Salon online magazine lets visitors choose between advertising and crypto mining

Salon is testing using the JavaScript cryptominer Coinhive to generate revenue from visitors. Whoever opens the site is given the choice to see advertisements or to use unused CPU processing power.

The option to let Salon use unused processing power was activated last weekend. Visitors with an ad-blocker are presented with a choice and Salon therefore partly conducts the test to see whether crypto mining is a valid option to compensate for lost income due to blocking advertisements. The site hints that in the future it can use distributed computing power for science, for example, as the Boinc platform does now.

Anyone who opts in to the current test will run Coinhive as long as Salon.com is open. If you close the tab, background mining will also be disabled immediately. Salon remembers the opt-in for 24 hours, whoever visits the site afterwards has to make a choice again. Salon can mine the cryptocurrency Monero through Coinhive.

The magazine isn’t the first party to experiment with visitor mining cryptocurrencies to generate revenue. The Pirate Bay, among others, did that during a test last year. In addition, criminals try to smuggle Coinhive code into sites, including covertly modifying plugins and advertisements, in order to generate revenue.

Tweaker published the background article Cryptomining: an advertising alternative or malware? about this subject.