It is getting harder and harder for online publishers to stay afloat. Simply put – advertising revenue is not enough to support the editorial staff needed for big publications. Like that’s not enough, many users have been installing ad blockers to hide ads on sites across the web.
That prompted some publishers to introduce the so called paywalls, and effectively sell their content. This setup, however, doesn’t work for all (online) publications as users are accustomed to getting the information for free.
Crypto rewards
There is an emerging third path, which would still enable websites to offer their content for free while making money from spare power the site visitors’ computers have. If the publication is clear about its intent to do this, we can’t call it cryptojacking — in this scenario, the user is consent to provide its CPU power to the good cause and support an online media he/she enjoys reading (related: How Does Cryptojacking Work?)
And that’s exactly what the online publication Salon has started doing, offering an alternative way for users to support its efforts. Those who want to keep blocking ads, can opt to offer a “a small percentage of spare processing power to contribute to the advancement of technological discovery, evolution and innovation.” The site doesn’t isn’t specific what exactly happens in the background, but The Verge claims Salon is using the open-source CoinHive software to mine the cryptocurrency Monero.
Here’s how Salon has put it:
The demand for computing power across many different industries and applications is potentially very high. We intend to use a small percentage of your spare processing power to contribute to the advancement of technological discovery, evolution and innovation. For our beta program, we’ll start by applying your processing power to help support the evolution and growth of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies.
Said CoinHive software is able to automatically detect the current processor usage and assign a portion of unused processing to this process. Once a user opens some other app and its CPU usage grows, the software will reduce the amount it is using for calculations (i.e. mining for Monero).
If you haven’t heard of it, Coinhive is probably the most-used browser-based mining program, offering a JavaScript-based app that website owners can embed on their sites. It was designed to work in a way Salon is using, but it is unfortunately also used by malicious actors to cryptojack users’ computer resources.
According to Salon’s blog post announcing the new program, newspaper ad revenue fell from $60 billion in 1999 to $20 billion in 2010, with online and mobile ads not being able to produce enough revenue to sustain the (online) publishing business.
So we want to ask you – would you be willing to support your favorite online publication with your computer’s spare computing power? Comments form is all yours.