A few days ago, The Pirate Bay made headlines for using a miner script to generate revenue. According to the site, this was a short 24-hour test to see if such a script could replace ads. The miner was limited to occupy a maximum of 20 to 30 percent of the processor consumption, so the impact on performance should be minimal. Is this the technology that will put an end to advertising for good?

How did we arrive at the current advertisements?

Ever since the emergence of the internet as we know it, people have been looking for ways to make money with websites. This was easy to achieve with media such as newspapers and magazines: If you don’t pay, you get nothing. On the internet, however, this was a lot more difficult. Since all kinds of information was suddenly much more easily accessible, the supply also increased. When a website started charging money for its content, there were plenty of alternatives available, which reduced visitor numbers.

The first clickable advertisements appeared on the internet in the mid-1990s. Advertising space such as in newspapers has been used before, but now it was possible for the user to get even more information about the advertising subject with one simple push of a button. This also made advertising on websites much more valuable for companies. 10 years later, advertisements can be found on almost every website. However, the advertisements became more and more intrusive, and viruses regularly came along with the advertisements. Around 12% of the world now uses an ad blocker!

Time for a successor

It is therefore time for a successor, and The Pirate Bay may have found an alternative in using a miner. But does this actually yield anything?

• With normal advertisements, a thousand users generate about € 1.50 per month.
• The script used by The Pirate Bay was expected to yield about 30 hashes per second per user.
• According to this calculator, this yields about 1400 euros in a month if there are a thousand visitors to the website continuously.
• That means a visitor needs to spend 0.1% of their time on the website (and mine) to get that $1.50, which equates to about 43 minutes per month or 1.5 minutes every day.

Since banner ads are simply about views, and mining is about visit duration, it can therefore be quite profitable for websites where more time is spent by visitors.

What do you prefer? Intrusive ads or a miner in the background?