hold under licence; building instructions are linked to their source and never copied. If something here gives you pause — a mark, an image, a page — the address below reaches us directly, and it will be dealt with rather than argued about.
Getting in touch
ThreeB IT GmbH reads this mailbox, and it is the same address published in the imprint. Say which programme or network you are with and which market you are in, and you will get a straight answer about whether it is a fit.
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