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PAYDIRT PROSPECTOR

About PayDirt Prospector: Our Mission & Methodology

We built the site we wished existed when we started prospecting.

PayDirt Prospector was created to solve a simple but frustrating problem in the recreational gold prospecting hobby: finding reliable, transparent data about paydirt sellers and public panning locations.

For years, the paydirt community has relied on fragmented YouTube reviews, scattered forum posts, and outdated seller websites to figure out who to trust and what a bag of dirt is actually worth. We decided to centralize that information.

Our Mission Is To make recreational gold prospecting more transparent, data-driven, and accessible.

We believe that whether you are a weekend hobbyist panning in your backyard or an active prospector hiking into public lands, you deserve to know exactly what you are buying.

PayDirt Prospector serves as an independent intelligence hub for the niche. We do the heavy lifting of tracking seller prices, calculating live Return on Investment (ROI) based on daily gold spot prices, aggregating trusted YouTube reviews, and mapping verified public panning locations across the United States.
How we track paydirt ROI:

Our comparison engine is built on transparency. We do not guess or inflate numbers.

The Formula: We use the community-standard formula: (Gold Value Recovered ÷ Total Purchase Price Including Shipping) × 100.

Live Spot Pricing: Because gold prices change daily, static ROI numbers go stale quickly. Our system recalculates ROI multiple times per day against the live gold spot price so you always see current valuations.

Trusted Reviews Only: Our data is informed by the most respected voices in the prospecting community—creators who buy bags anonymously (secret shopper style) and conduct rigorous "honesty tests" on camera.

How we source public panning locations:
Finding a legal place to pan for gold can be intimidating. Our directory of public locations is built using verified primary sources, including the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the US Forest Service, State Park directories, and established fee-dig mines. We prioritize sites that are beginner-friendly and open to "casual use" hand-panning.

How We Make Money
 

PayDirt Prospector is currently a free resource. To support the servers and data updates, we generate revenue in two ways:
 

  1. Prospecting Gear Affiliate Links: If you click a link on our site to purchase panning equipment, sluice boxes, or other prospecting gear (like via Amazon), we may earn a small commission at zero additional cost to you. We only recommend gear that we believe is genuinely useful.

  2. Future Premium Features: In the future, we plan to offer a premium subscription layer for advanced data tools, custom alerts, or exclusive community features—while keeping the core comparison chart free for everyone.



Get in Touch
Have a question about a paydirt seller? Know a great public panning spot we missed? Or just want to talk gold?
Drop us an email 

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