Articles

Introduction

Public interest in deep sea mining has grown rapidly over the last few years. We've dug into that interest by looking at Google Trends, search terms and search volumes, and the common search terms that the public use when visiting this site.

The results are fascinating, and suggest that the public is interested in the players and equipment, but also very interested in how to invest in deep sea mining.

Public Interest

Unsurprisingly Google search volumes for the Topic "Deep Sea Mining" have increased by a factor of 8x since 2010. (Source: Google Trends).

The public appears to be more interested in deep sea mining, the number of companies involved has grown over this period, and the amount of news and press articles on this subject has grown rapidly.

Note that this data includes similar search terms (e.g. "subsea minerals") and search terms in other languages (e.g. "gruvedrift på dypt hav"). The data is automatically normalized by overall Google search volume, and so it removes the impact of population growth and increasing internet usage.

Topics of Interest

We dug into these Google Search Terms using search tools at AnswerThePublic to understand what specific subjects the public are interested in when searching for "Deep Sea Mining":

What's fascinating here is that the majority of searches around the topic "Deep Sea Mining" are about the Companies, Investment Opportunities and Equipment.

Despite significant volumes of press and NGO activity around the potential environmental impacts of deep sea mining, the actual search volumes for these terms are relatively low. For example, almost there were almost twice as many searches for "dead sea minerals hand cream" as there were for "deep sea mining moratorium".

Here's the full set of results:

Impression Share for This Site

We also pulled Google Search Console data for this site, to see which specific search terms and topics we show up for.

This site is not dedicated to environmental arguments or documenting moratoria, but it covers a broad range of topics around deep sea mining. Despite this, the vast majority of search impressions are for topics around stocks, investing and equipment:

Again, this is fascinating and surprised us. Specifically, the volume of searches and amount of interest in investing in deep sea mining was utterly surprising, particularly given the relative absence of searches about the issues and challenges.

Of further note, the Stocks page is a particularly popular destination for visitors to this site.

Here's the full set of results:

Conclusion

We started this site with the aim of becoming an authority in the equipment, financing, regulations and operations of Deep Sea Mining, because we percevied a lack of meaningful information addressing these topics. Google Search Trends, Topics and Impressions all indicate that the public is interested in these subjects, but furthermore, is particularly interested in investing in deep sea mining.

Whilst the former did not surprise us, the large amount of interest in investing in DSM versus the relative lack of interest in the commonly published "issues" of deep sea mining is particularly surprising, even to us.

In short, the public appears less interested in the potential impacts of deep sea mining, and more interested in how they can invest in it.

Huh.