Coin-Hive Case Study - Earn Money from Your Visitors without Ads?

There's been a lot of controversy regarding Coin-Hive and CPU based JavaScript miners to net webmasters an alternate income, replacing advertisements. Is it really worth it? Will such services make large advertising platforms obsolete?

The above picture is the statistics for two very niche-specific websites our team runs. The audiences are very targeted, and provide a decent revenue via ecommerce on one, advertisements and affiliate offers on the other. That being said, the above image is six days worth of income from Coin-Hive CPU Mining, for a grand total of approximately $5.28 USD. 

Now, let's get some things straight. The eCommerce website alone nets around an average of $250 per day. The site monetizing from ads and affiliate offers, makes around $80 per day and has a higher amount of traffic. So Coin-Hive has provided us with an extra 0.025% profit per day. Is that really worth it? In our case, not particularly. But, should we remove it completely?

The great thing about currencies, is you can never guarantee the prediction for the value of any token, asides from maybe Tether. So in all reality, if these coins shoot up 10x their current value, we could be making an additional 0.25% profit per day. Well, that's still not much.

But, who am I to complain? We run the threads at only 2x, and with a throttle of 0.2. Any internet marketer understands the direct correlation between site speed and conversions. On average, the slower the site is, the less money you make. However, being that the script does not really effect the site itself, and being that it's only running on two threads, it seems to be unnoticeable to our users. We have not had any complaints, we've not seen a drop in conversions or a shift in bounce rates from the previous weeks.

So, is Coin-Hive really worth it?

In my opinion, yes... in some cases. If you're paying for traffic, and you're running a very niche-specific website that you're monetizing with eCommerce or affiliate offers, not likely. However, if you run a large website without a very small targeted audience that gets traffic from SEO and/or viral tactics, it may.. Say you have a website that hosts videos. A large proportion of those videos will be fairly general, and the ads will be VERY low paying (speaking from experience, I've had a video hosting website). Another big problem, is that a lot of the traffic is worthless. Most general ads clicked by users outside of the big 5 (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand) and of course the EEA (Europe Economic Area), are extremely low paying. It's not unheard of getting $0.01 ad clicks, and that's if the user even clicks on your ad. But, these websites typically keep the user on their site for a prolonged duration, and keep those visitors coming back. Thus, having your users CPU mine for you may certainly be a viable monetization strategy.

Will Auto-Mining Services like this Replace the Advertising World?

Of-course not. Being an experienced marketer, I can guarantee you the advertising world will never become obsolete. Some advertising platforms may go out of fashion, but a $229 Billion dollar per year and growing industry isn't going to go away over forced nor optional user mining. Even if said mining was able to take GPU and Storage platforms into consideration. However, it would be nice to to supplement low profiting services that provide a lot of user value. 

Will it Replace any Specific Form of Advertising?

I could see it replacing popups and forced ad clicks. Everybody hates these, and of course some even bypass adblockers. In this case, this certainly incentivizes the webmasters to keep the users on their websites, and keep them coming back. I'd much rather revisit a auto-mining website that takes up a little of my CPU resources, or even GPU resources (since I likely wouldn't be doing anything overly CPU intensive if I'm watching a video). Popups piss me off, who doesn't hate popups? I make it my life mission to find alternatives to websites who force popups and hijacked clicks, so there's a possibility services such as this one could provide value to every day users.

Anyhow, that's just my opinion. Let me know if you have a different view to this, I'd love to hear your feedback and opinions.