Ad-free Revenue Source for Websites

[Rob Lister]

Pirate-bay appears to be experimenting with a new type of tool that causes your browser to run a coin-mining operation using your processor cycles while you're on their page. I'm sure they were not the first but that's where I first heard it. As would be expected of the likes of them, they didn't ask or notify visitors, they just fucking did it. There are a lot of mixed reviews for this, some quite heated, pro and con.

As a general technology, I'm tentatively pro depending on how it is implemented. Torrent Freak makes some estimates its profitability, and it looks quite good.

How Much Money Can Pirate Bay Make From a Cryptocoin Miner?

In a surprise move, The Pirate Bay decided to add a cryptocurrency miner to its website last weekend. The notorious torrent site wanted to see whether this could replace the ads on the site. A controversial idea, but how much money can a site like The Pirate Bay make through mining?

snip ...

The miner is provided by Coinhive which, at the time of writing, pays out 0.00015 XMR per 1M hashes. So how much can The Pirate Bay make from this?

To get a rough idea we did some back-of-the-envelope calculations, starting with the site’s visitor numbers.

SimilarWeb estimates that The Pirate Bay has roughly 315 million visits per month. On average, users spend five minutes on the site per “visit”. While we have reason to believe that this underestimates the site’s popularity, we’ll use it as an illustration.

We spoke to Coinhive and they estimate that a user with a mid-range laptop would have a hashrate of 30 h/s.

In Pirate Bay’s case this would translate to 30 hashes * 300 seconds * 315M visits = 2,835,000M hashes per month. If the miner is throttled at 30% this would drop to 850,000M hashes.

If Coinhive pays out 0.00015 XMR per million hashes, TPB would get 127.5 XMR per month, which is roughly $12,000 at the moment. Since the miner doesn’t appear on all pages and because some may actively block it, this number will drop a bit further.

Keep in mind that this is just an illustration using several estimated variables which may vary greatly over time. Still, it gives a broad idea of the potential.

https://torrentfreak.com/how-much-money ... ntfreak%29

[gnome]

Do the estimates take into account people going to other torrent sites so that they don't have to bother with this?

[Rob Lister]

Do the estimates take into account people going to other torrent sites so that they don't have to bother with this?

I doubt it gnome but it isn't really the point I was trying to make.

For years they bitched at us for blocking their ads.
For years we flipped them the bird saying 'find some other way to fund your mess [that I like to read].

Okay, so here's a different way. Pirate Bay is just one of the coming many that are going to try this. If they limit their cycles to some reasonable low number--it doesn't slow my computer to a crawl or cause my fan to spin at a million rpm--then I'll allow it.

[gnome]

I'd be willing to consider it, depending on impact, yeah.

If they really wanted to be clever, they could have a sort of lottery where if the user's machine is the one that generates the bitcoin, the user gets a fraction? Or does it work that way?

In all honesty, I never minded ads that just sat there on the page being ads. I started to push back and use blockers when it went too far into:
- Popups or pop-unders.
- Unwanted redirects
- Disruptive autoplay videos with audio
- Ads designed to fake being part of the page, like fake "download" or "next page" buttons.
- Attempted malware distribution (generally not the direct fault of the content provider--more often when an ad serving site got bought out or something I suppose).

[Grammatron]

Do the estimates take into account people going to other torrent sites so that they don't have to bother with this?

I doubt it gnome but it isn't really the point I was trying to make.

For years they bitched at us for blocking their ads.
For years we flipped them the bird saying 'find some other way to fund your mess [that I like to read].

Okay, so here's a different way. Pirate Bay is just one of the coming many that are going to try this. If they limit their cycles to some reasonable low number--it doesn't slow my computer to a crawl or cause my fan to spin at a million rpm--then I'll allow it.

But on the mobile platforms ad blocking is virtually non-existent and really that's where the modern internet advertising is working. Sites likes Pirate Bay are PC heavy in uses so they have to think of other revenue streams.

[Abdul Alhazred]

If it works at all, it establishes a precedent for more subtle development.

