The Pirate Bay recently came under the spot light when it was found that they had implemented a crypto mining script into their site without notifying users. What they used was the Coinhive crypto miner. It can easily be added to any website with some simple Javascript in order to monetize a website. It took me no longer than 10 minutes to go through sign up and implement the code on my own site. Don’t worry it’s not running on this one.
Some people believe this has the potential to replace the whole ad industry, as websites will no longer need to rely on display banner advertising to generate revenue. Whilst I don’t disagree with this, I do believe that we are not quite there yet, as the economics are not balanced.
I thought I would run a little experiment to see how much revenue I could get from using the Coinhive Crypto Miner on one of my websites instead of running ads over a 24 hour period.
These are the results.
Ad Revenue
24,000 pageviews x 2 ads = 48,000 impressions
48,000 at an average of US$0.7 per 1000 impressions = US$33.60
Ad revenue was $US33.60
Coinhive Web Based Browser Mining
244,360,704 hashes x 0.00016291473 per Million hashes = 0.03980996 Monero
0.03980996 XMR x $91 (todays Monero price) = $US3.62
Mining Revenue was $US3.62
Whilst the script was on the website, we had a minimum hash rate of around 1700 hashes per second, and a peak hash rate of around 2750 hashes per second.
Some current Monero mining network details for anyone interested.
Current Monero Mining Difficulty: 28.963G
Current Block Reward: 6.82 XMR
Coinhive Payout: 70% (Yes, Coinhive keeps 30% of all your mining revenue)
In summary the results clearly show that ad revenue far exceeds that of browser crypto mining using Coinhive. In fact you make roughly 10 times more from monetising your website with ads. There’s really no contest.
You could potentially mine more if users spent longer on your site, if the price of Monero rose substantially, or if the mining difficulty reduced substantially.
Coinhive also has a few other interesting products, the Proof of Work Captcha and Proof of Work Link Redirects.
It was an interesting experiment, and would be happy to hear from other people who have implemented the script and to share experiences.
