What is an alternative for google ads?

Is it possible that site operators will prefer to generate content revenue mining for Bitcoins instead of displaying online ads?

• After reading an interesting story out of EFF, I wanted to see what people thought about the technology discussed in it – (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/02/eff-challenges-new-jersey-subpoena-issued-mit-student-bitcoin-developers). The implications of what Tidbit does is akin to what Google Adsense did to online advertising since June 2003 – it’s a stretch but there is something there. In Nov 2013, Jermey Rubin and his MIT classmates  developed a computer code called Tidbit for the http://nodeknockout.com/.  Per the above article, Tidbit uses a client’s computer to mine for Bitcoins as an alternative to website advertising: in exchange for removing ads from a website, a user would give some CPU cycles to mine for Bitcoins instead. Still very much in a proof of concept stage,  but I think this has the potential to disrupt the online ad-network industry.  For now though, this perhaps remains an unnoticeable  kink in google and others' ad-affiliate networks' shining armor.

• Answer:

  I'd be interested in seeing what the math is between the amount of CPU cycles you could get from users passively mining for coins as they browsed your site vs the amount of cash you'd get from ad impressions.  Given how most Bitcoin mining is done with purpose-designed chips that are tens of thousands of times faster than CPU's, you're not going to get very much value out of mining through a relatively slow setup like Javascript in the browser.   My 1.6Ghz ASIC will give me about 21 cents worth of Bitcoins per day.  CPU mining would be thousands of times less than that.  According to CoinWarz (http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency ), your best bet for CPU mining would be Doge, where you could probably get about about 25 cents per day per user, split proportionally between every site they visit that day. You incur the bandwidth / server load cost of a user loading a page the instant they click the link, but you could only get revenue from them by mining while a person was actively on the site, since the browser tab would have to be open for the javascript to be running.  So instead of being engineered to generate clicks and pageviews, web content would be engineered to keep people looking at one page for as long as possible.  Good for Quora, less good for a news site or other sites where lots of users come by but don't stay for long. Also, if this became common, a person's computer would quickly get bogged down by multiple browser tabs all running CPU-intensive mining scripts. Maybe if everybody ran an ASIC chip on their home computer and you leased out time on that chip to the sites you were browsing, you'd get some real value, but that infrastructure would be pretty cumbersome to implement globally. I think what's more compelling about that EFF post is the terrifying precedent that it's setting that software developers can be liable for their software being used to potentially perform illegal activity, even if it wasn't designed to perform illegal activity, and even if no illegal activity has been performed.