You're stuck between running this miner covertly (scummy) or asking for permission (who is going to click yes?).
How much of Coinhive's income comes from users who are unknowingly running the code? It seems like a move towards more user-hostility, not less.
The one time I saw an actual fit for the end user was an online game that would let you turn on the miner to win in-game coins. Who else can pull off an opt-in?
Of course, the other issue is that this was only feasible under very specific and temporary circumstances, so it cannot be the answer to ads. Coinhive is done. The experiment failed.
That $250,000 every month amount was made at the cost of way more than $250,000 worth of electricity.
Additionally they (or some alternative) may have been able to improve the software and create a simple consent process to avoid being blacklisted.
Not that I am making much from ads either, but it just really wasn't worth it. Affiliate revenue, while small on a grand scheme, was much more effective .
I think a miner like this could provide an interesting way for people to monetize their content, as long as it's opt-in, but blocking a non-ad like this just totally deflates the argument that ad-blockers are about privacy or intrusiveness, and their really about people having their cake and eating it too.
> uBlock Origin is NOT an "ad blocker": it is a wide-spectrum blocker -- which happens to be able to function as a mere "ad blocker". The default behavior of uBlock Origin when newly installed is to block ads, trackers and malware sites
Any third party scripts tend to fall under "trackers" (stuff like typekit, disqus often gets blocked by default as well), something that just burns your CPU in the background without approval could be classified as malware.
A better strategy, then, would be to completely dissociate the idea from ads, and simply make it easy for content creators to ask users if they’d like to support their content via in-browser mining. Make it unobtrusive for viewers and both frictionless and highly configurable for creators. The goal should not be to maximize the number of viewers who consent, but to keep the potential loss in viewership and/or good will very close to zero. Let content creators decide how aggressively they want to pitch the idea to their viewers, with the default being about as aggressive as a small link off to the side soliciting donations.
The result would likely be an extremely high ratio of new widget installations to marginal unit of revenue, but it also wouldn’t totally crash and burn.
While the growth of mobile probably wasn't a primary reason, I suspect the founders may have seen that the future didn't look great, even if they could solve the monetization of exploits and collapse of crypto prices overall headwinds. With crypto pricing falling to near the power input costs when mined on ASICs and GPUs, CPU mining from Javascript was going to be a case where users paid $1 for ~$0.10 of crypto which only a tiny sliver of the original input ($1) went to the content creator.
Overall, it probably didn't generate very much money. Mining is a commodity. An ad click is worth orders of magnitude more.
IMHO there still is quite an opportunity to find substitutes for ads that provide revenue for websites and aren’t as annoying as ads whether it is mining or something like SETI or something like re-captcha.
Would love to see more in this direction.
Coinhive is now, for me at least, always associated with scammers.
https://coinhive.com/blog/en/discontinuation-of-coinhive (you probably need to whitelist that in your adblocker to read it)
Sounds like "lots of work to do soon and not making all that much money, not worth it". (surely being known as "malware" didn't help either...)
