Resource prospectors are bleeding their depleted coffers at a time when they might think about hoarding capital firepower.

We are seeing evidence that legitimate assay updates of mineral resources, for one, are all but ignored in the investment marketplace.

Some public relations professionals tell me the usual business-wire distributions of fresh mineral assays, property transactions and other corporate developments are getting 30 percent fewer "reads" than they were just 18 months ago.

I am sure the traditional press-release disseminators / distributors dispute such a dramatic decline in "reads"  success.

Still, when it comes to the public companies with legitimate developments, well, they're danged if they do and dinged if they don't -- disseminate their paragraphs, that is.

"The email newswire/paid distribution model lives on despite the indifferent reception, but many companies feel they still need to keep some presence of mind with investors lest they completely fall off the radar," says Howard Fitch, a Canadian who works in public relations and now runs a one-on-one outreach service for small companies, MarketEdge Media.

I think it's fear that keeps many small companies -- resources and otherwise -- spending their shriveling treasuries on the usual suspects of pr-wire / biz-wire distributions.

My baliwick is natural resources. Thus: in a three-month span, a junior minerals prospector can spend tens of thousands of dollars on North America and European news dissemination that is neither required by regulators nor demanded by shareholders.

International reach via traditional press-release distributors is even more dear. (Multiple channels, language translation and so on.)

By every measure, interest is waning in these paragraphs getting shuttled through media pipes. In the 1990s and early 2000s, in the technology segments, we called it "vaporware" -- a lot of text designed to move stock prices.

Fortunately, Internet and other technology companies were enjoying for a time a red-hot market, and snaring fresh investors was as easy as brewing some tasty paragraphs for the masses.

These days, your vaporware has to be superb, and well timed, to work -- in any industry.

Take a look at "reads" for text, for example. These include a range of activity for news releases that includes inbound links, average length of read time, traffic, indexed pages and other geeky indicators of popular reach.

They are all declining.

Granted, press releases are getting propagated to an ever-growing crowd of financial news vendors, led by Yahoo Finance and including MarketWatch.com and hundreds of other large and small Internet publishers.

Yet video is crowding out text on the Web. Investors are at a saturation point. Many want analysis with their press releases. And when they get it, via Seeking Alpha and other venues, investors can be underwhelmed with sub-par content in some cases, and with misleading or self-interested reports in other cases.

Oh yes. There are changing guidelines for what securities regulators in North America and elsewhere view as sanctioned dissemination.

It is all in flux, with Twitter and others looking to become news distributors that allow public companies to identify their investors and spoon-feed them.

It gets dramatic in natural resources -- one of the few equity segments of the stock market worldwide that has not had a sustained price rally in the past 39 months.

Continental Gold (CNL in Canada) is one of many examples in the natural resources business. Great news this week, yet no reaction. (I could mention Gold Standard Ventures this week as well, and a few dozen others that published compelling press releases and received nothing in the way of investor love.)

Ari Sussman and Mark Moseley-Williams' Colombia gold and silver mine developer, Continental Gold, this week reported a quantum leap in measured and indicated gold and silver at the Buritica project in Antioquia department, Colombia.

The 70 percent gain reported this week in precious metals at Buritica from 18 months ago saw little attention on 1. bulletin board and chat-room sites; 2. news and other traditional wire services; 3. in the stock market.

Sure, the news was propagated in paid distribution channels. Big deal.

Executives at news-wire distributors tell me, privately, that miners with legitimate news are torn between holding their paragraph firepower until the appetite for resources returns, or seeking cheaper and more effective ways to disseminate their reports. "I think this holds for any industry in a down market," one higher-up told me.

Some of the best known business-wire services -- there are four or five major ones in North America and numerous smaller ones and we all know the names -- charge thousands of dollars to propagate news across continents. Add-on services for fully formatted PDF files, with graphics, and search-engine optimization, add to the PR pile of evaporating cash.

So too do video services and other telecom features for conference calls with investors. Many of these "events" get fewer than a dozen participants in this tarnished age of precious metals equities.

In the case of Continental Gold, its Marketwire releases reach Marketwatch, Yahoo Finance and other major news outlets.

Yet these execs must be scratching their heads. Financial regulators around the world are opening the gates to authorized disclosure media for public entities. LinkedIn, Twitter, StockTwits, Stockr.com, Equities.com and other so-called social media that connect with specific individuals and institutions probably fit the new bill.

Now, I could be writing this about any industry, not just resources. As I said, regulators these days are permitting any publicly owned corporation to distribute news via outreach services that will reduce corporate overhead and likely expand reach to ordinary investors.

"At some point, Coca-Cola won't issue press releases. The social reach is a dynamic where investors will come to the company for its content, and not vice-versa -- no need to push it out," says Vinny Jindal of Stockr.com in Santa Monica, California.

He and other social media -- Equities.com for one, also in the Santa Monica area -- believe that within five years, corporate IR, or investor relations, executives will feed their company-specific audiences via social-media receptacles.

Instead of paying for press releases, or searching for fresh investors via telephone, or at conferences, IR execs will transmit directly to their opt-in investors via  third-party social media. They even will pay for those leads.

As for thought leaders who can influence investors, there are, of course, the hoard of investment newsletter writers, including this one. Increasingly, though, we are seeing powerful groups of like-minded "experts" come together at sites such as LinkedIn, Stockr.com, Equities.com, CEO.CA, etc.

I just was invited to one at LinkedIn called 121 Mining Investment. It's a collection of about 90 international mining-centric professionals in all segments: geology, banking, communications, engineering, logistics.

For now, best we keep an eye on regulatory agencies' softening of the fair-disclosure rules in North America, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Like I said, it's already in flux -- with social media getting an OKAY from the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission in April 2013, at least as a supplement to the usual, expensive and tired old p.r. channels. (See: April 2013)

-- Thom Calandra