Bitcoin v. Adsense

Image by Adam Crowe via Flickr

Without going into the details of Bitcoin and its use as a digital currency, I’d like to look at the miner for websites which was developed by Bitcoin Plus. Although CPU mining for Bitcoins can be quite slow, that can be offset by using multiple CPUs. This is particularly true for websites which may have many hundreds of thousands of viewers every day. So I’ve got to ask, could Bitcoin be an alternative to Adsense?

This site, Jones PC Repair, does not receive a massive volume of visitors every day. At least not when it is compared with the truly big sites on the web. However, we did receive about 2,500 visitors last month and those visitors spent an average of about one minute on the site. This amounts to about 33 hours of processing time over the month. At an average  rate of about 1 payout from Bitcoin Plus per hour, this would amount to 33 payouts of 0.00003303 Bitcoin each. That adds up to 0.00108999 Bitcoin per month. At the time of this post, Bitcoins were exchanging at a rate of approximately 1 Bitcoin to 3 US dollars. This means that I could count on making approximately $0.0032697 each month.

Obviously this number would scale up as the number of visitors increased or the amount of time they spent on the site increases. However, the same could be true of Adsense marketing. Last month, Jones PC Repair brought in an astounding $15 from Adsense. Although that isn’t much, it’s more than 4,500 times what Bitcoin Plus would have brought in for the same period. For this reason, I don’t expect Bitcoin Plus to replace Adsense any time soon. However, some sites feel that advertisements of any sort will compromise the objectivity of their content. For these sites, Bitcoin Plus may be just the way to generate some revenue from visitors. The script is easily inserted into any website and works with any modern browser that has access to an updated Java installation. If not Bitcoin, maybe some other service could monetize spare processor cycles of website visitors.

There are many questions which still need to be answered, a few of which are listed below. On the topic of questions, tell me what you think of using Bitcoin Plus compared with Adsense in the comments section at the bottom of the page. Alternatively, you could give your opinion about any of these other questions yet to be answered.

• How will this effect SEO?
• Will users allow Bitcoin Plus to run?
• Should you allow visitors to the site to disable Bitcoin Plus?
• Is Bitcoin Plus too resource intensive? Does it slowdown you computer too much?
• Can a website generate as much revenue using Bitcoin Plus as with Adsense? For Jones PC Repair, the answer seems to be no. But other sites may have more visitors and fewer which are willing to click on advertisements.
• Do people prefer to view ads on website or donate processor time?