In-browser Cryptomining

A relatively new concept, in browser cryptomining is an alternative to adds, and has the advantage that the user isn't flooded with eye pollution (to the degree at which the can't tell the difference between add and genuine content). The disadvantages are that it generates significantly less revenue (for most sites – we'll get onto that) and can wreck users hardware. 

So first what is cryptomining? Try reading this article from bloomberg  and if you want to mine some cryptocurrency while you're at it, try this link to the same article.

So how do you set up the in-browser stuff? There are 2 ways. 

1. Join a site like Coinhive (which provides you with easy set-up instructions to add the code to your website). I use it and you can see an example of how it works here. 
2. Set up the code yourself (this is a bit more fiddly, but should be easily possible). 

What's the revenue like? Small. To put this into perspective, payout is about 0.00005609 XMR per 1M hashes (that's about £0.01 or $0.02) and the average desktop/laptop computer will generate about 20-125 hashes per second. So if we take the average computer which does about 50 h/s (hashes/second) you'll find that it will generate 1 Million hashes every 20000s (which is about 5 hours). 

This means that to make a decent amount of money you need a lot of users, who visit for a lot of time. So for streaming sites (with a lot of users) this might work. For anything else it clearly won't.