[Witness]

But on the mobile platforms ad blocking is virtually non-existent and really that's where the modern internet advertising is working. Sites likes Pirate Bay are PC heavy in uses so they have to think of other revenue streams.

I only recently discovered there were ads on Youtube – when accessing it through a friend's phone.

Mining bitcoin could be interesting, letting some unknown software quietly run on your machine less so. (Even if it was originally harmless…)

[Rob Lister]

But on the mobile platforms ad blocking is virtually non-existent and really that's where the modern internet advertising is working. Sites likes Pirate Bay are PC heavy in uses so they have to think of other revenue streams.

I only recently discovered there were ads on Youtube – when accessing it through a friend's phone.

Mining bitcoin could be interesting, letting some unknown software quietly run on your machine less so. (Even if it was originally harmless…)

yea, i consider that. my understanding, although slight, is that it has to run in the sandbox that is the browser. assuming that, it is safe. At least as safe as any ad that is trying to hijack my video.

What do you think?

[Witness]

I think that it will soon be hijacked.

[Rob Lister]

I think that it will soon be hijacked.

Yea, again. Everything is. Ad's used to be low profile too, as my wee memory serves. This method (as a technology) is obviously going to take as much advantage as it can, as quickly as it can, penny to pound. Do you think it will work as it is able for at time or two? Is it a reasonable technology?

[Witness]

Only the first answer was free.

[Abdul Alhazred]

May be relevant.

CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers
The Register

...

The flagship Showtime.com and its instant-access ShowtimeAnytime.com sibling silently pulled in code that caused browsers to blow spare processor time calculating new Monero coins – a privacy-focused alternative to the ever-popular Bitcoin. The hidden software typically consumed as much as 60 per cent of CPU capacity on computers visiting the sites.

The scripts were written by Code Hive, a legit outfit that provides JavaScript to website owners: webmasters add the code to their pages so that they can earn slivers of cash from each visitor as an alternative to serving adverts to generate revenue. Over time, money mined by the Code-Hive-hosted scripts adds up and is transferred from Coin Hive to the site's administrators. One Monero coin, 1 XMR, is worth about $92 right now.

However, it's extremely unlikely that a large corporation like CBS would smuggle such a piece of mining code onto its dot-coms – especially since it charges subscribers to watch the hit TV shows online – suggesting someone hacked the websites' source code to insert the mining JavaScript and make a quick buck.

The JavaScript, which appeared on the sites at the start of the weekend and vanished by Monday, sits between HTML comment tags that appear to be an insert from web analytics biz New Relic. Again, it is unlikely that an analytics company would deliberately stash coin-mining scripts onto its customers' pages, so the code must have come from another source – or was injected by miscreants who had compromised Showtime's systems.

...

[Witness]

May be relevant.

Now that was fast!

[Rob Lister]

More!

Websites use your CPU to mine cryptocurrency
even when you close your browser Resource-draining code hides in pop-under windows that can remain open indefinitely.

Spoiler:

https://arstechnica.com/information-tec ... -near-you/

Okay, this won't fool the savvy porn surfer but that's about 20%

[ed]

The US Government should mine bitcoins on all their sites.

Deficit fixed.

Yuge payoff

$ for the wall.

[Mentat]

Oh great, make the DMV site slow and painful too.

[Grammatron]

Now even YouTube serves ads with CPU-draining cryptocurrency miners

YouTube was recently caught displaying ads that covertly leach off visitors' CPUs and electricity to generate digital currency on behalf of anonymous attackers, it was widely reported.

Word of the abusive ads started no later than Tuesday, as people took to social media sites to complain their antivirus programs were detecting cryptocurrency mining code when they visited YouTube. The warnings came even when people changed the browser they were using, and the warnings seemed to be limited to times when users were on YouTube.

[gnome]

Youtube will claim it was outside of their control and terms--but is it really so difficult for Youtube to vet any advertisments through the very same antivirus programs that users are detecting it with?

[Doctor X]

For Youtube, yes.

--J.D.