Advertising — the policy for this archive, and why it carries none

Why this page still exists

This address was one of three company-information pages on the original site, and it carried rate cards for banner positions. Removing it would leave an inherited address returning an error, and replacing it with a redirect to the homepage would tell a visitor nothing. So it answers the question it was always for, whether you can buy space here, with the current answer, which is no.

The reasoning

The archive's only asset is that it can be trusted about dates and figures. Everything here depends on the pages being exactly what they claim: reproductions of what was published, at the address where it was published, on the date it was published. A single number quietly adjusted to suit an advertiser would make every other number on the site worthless, which is a poor trade for the price of a placement.

Commercial arrangements erode that in ways that are hard to bound. A dealer's banner beside a dispatch about gold smuggling changes how the dispatch reads. A sponsored explainer about bullion storage would sit in the reference layer and be indistinguishable in form from the pages that are not sponsored. An affiliate link inside a 2013 dispatch would be an edit to a dated document for commercial reasons, which is the one thing this site rules out absolutely.

None of that is a moral position about advertising. It is a judgement about this particular site: being trusted about dates and figures is the whole of its worth, and that trust is also its most fragile property. The amount a small closed archive could earn from display inventory does not come close to covering the cost of spending it.

What this means in practice

There is no display inventory, so there are no rate cards, no sizes and no availability. Sponsored dispatches are not accepted at any price, and neither are paid insertions into existing dispatches, including link insertions, which are the most common request an archive of this kind receives. Guest contributions are not accepted either, because the archive is closed: adding new writing presented as part of a 2011–2016 record would be a misrepresentation regardless of who wrote it or why.

Product mentions inside the archive are historical. Where a dispatch names a mint, a dealer, a fund or an exchange, that is because the desk reported on it in the year in question, never because of a commercial arrangement.

The requests an archive actually receives

Almost none of them are for banner space. A closed record with dated pages and stable addresses attracts a specific set of approaches, and it is worth naming them, because each has the same answer and saying so once saves the correspondence.

The most common is the link insertion: an offer to pay for a link added inside an existing dispatch, usually described as an update, a resource addition or a correction. It is declined without exception, and not on principle but on definition: a 2012 dispatch that acquires a link in 2026 is no longer a reproduction of what was published in 2012, and every citation pointing at that address is then pointing at something other than what it cited. The second is the offer of a written piece for the archive, sometimes framed as filling a gap in the coverage. The archive is closed and files nothing new, so there is no gap to fill; anything added now would have to be presented either as part of a record it was not part of, or as something visibly outside it, and neither is worth doing.

The third is an offer to buy the domain or the archive outright. That is a different kind of question from advertising and is not answered on this page. The fourth is a request to remove a dispatch that mentions a company unfavourably, occasionally arriving with a commercial proposal attached. Removal requests are decided on their merits and the proposal makes no difference to the outcome either way; contact sets out how they are handled.

What is welcome instead

Corrections come first: a figure reproduced wrongly is worth more to this site than any commercial proposal. Requests to give a specific consolidated dispatch a full page of its own, with a reason, are considered on the evidence. And being quoted accurately is what the whole arrangement is for: the addresses are stable, the dates are stated, and each restored page prints its own canonical address in a form that can be copied straight into a reference.

If your interest is the material rather than the inventory, the section hubs describe what each part of the archive covered, and the reference layer explains the mechanics behind the figures: how gold is priced, contract specifications, and India's gold import regime. For anything else, contact sets out what the address is and is not for.