Salon Offers To Remove Ads If Visitors Help Mine Cryptocurrency

from the just-renting dept

As we've been discussing, the rise of stealth cryptocurrency miners embedded on websites has become a notable problem. In some instances, websites are being hacked and embedded with stealth cryptocurrency miners that quickly gobble up visitors' CPU cycles without their knowledge. That's what happened to Showtime recently when two different domains were found to be utilizing the Coinhive miner to hijack visitor broswers without users being informed. Recent reports indicate that thousands of government websites have also been hijacked and repurposed in this fashion via malware.

But numerous websites are also now exploring such miners voluntarily as an alternative revenue stream. One major problem however: many aren't telling site visitors this is even happening. And since some implementations of such miners can hijack massive amounts of CPU processing power while sipping a non-insubstantial amount of electricity, that's a problem.

The Pirate Bay for example was forced to stop using visitor CPUs and browsers to mine Monero last fall after Reddit users complained the miner was slowing down their PCs and eating up 80% of their CPU cycles. The website stated that it was simply exploring new revenue streams to keep the website afloat:

"As you may have noticed we are testing a Monero javascript miner. This is only a test. We really want to get rid of all the ads. But we also need enough money to keep the site running."

This week Salon joined the fun, informing users that they'd be happy to suppress advertisements if site visitors are willing to help mine cryptocurrency:

Creative exploration of alternative revenue streams is obviously necessary, and there's numerous examples where site-driven cryptocurrency miners could be used to help bolster scientific research. Salon pretty clearly understands this decision is controversial, offering up an entire website explaining how making money from journalism is hard, and the company needed to explore some new, creative solutions in order to stay afloat:

"Salon is instructing your processor to run calculations. Think of it like borrowing your calculator for a few minutes to figure out the answer to math problems, then giving it back when you leave the site. We automatically detect your current processing usage and assign a portion of what you are not using to this process. Should you begin a process that requires more of your computer’s resources, we automatically reduce the amount we are using for calculations."

That said, security researchers have similarly warned that this is a very slippery slope, and for every website that's being transparent about the process and respectful of the possible impact on computer performance, there're countless others who quite obviously won't give much of a damn about either. These are, after all, the same websites that are now engaging in ham fisted and annoying ad blocker blocking, frequently oblivious to how their own obnoxious ad decisions drove the rise of ad blockers in the first place.

As Malwarebytes researchers recently noted, there's no limit of websites that are already pushing their luck on this front:

"The question at this point is: How far can publishers push the limits towards a really bad user experience? You may be surprised that for many, this is not really a problem at all and that double dipping is, in fact, a fairly common practice...publishers ought to be more transparent with their audience because no-one likes unannounced guests. Unfortunately, there will always be publishers that care very little about what kind of traffic they push, so long as it generates good revenues; for those, cryptominers are just an added income to their existing advertising portfolio."

If implemented with respect for the end user and transparency, such miners may not be a bad thing. But bad actors could very quickly create an environment where users feel they're being accosted by sites that don't respect either, resulting in another layer of cat and mouse gamesmanship between sites publishers and readers. So while there's certainly potential here, escalating an already adversarial relationship in the adblocker era isn't likely to excite readers, forge community, or save journalism anytime soon.

Filed Under: business models, cryptocurrency, journalism, mining, salon, transparency
Companies: salon

Guardian, Salon Show How Keeping And Fixing News Comments Isn't Hard If You Give Half A Damn

from the Walter-Cronkite-is-Dead dept

We've been talking a lot lately about how the new school of website design (with ReCode, Bloomberg, and Vox at the vanguard) has involved a misguided war on the traditional comment section. Websites are gleefully eliminating the primary engagement mechanism with their community and then adding insult to injury by pretending it's because they really, really love "conversation." Of course the truth is many sites just don't want to pay moderators, don't think their community offers any valuable insight, or don't like how it "looks" when thirty people simultaneously tell their writers they've got story facts completely and painfully wrong.

Many sites justify the move by claiming comments sections are just so packed with pile that they're beyond redemption, though studies show it doesn't actually take much work to raise the discourse bar and reclaim your comment section from the troll jungle if you just give half a damn (as in, just simple community engagement can change comment tone dramatically). Case in point is Salon, which decided to repair its awful comment section by hiring a full time moderator, rewarding good community involvement, and treating commenters like actual human beings:

"You can measure engagement by raw number of comments or commenters. Using Google Analytics, Livefyre and Adobe, Salon looks at metrics like the number of replies they make as a share of overall comments, how frequently they share Salon articles, and how many pageviews they log per visit. (Users who log in, which is required if you want to comment, view seven pages per session on average, while non-registered users make it to only 1.7, according to Dooling.) After it identified these top commenters, Salon has solicited their feedback and invited them to lead discussions on posts and even help moderate threads.

..."Comments aren’t awful,” (said Salon community advisor Annemarie Dooling). “It’s just the way we position them. The whole idea is not to give up on debate."

That news is now a conversation and a community is something traditional news outlets have struggled to understand, so it's ironic that a major wave of websites proclaiming to be the next great iteration of media can't seem to figure this out either. For example Verge co-founder Josh Topolsky, spearheading the freshly-redesigned Bloomberg, recently argued that disabling comments is ok because editors are still "listening" to reader feedback by watching analytics and the viewer response to wacky font changes. But that's not the same as engagement or facilitating engagement. Similarly, Reuters and ReCode editors have tried to argue that Facebook and Twitter are good enough substitutes for comments -- ignoring that outsourcing engagement to Facebook dulls and homogenizes your brand.

Former managing editor for digital strategy at the New York Times Aron Pilhofer, now at The Guardian, seems to understand this point:

"I feel very strongly that digital journalism needs to be a conversation with readers. This is one, if not the most important area of emphasis that traditional newsrooms are actually ignoring. You see site after site killing comments and moving away from community – that’s a monumental mistake. Any site that moves away from comments is a plus for sites like ours. Readers need and deserve a voice. They should be a core part of your journalism."

Now -- can you quantify and prove that money spent on community engagement will come back to you in clear equal measure as cold, hard cash? Of course not. But all the same, it's not really a choice. We're well beyond the Walter Cronkite era of journalism where a talking head speaks at the audience from a bully pulpit. We're supposed to have realized by now that news really is a malleable, fluid, conversational organism. Under this new paradigm, reporters talk to (and correct) other reporters, blogs and websites talk to (and correct) other blogs and websites, and readers talk to (and correct) the writers and news outlets. You're swimming against the current if your website design culminates in little more than a stylish uni-directional bullhorn.

Filed Under: comments, community
Companies: guardian, salon