Where have all the bloggers gone?

An unusual short topic for this blog. I’m wondering about a lot of early days colleagues and predecessors. As time went by, the blogging scene on precious metals and mining has become more or less a wasteland.

As I started this blog in autumn 2009, I was one of the many. Some illustrious bloggers had gathered dozens of followers and were totaling page views by the hundreds of thousands if not millions. Many of them have been included on the blog list in the right hand column (not visible on mobile devices).

Yet the unraveling of the precious metals boom of 2011 made investors wary and scared away speculators or made them revise their strategy from long to short.

Whereas the analysis of many bloggers had been spot on until 2011, only few of them revised it as the climate for precious metals worsened. Many lost credibility and the crowed of followers became thin, until only a few die-hards remained.

The number of bloggers has shrunk as has the audience of potential readers. Unless you mainly have been into blockchain and crypto currencies since at least a few years, writing about precious metals and miners feels a bit like preaching in the desert.

A few well-known investors left the blogging sphere to concentrate only on their website, which offers more versatility. And while the blogs are still there, they most often have not been updated since several years. 

My blog-list is now narrowed down to three bloggers who have at least been active over the past year.

1. Moreover, on IKN (Inca Kola News) the editor Mark Turner only continues mentioning that its (paid) weekly newsletter has been sent to subscribers. 
2. FOFOA keeps regurgitating the very valuable insights of a series of posts collected in ‘the gold trail’ going back to turn of the century. They explained why the gold bear market of the late 1990′s was at its bottom and why a substantial recovery was to follow. Note that gold quoted around or below $300 back then: the analysis was spot on.
3. Finally (last but not least) we still have Jesse’s Café Américain. The blog is in English, though much of the side information (vintage publicity panels) are in French. You find daily updated graphs and some historical facts in order not to lose the perspective of how the situation came to be what it is.