Monetising website via crypto coin mining vs ads

[Darth]

PirateBay gets it users to mine Monero via javascript rather than having ads on its site.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurr...the_pirate_bay_experimenting_with_javascript/

This is the website that provides the script https://coin-hive.com/ (replacing the ad network in a traditional scenario).

Might be of interest to some of the high traffic webmasters here, especially ones where the traffic is low quality (ie non US traffic).

 

[darkzerothree]

I looked at this yesterday.
Wow, are you in for a surprise if you'd do this in Europe.

Why?
Use of someone else's computing resources without consent (This is how the EU banned spam mails)

Up to 20K fines in case of spam mailing.
However, a short popup might do the trick (ever read an EULA? no? See?)

 

[Steve]

This is going to be... interesting.
I wonder how easy it would be to shoehorn this into one of the 2nd level ad networks, or a facebook widget, xss just got a new revenue stream... (i dont intend to do this, but others certainly will)

Time to add the url to my adblocker

 

[built]

Unfortunately malwarebytes blocks the domain

 

[Ryuzaki]

That coinhive captcha is cool. As is the short links. A giant site, specifically like a forum or image board like they talk about, could eek out a good bit of coin doing this. Especially on an image board where every post requires a captcha solve. The ad blocking / malware stuff like built is pointing out will require some ingenuity in application. Like an image board, the users would have to disable it in order to post because they have to use the captcha.

 

[Calamari]

If you don't care about your users, can't monetize your existing traffic and generally don't give a shit it's a grand idea.

For the rest of us, here's a browser plugin to block this insanity: https://github.com/keraf/NoCoin

 

[doublethinker]

I tried it. On a 2011 Macbook Air you can feel a lag, but I've never had a crash. This is a few other tabs, with Brackets and two FTP apps (FileZilla, Cyberduck) on. So I don't feel a difference when it came to my Surface Pro 4. You have to accommodate to mobile devices or turn it off completely.

It is profitable, but not wildly so and I wouldn't introduce this to an existing community. It's just enough to pay your server bills most of the time I suppose (unless it blows up to bitcoin levels). On its own, I do not think it's fraudulent or malicious since it mines only for the duration that which you are on the website, i.e. someone else's property- but it has very high potential for misuse, and it's incredibly easy to. Those abuses (javascript mining on sites) won't give it a good name, not for a long time.

And I don't think this is too far off from ugly ass display ads that take up bandwidth, CPU, privacy, and attention of my users. Have you heard of MouseFlow, that records not just your clicks but your mouse movements all in the name of marketing? Do you think that no resources are not being used continuously, for the duration of your time at that website, at your expense?

It is an old and remains a novel idea. Slightly more practical than the 2011 javascript miner for bitcoin, but not enough to replace anything. Maybe enough to cover the difference from ad blocking (if you host your own).