Coinhive is a Monero (XMR) miner that runs on users’ web browsers when they’re visiting certain sites (don’t worry, we don’t employ this on 99Bitcoins). Recently, The Pirate Bay and CBS’s Showtime were busted for running Coinhive on visitors’ browsers without their knowledge or consent.
Before we get into a discussion about how to use Coinhive to monetize your content, let’s first discuss why website owners might want to use it instead of the tried-and-true method of online revenue generation: ads.
The Rise of Ad Blocking
Software that blocks online advertisements—usually referred to as an ad blocker—is rapidly becoming the standard. According to PageFair, a company dedicated to analyzing and mitigating this trend, about 615 million devices were using ad blockers at the end of 2016. The total number of internet users in mid-2016 was estimated to be 3.4 billion. This means that around 20% of users employ ad blockers.
Because most ad blockers are free and easy to install, there are no immediate downsides—and plenty of upsides—for their users. The most popular ad blockers include Adblock Plus, AdBlock, and—my personal recommendation—uBlock Origin. Origin includes a filter for Coinhive to deny websites free access to your CPU’s mining power.
In addition to blocking ads and trackers via ad blocking methods, particularly proactive users may opt to go on the offensive with AdNauseam. This browser plug-in not only blocks ads but also spoofs clicks on them, generating false traffic to the detriment of advertisers’ conversion rates and thereby wasting their advertising budgets. The credibility and effectiveness of online advertising, in general, has been called into question lately by major companies such as Uber.
Because the current business model of the internet is largely based on advertising, ad blockers and the apparent decreasing impact of regular online advertising are forcing advertisers to adapt or go broke.
Cryptocurrency as the Solution
Because cryptocurrency is “the internet of money,” it will likely prove to be a better way to monetize the internet.
The Brave Browser is one attempt at a solution. Brave automatically blocks ads, or at least replaces them with privacy-respecting ads. Brave allows users to earn small amounts of bitcoin if they opt in to viewing these “good ads.” Brave also lets users fund participating websites by automatically allocating bitcoin donations based on the amount of time they spend on each site. Brave is improving quickly, and it will hopefully soon incorporate Lightning Network micropayments.
Coinhive presents a more straightforward approach to content monetization. The integration of the Coinhive script into a website gets the CPUs of cooperative visitors to mine Monero. All proceeds are split between the site’s chosen Monero address and the Coinhive creators, who receive 30%. This is a fairly large cut, but an open-source version known as Harvest, which will allow site operators to retain the full proceeds of mining, is likely coming soon.
Depending on the number of visitors a site receives and the time those visitors spend on the site (and the XMR price and mining difficulty), profits from Coinhive may allow a site to forego other monetization options such as ads, paywalls, donations, and subscriptions.