A couple of weeks back there was a headline about a site surreptitiously using visitor's hardware to mine some form of crypto. People were upset, but it made me wonder.. why isn't this a viable business model?
Crypto mining in lieu of advertisers would realign interest between content producer and content consumer - the person who reads your articles begins to be your customer again, instead of the companies advertising to the people reading your content. The only conflict of interest is wanting consumers to spend as much time as possible on your site, but I think that is a big step up compared to the plethora of conflicts imposed by relying on advertising as a business model.
This is of course ignoring the technicalities of working out a crypto where the economics work here. But assuming that would be possible (which is certainly a big assumption), this seems like an interesting concept that could solve the monetization issue facing so many things today in one fell swoop.
If I find any site doing this, I'm going to throw it into my local dns resolver to point to 127.0.0.1 faster than I can script it.
Why? Because when I'm on battery and any site decides their crypto currency ad scheme is ok to run and blow through my laptop battery, I'll likely wonder if I can bill them for the machine resources they have used.
Well for one, the trend is hugely toward people consuming media on mobile devices, where resources like processor power and battery life are much more limited and unsuited to effective crypto mining than even a standard PC is.
It’s been discussed repeatedly right here on HN. Unlike you, it strikes me as one of the dumbest things I’ve heard in a while, and I can support that assessment from multiple angles. But one person’s dumb idea is another’s successful business model, and I’ve been wrong plenty of times in the past. Like a sibling commentor, though, I catch you doing it and your domain will never again resolve to a valid IP on any machine that I own.
Crypto mining in lieu of advertisers would realign interest between content producer and content consumer - the person who reads your articles begins to be your customer again, instead of the companies advertising to the people reading your content. The only conflict of interest is wanting consumers to spend as much time as possible on your site, but I think that is a big step up compared to the plethora of conflicts imposed by relying on advertising as a business model.
This is of course ignoring the technicalities of working out a crypto where the economics work here. But assuming that would be possible (which is certainly a big assumption), this seems like an interesting concept that could solve the monetization issue facing so many things today in one fell swoop.